Igalia Chats: Web Ecosystem Health Part IX: economics
Igalia chats/Shop Talk crossover - Brian Kardell and Eric Meyer chat with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from the Shop Talk Show about the economics of browsers and engines
Brian Kardell: All right, so, hi, I'm Brian Kardell, I'm a developer advocate from Igalia.
Eric Meyer: I'm Eric Meyer, also a developer advocate at Igalia.
Brian Kardell: So we listen to the Shoptalk Show. A few weeks ago I was listening to episode 544 and I got excited, because they were getting into some stuff that I've been really trying to get people to talk about more. And since then, there's also been a number of follow-ups. They got into all kinds of things and so we invited them to come onto the show and I'm pleased to say, 'Hey,' to Chris and Dave.
Chris Coyier: Thanks for having us.
Dave Rupert: Great to be here, in the virtual studio. Wonderful.
Brian Kardell: Thanks for-
Chris Coyier: Pretty good turnaround too. Episode 544 was just in December. I know it's February now, but still as far as getting four hardworking adults in the same room.
Brian Kardell: And we had some challenges, when we were scheduled last time, Dave lost all his power.
Dave Rupert: All things considered. I think everything that's gone wrong that can go wrong. So I think we're good to record.
Brian Kardell: And we still got to turn around pretty quick, so I'm pleased.
Eric Meyer: Although, it is pretty windy here today while we're recording, so if I suddenly drop off, it's because I lost power.
Chris Coyier: Good, good.
Eric Meyer: Sorry Chris, what?
Dave Rupert: I spoke too soon.
Chris Coyier: Well, I was just saying, because Brian brought up 544, I was just looking back on what we were talking about. And we got into talking about different browsers and what engines and stuff they use and I assume that's where we're headed with all this.
Brian Kardell: I think that you raised a lot of interesting questions. You talked about Arc and getting into that. You were saying, 'Well, it's not an engine, it uses Chromium.' And then you also harken back to, I think you wrote a nice piece in the past about what is a browser and what is Chromium. You have to rip some stuff out of it, you said.
Chris Coyier: You would know more about it than I do. But I do find that interesting. One of the ways that you could, if you were so inclined, to make a new browser, you could fork one of the open source browsers that already exists, but it's not as simple as that. I don't think. I don't think you can just hit the fork button in GitHub and run npm build browser or something and then just start. I don't know. I'm going to mess with the CSS and make my tabs orange. I assume that it's going to be harder than that. And even when you're done then, what you still have is, even if that were to work, you have a fork, you didn't really make a new browser.
Brian Kardell: Right. It's not as easy as that, and it's not the same for any of them. Firefox is a little different than how it works for... Chromium which is a little different than how it works for WebKit. So the Chromium project... One part of the Chromium project is the Blink engine, but the Chromium project also is the basis for Chrome and ChromeOS even. So there's a whole lot of stuff in there, and they provide implementations, and a lot of the implementations have some default, but also they can go to Google services. And, if you make a fork, you can sort of buy access to those Google services. Speech API is an example of that.
Dave Rupert: From what I hear, when Edge forked Blink or Chromium, they had a post where they ripped out all the Google specific stuff. And I remember them talking about that and it was very interesting. It was something like 60 APIs, which you might be like, 'That's Google spy tech.' But I don't think that's exactly it, it just was convenience features or just... I don't know. I don't know the specifics, but it's just really interesting. Like are we in a Ship of Theseus situation. Theseus. Where, how much do you have to replace a Chrome to have a new browser?
Brian Kardell: No, it's not at all. Chromium is, I think, currently it's really hard to keep track, because it grows so fast. I think it's currently 34 million lines of code.
Dave Rupert: So that takes a day to read or so.
Brian Kardell: So it's a lot. You definitely don't have to replace all that, or you would never get anywhere. But no, I think actually a key thing to keep in mind is the word engine. So this is actually a better metaphor than we give credit for, because like an engine, it needs to be connected on all sides. It is an architecture.. And if you plug in all the right things, you can generate power and transfer the power to the wheels, but you need to connect inputs and outputs. That's what the web engines are, and browsers are on top of that.
Eric Meyer: Because what we think of as a browser, I think really is a user interface shell, which I think is what you are experiencing, Chris, with Arc. You were saying how different an experience it was, even though the engine is exactly the same as if you were running Chrome, but the experience was not in the same way that if you take an engine out of a Buick Escalade, or whatever, and then you put it in a sports car, it's a very different experience.
Brian Kardell: Exactly.
Chris Coyier: And that's good, kind of right? It opens up some doors to experimentation. It's pretty cool that Arc exists. I'm literally using it right now to be on this podcast. So it increases what you might call the diversity of the experience of using a browser out there. It's still going to cost some money. It's going to be an awful lot of work to produce one of these things and in the end, maybe that's good for people, but it doesn't increase the diversity of that engine situation. And that was, it's just been hotly talked about for years now because it never gets any better, it only gets worse, it seems like.
Brian Kardell: That is... 'Bang.' That's it. It doesn't get better, it only gets worse. And it gets increasingly harder to change it. And the thing that powers a lot of it... It costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain each one of those engines. And where does it come from? Why? I think, Chris, you asked a question that I thought was really pertinent. Just forget the engine for a minute. What is the monetary incentive to build a browser? I guess they'll sell it at some point or try to, but will people buy it? Enough people? Will it be lucrative or what will they do? That is the problem, is that the thing that funds it - all of the money coming in is somehow, I think, is safe to say ultimately through default search deals, which is a thing that we got to in 2004, when both Firefox 1 was coming out, Mozilla was this open new thing that got some initial startup money, but then it was running out and somehow you had to find a business model here. And Google had this hot new engine that they also wanted to sell, but nobody wanted to buy it. So they decided to make their own thing and sell those silly little ads, which I joke all the time: I laughed. I thought, 'That's cute.' It's almost like the plot for Superman 3. It's like we just collect fractions of a cent, but billions and billions and billions of time we'll be super rich. And they were right.
Dave Rupert: To the tune, right? I don't know the books, I know Apples... Part of the WebKit budget is the Chrome search deal. Same with Mozilla, the Google search deal, sorry. Google's also paying to be the default search engine in a lot of these browsers.
Brian Kardell: That's right.
Dave Rupert: One thing is kind of funding a lot of web.
Brian Kardell: It's not exclusively Google, there are other ones, but that is the interesting missing thing that browsers didn't have until we did integrated search, the Wonder Bar at the top. Before that it was always you had to go to a search engine and execute a search, but now it's even integrated. Clearly, it's an important critical part of the web. You don't have a web browser if you don't have that.
Dave Rupert: Are you hypothesizing a reality in which Yahoo or WebCrawler could have won?
Brian Kardell: But Yahoo did win. Yahoo did win.
Dave Rupert: I guess so.
Brian Kardell: Until they lost. And that is actually the thing that worries me, is that someday Google is going to lose, and someday Apple is going to lose. I hope it's not tomorrow. It doesn't look likely to be tomorrow, but who knows. I don't want to speculate, but you can look around at the news and see lots of things are changing.
Chris Coyier: So what's the point of that though? If both of them lose, which you think is inevitable at some way, that a hundred percent of the funding for browsers also disappears. Is that the scary part?
Eric Meyer: As the markets currently is structured, I would say pretty close.
Chris Coyier: Interesting.
Eric Meyer: That's sort of the concern. It's a long term concern, but it's a lot like climate change. In the sense that this is going to be a problem someday, and possibly a serious existential problem in some ways. But it might be 5, 10, 15 years. But like you say, you could look at the news and you might say to yourself, 'Maybe Google going all in on machine learning, quote, unquote, artificial intelligence turns out to be a bust.' It takes four years to figure it out, but they basically exhaust themselves trying to make this work. And it turns out that it doesn't, for some reason that nobody can guess.The market shifts at exactly the wrong time or there are inherent limitations in this technology that nobody has figured out yet because nobody's gone that far, so Google bet the company on it. And I'm not predicting that this is going to doom Google, but I'm just saying, you can imagine an outcome where they completely went all in, they developed tunnel vision around this and then these other factors led to the reality of 2030 where people say... Where kids are like, 'Grandpa, tell me more about Google. What was that again?'
Brian Kardell: That is totally... Just within our own lifetimes, this has happened. There have been whole paradigms established that don't even exist anymore, like Blockbuster video. We went from everything was brick and mortar, malls were everything, to now malls barely exist.
Chris Coyier: So Things change and let's say that were to happen, all the money dries up from these two sources anyway, for browsers, what we're left with is whatever's on GitHub or maybe GitHub goes away too, but what happens is we're locked in time. It's not that browsers go away, they stop evolving in the way that we're used to them evolving.
Brian Kardell: But they'll also bitrot. So... operating systems will continue to develop and they'll continue to update, and drivers will continue to develop and update, and graphics cards will continue to... So somebody will need to keep them alive. It costs money to keep the lights on. It's not to say that the web will disappear, I do think that we will manage to keep the web going, but it would be a very different thing.
Eric Meyer: What were you saying, Dave?
Dave Rupert: I was just like, 'Firefox will save us.' That was where I jumped to in my head. But then, I have to remember, I have this idea in my brain that Firefox is five neckbeards in a dungeon, just coding it, but it's an actual business. It had Netscape market Andreessen bucks, and then it got bought by AOL and then it had AOL bucks, and they have office buildings and they have Google search money. I think my idea is like 'Mozilla's just this really... They'll do it.' But it's actually a big operation.
Eric Meyer: It's not nearly as big as the other two engines operations, from what we can tell. But it is still an operation. And I do think that if Thanos snaps his fingers and doesn't get rid of half of the life in the universe, he just gets rid of Google and Apple, I don't know, had a bad experience with an Android and an iOS device or something, and just makes them go away, then I think browsers would... The web wouldn't go away, and the web would still continue to evolve slowly. And browsers would, at first, evolve very slowly basically on the backs of volunteer work. But that only lasts for so long. And this could happen very quickly. So Google doesn't have to disappear, Google just has to decide that they have enough of the market that they don't need to pay other browsers to be the default search in those browsers.
Chris Coyier: We know that's the case for Firefox and it has been for a long time, but once in a while it gets surfaced that this huge chunk of what makes them exist as a company comes directly from Google, right?
Brian Kardell: 95%. 95%. They are the ones that established this model. And the interesting thing about that is, that is a historical accident because the web almost died. Microsoft walked away, they won the game and then they said, 'We're going to go do Silverlight. We're going to go do the next web. This web is done.' And it was actually this open source hope that received some funding and was actually moving forward in a big way. They hadn't even released a one point o, and they already had 3% of the market or something like that.
Chris Coyier: So, just to hang onto that for a moment, it feels wildly inevitable to me that that's not going to last. That someday Google is going to snap those fingers and Mozilla is just... How can they survive that, 95%?
Dave Rupert: Well, here's my thought. Can I get to ...
Chris Coyier: Please.
Dave Rupert: I think that's an insurance policy. This is Dave Rupert, ruining my ability to ever work for a browser, but it just feels like an insurance policy, so they don't get sued for having a browser monopoly. That's my hot take, and they'll keep paying that insurance policy until they get tired.
Chris Coyier: Ah so in Dave's world...
Dave Rupert: Until Edge gets popular enough.
Chris Coyier: They're not going to snap those fingers because it's more valuable for them to have it than not. That's pretty juicy.
Dave Rupert: It's legal protection for them. That's my hot take. I know you guys all work with browsers, so you don't need to comment and ruin your relationships. I'll take the blame. I'll take the heat.
Eric Meyer: Well, it's an interesting perspective. I'm not going to say that you're wrong. Brian and I, we do not sit on the inner councils of the WebKit and Chrome teams. We're very much outsiders and yes, we do-
Dave Rupert: That's actually surprising to me.
Eric Meyer: We interface with them. And for that matter, I don't know that the Chrome and WebKit teams sit in the inner councils of whatever parts of Apple and... The Chrome team does not direct strategy of paying for default search. That's not their job, that's not part of it. And they probably are in, some ways, firewalled from it. They probably can't be-
Brian Kardell: If anything, they are dictated too from it, as their largest source of... Their only, really, source of funding, right?
Eric Meyer: So there's some part of Google, and maybe for all we know it's the legal team. I was like, 'We can keep paying whatever, Google, Firefox, Mozilla, whoever they are. It's a rounding error on our quarterly search revenue.' When things get real tight, companies start to cancel contracts or not renew them.
Dave Rupert: And we're seeing a contraction right now-
Eric Meyer: We sure are.
Dave Rupert: Yeah that's kind of frightening.
Brian Kardell: You may know that we are making a browser ourselves that was originally from a company you might know called Mozilla.
Eric Meyer: Indeed.
Dave Rupert: Let's talk about that, because you are making a browser, a VR based browser, correct? And what's that been like? Or how does that... I don't know. Are you feeling the pressures of how do we fund this or...
Brian Kardell: Absolutely. We're using this to, in part, start a discussion and try to change this problem, because it's not great. And just to hold up an example, I have said that we're lucky that the model that we have today keeps going. And it's a historical accident though, that you created a Mozilla this way. Mozilla signed the contract that made the means of making things practical. Don't misunderstand. It's not like there's a direct connection in Apple, for example, that's like this money funds this work, but when you look at the ledgers of what it costs to have this versus what you get from having it, it's pretty plain that, well, it's actually profitable, so of course we're just going to keep doing it. And I'm not speculating how long it would take if you removed that deal, but I expect that, like every other business, they're a business. And you don't just pick projects that bleed you hundreds of millions of dollars in growing. So if you're a new browser, the only source that you can get, the main source, is a default search deal. But to get a default search deal, you need a situation like Mozilla had, where you already have 2% of the market or 3% of the market, and that's just not really possible.
Chris Coyier: I always thought it was... I need a really tiny browser to put spyware on TVs. I thought that was a secondary.
Dave Rupert: That too.
Eric Meyer: That's the thing. Creating a new... I mean Arc is I'm sure facing the same sort of problem. They're creating a, quote, unquote, 'new browser,' even though it's based on an existing engine, it's basically Chrome under the hood. Whatever, to the user it's a new browser. And as you've been experiencing, Chris, it's like a new way of interacting with the web and web content on the browser itself, and maybe that's enough for them to get a million users. That's not even 1% of the market.
Brian Kardell: We have a goal by the end of next year to have 2 million users.
Eric Meyer: Which, again, is not 1% of the overall web market. So to get to that three, or four, or 5%, whatever that threshold is where Google starts to think, 'All right, maybe we'll pay you... We'd like to be the default search on your browser, we'll pay you. Here's several pallets of cash that will drop in your front yard.'
Brian Kardell: Or even just one.
Eric Meyer: Whatever. I want to aim high here, Brian. Anyway. But to get to that point is really hard. And that's something Arc... And I'm not saying that that's their plan is to find 5 million or 10 million or whatever million users. Maybe they have a completely different exit plan that involves getting bought by Microsoft or Apple or some other company that decides that they want their own bespoke branded browser. Maybe that's what they're aiming to do. Or maybe they just want to be a browser company. Maybe they want to be the browser company of New York in perpetuity, they're not interested in selling. I have no idea. But if they're trying to create sustainable funding, right now, the model is they have to get big enough to get Google or some other search engine, but it's probably Google, to pay them $50 million a year or a hundred million dollars a year, or whatever million dollars a year it is, I don't know.
Chris Coyier: It seems like they have-
Brian Kardell: Or half a billion, half a billion if you're a Firefox.
Eric Meyer: If you're a Firefox.
Chris Coyier: If Arc does an amazing job, they have a UI... They have options. They could put ads on it, they could sell memberships. There's two, they have those two, but at least they have them. If you are going to make a new engine, you don't have either of those.
Brian Kardell: There's no monetary incentive to maintain an engine. There is totally monetary incentives to make a browser. And so you could, just hypothetically, let's say you're the FooBar device company, and you make devices, and you're going to make 5 million devices, and you're like, 'Well, I can make a cheap version of Android open source operating system, and I can make a cheap version of my own Play Store, control what I put into it. And one of the things that I'm going to put in it and on by default is my own fork of chromium.'
Dave Rupert: Brian, Samsung's right here. You don't need to talk about them in abstract. They're right here in the room. I'm kidding.
Brian Kardell: I'm just saying, you can do that and you don't have to put any money back into it, and you have a pretty good negotiating strategy for getting default search money. You're not contractually obligated to somehow participate and invest money back in. And that's not a comment on anybody or any company, it's just a fact.It's a problem with open source. There's a great thing about open source that anybody can spin up an idea really fast. That's great. We can make these amazingly complicated things, but then we could also turn them into something like fantastically successful, and then our users become somebody else's problems and we don't want to fund that work. And then those people burn out and it gets worse because there's too many asks of the system. So it's an interesting problem that we need to work on fixing, and that's what a Igalia's whole thing is, trying to fix that problem.
Chris Coyier: You've had a couple interesting takes on it. One of them was that, it was a year or two ago now, was let's ask actual people, 'You want this CSS feature? Prove it, with money.'
Brian Kardell: We all pay, we do pay. We have done a fantastic job of hiding the fact that we pay, but you are paying, you are a valuable commodity as a user of a browser who needs to do default search. Several dollars per user per year is the value. You're paying, you're just paying with other ways. You're paying with your eyeballs. Maybe you're paying with some of your privacy, maybe you're paying... So we can let those companies do all the deciding, because they're overwhelmed by asks from everybody. We can keep depending on them more and more, we can keep asking more and more, we can keep leaning into this broken system. Or we could just say the whole system is broken and we want stuff and we should find other ways to fund the stuff, then we can get what we want, or what we need.
Chris Coyier: That's the challenge, of course. I know you have some ideas, Brian, but I think we should talk about them too, because they're interesting, but there isn't infinite business models to reach for in a way. There's really only a couple. That's not totally true. There's lots of interesting ways to make money in the world, but from digital products, from making your two bucks per user or per browser or something, if business models were easy to experiment with, everybody would be doing it in a way, or if there was proven ways to do it. So you have a recent blog post just from a few days ago comparing it to the Super Bowl as...
Dave Rupert: Is that right?
Brian Kardell: That's just because... I just reflect back to your show, and Dave was commenting on some stuff that Microsoft did that he was like, 'Man, I just find that really gross and I hate it. I don't want ads in my browser.'
Dave Rupert: I would say that's gotten worse too. There's a little sparkle button in my Edge now and I don't like it, and I click the sparkle button because it's different colored than the rest of the UI. And guess what? It opens up a Office 365, which I have, but I don't really use online, I just make PowerPoints twice a year for talks. So I don't know. That's sort of frustrating to me. I guess they got to make money, put Bing and MSN and stuff.
Brian Kardell: Hearing your take on that is why I put in those examples of, people were happy, they liked that - people downloaded opera and Vivaldi because of speed dial.
Dave Rupert: Speed dial-
Eric Meyer: Speed dial being...
Brian Kardell: It's just default search icon. Er, it's just default icons in your start page really. That's all it is.
Eric Meyer: When you open up a new browser window, it would give you a set of buttons that were, here are your most visited sites or here are some search engines.
Chris Coyier: That was their killer feature, really?
Brian Kardell: Which was novel at the time.
Eric Meyer: It doesn't matter. It was super novel at the time.
Brian Kardell: But it weren't just your most recent ones. They were like, 'Here are some that everybody goes to that's really popular.' And even to this day, they will take money to put them on there, that's part of the business model.
Dave Rupert: They do that, right? I don't know. Your top eight on MySpace, they have the recommended apps when you download or whatever.
Brian Kardell: Exactly. You can pay for that. They're kind of an ad.
Eric Meyer: Or the thing Firefox does these days where, usually when you open a new wind... The first time you open a new window after you update, it'll give you a full page ad for Pocket, which-
Brian Kardell: Sometimes, they can.
Eric Meyer: Well, okay, sometimes, which Mozilla owns. But then, what was the movie? Brian, you were reminding me of this.
Chris Coyier: Seeing Red, wasn't it?
Eric Meyer: Turning Red.
Chris Coyier: Turning Red.
Eric Meyer: The Pixar movie where it was just this big thing for Turning Red, which was, probably a lot of people were like, 'That's cute.' And some people were like, 'Oh God, another ad?' But I'm sure-
Chris Coyier: It would've been worse if it was Coinbase or something, right?
Brian Kardell: Exactly.
Eric Meyer: Exactly. They also didn't do it for free. The Disney, or Pixar, or whoever, whatever, wherever the money came from, somebody wrote them a check to-
Brian Kardell: Maybe.
Eric Meyer: Or something. Did something.
Brian Kardell: I'm curious. I would like to know. If you know the answer to this question, you can email me...
Chris Coyier: In what universe would they not get a check for advertising at a Pixar movie?
Eric Meyer: Some kind of...
Brian Kardell: In a partnership world where Pixar doesn't really feel like they need Mozilla, but Mozilla feels like they need this to demonstrate something.
Chris Coyier: I could see that. I did verify this with somebody at McDonald's one time. I talked to a guy, his wife worked at McDonald's a long time, because I was fascinated by who pays who for Happy Meal Toys? Is there any world in which that a company will pay McDonald's to put their toy in the thing? And apparently it does happen sometimes, and that each deal is very unique about what goes in there. And sometimes it's the other way around, that McDonald's indeed says like, 'We will sell a lot more Happy Meals if we put an Elsa in.' You know what I mean? So that it goes actually-
Eric Meyer: So McDonald's pays Disney for the rights to have Frozen toys in there. Happy Meals-
Chris Coyier: And in that one, there's such heavyweights that it might be a no money changes hands deal, because it's so much for both of them.
Eric Meyer: Potentially. Interesting.
Chris Coyier: But you had some interesting thoughts, Brian, and they said that the number of people that even that just use Firefox is so high.
Brian Kardell: Yes.
Chris Coyier: It's comparative to Super Bowl numbers, and in fact are much higher.
Brian Kardell: It's higher. It's higher than Super Bowl numbers.
Chris Coyier: Which is-
Dave Rupert: [cross talk]
Eric Meyer: [cross talk]
Brian Kardell: What's that?
Eric Meyer: What kind of numbers are we talking about here? How many people, roughly?
Brian Kardell: I think that the last was Firefox had two hundred mill... hmmm... I'm going to foul it up, but I think that the Super Bowl had a max of like 150 million and Firefox is more than that. I know that Brave - just because I was looking at this very, very recently: Brave is currently at 53 million or something like that.
Chris Coyier: Those are big numbers.
Brian Kardell: They're big numbers, right? And nobody thinks Brave is a big one. Not to diss Brave, but I'm just saying in the discourse, people talk about the big ones and Brave is-
Chris Coyier: Not one of them.
Brian Kardell: Not the one that comes up in the top of most of those conversations.
Chris Coyier: That's interesting. And so you're saying, so people have paid many, many millions of dollars to advertise at the Super Bowl. I was also thinking of, because this came up abstractly, I went car racing a couple months ago, and then I got into that Netflix show called Drive to Survive, which is the way that a lot of people are discovering F1 racing, and I've just find it all so fascinating. The budgets for those teams are just nuts. They're so many millions of dollars. And the way that it happens is that they have sponsors. For example, Red Bull is one of the top teams right now. Red Bull is the team. They're so sponsored, and I have a Red Bull jacket that I've bought that's absolutely covered in logos.
Brian Kardell: Absolutely.
Chris Coyier: Because somehow they think enough people care about and watch about those teams that it buys them attention and goodwill or whatever, that it gets on there. So those are big numbers. So when you're talking about millions of people and millions of dollars, that is the kind of scope that we need to be talking about for browsers. It's not-
Brian Kardell: And this is everywhere though. This is everywhere, this sponsorship model. This is what pays for the big conferences too. The very big conferences have a lot of sponsorship dollars. Some of those ones, I'm not going to name any specifically, but some of them have millions of dollars to be a gold level sponsor.
Chris Coyier: You're thinking this is possible. It's not the sponsor, this opens project on GitHub sponsors, and as Dave put it recently, spend your 60 bucks at the bar, whatever. Those numbers are not enough. You can't say, 'Users of this browser engine, please support our hard work,' because it's just not going to work. But if there's millions of you and the companies want to reach those millions of eyeballs, that might be actually millions of dollars, which is the type of money that is going to actually help.
Brian Kardell: To be clear, I'm saying I don't know the answer. I'm saying we need an answer and there are a lot of things we could explore. And it is very painful to me that we can't get a good conversation like this going in the community. We need to talk about these things because, for example, like Dave saying, 'I hate this thing about Microsoft.' What can we do that people don't hate? Somehow, I don't know how, like Vivaldi or Opera had this feature, that is much more in your face, every time you click a new tab, it's there. And that people liked it.And I don't understand, this is where the Super Bowl analogy comes in. Commercials, I hate them, they're gross, I don't want them. But the Super Bowl, I like the commercials and I can't explain that really, except that we have built this cultural experience around it, where the time is valuable. So the commercial manufacturers make it valuable, and that means you're not going to see a recycled ad. You're not going to see something half-baked, you're not going to see some cheap ad, you're not going to see the lawyer down the street who... Whatever. You're going to get stuff that's big and polished and it's going to be world premier of our new commercial. And that's a different proposition than most commercials. And somehow we need to figure that out.
Dave Rupert: I'm worth $2 a year to Google or whatever. That's very interesting to me. I feel like a browser could say, 'Give us $5 and we'll be twice as profitable as Google per user, if you pay us $5, than a Google sweetheart deal.'And maybe it's like, I don't know, if I was a Firefox user, I might pay to be out that binding contract or whatever, or I'd be interested, but I wonder too, if it's like you're saying, I like this Super Bowl idea. I don't know. Google gets a lot of traffic just from the Google Doodles. They do something unique. They put time and effort into this thing. The whole department works on these things year round. I'm not saying everything needs a Google Doodle department, but can a browser offer that to an extent or something like that? Or some sort of... I don't know.
Eric Meyer: It's interesting. So I use Firefox primarily, because the dev tools, at least until very recently, were the best for the kind of work that I do. If I were a totally JavaScript programmer, I would probably disagree with this, and that's fine, so I use Firefox. And Firefox basically came to the user base and was 10 bucks a year and you get super bookmarks, but really what you're doing is you are supporting the browser. I would probably pay that. Even if they said 10 bucks a month, I would consider it that. But we got real used to... As a ecosystem, the ecosystem is super addicted to the idea that a browser is free. You don't have to pay a cent for running a browser, like an actual monetary cent. As Brian says, you pay in other ways, but no money comes out of your bank account and goes to somebody else in order to use a browser. That's going to be a real hard addiction to break, is the problem that I see.
Brian Kardell: You can donate directly to Mozilla, for example. So if you're saying, I would give $10 a month for that, or $10 a year, whatever, you could do that. You could do it now.
Eric Meyer: But you don't have to. And that runs into the problem of, what good is it going to do for me to give them 10 bucks a month when that probably means they're making 30 bucks a month from me to other people? That's not going to save them.
Brian Kardell: It's really challenging because we also don't want to create a web of... Having the web browser be free means that anybody can have it. It's not a task thing.
Eric Meyer: There are no economic barriers. There are no economic barriers.
Brian Kardell: There is, in the sense that you need a way to get online, you need to get connectivity. The connectivity is of course, biased toward people who have an iPhone. Everything is geared toward people who have better systems, but you can get, in anywhere in the world, you can with a little bit of work, find a way to access the web through a free web browser. And that's important. So I think it's important that we look at the history of that we've subsidized browsers. That's the challenge, is who's subsidizing? Because right now the answer is it's all of the advertisers in the whole world for every subject on earth. It's like the marketing departments of every company through search.
Eric Meyer: Because you're talking about Google Ads essentially, and those companies-
Brian Kardell: Google, or Duck Duck Go, or Bing, or Yahoo, or whoever your search engine is. So it's tricky. You can also donate to our collective for Wolvic. And what do you get out of that? Well, we'll put your name in the browser, in a thank you page, and that's about all you get, if it's a little bit of money. If you give a fairly substantial amount, $2,000 in six months, we have a town hall that we're going to work together in that town hall to prioritize like, what do we do with this money? And then we have levels of partnership that come with more... Will help bring this to your device, will help support it on your device.
Eric Meyer: Which is interesting, because as a model that's really... Yes, individual users can toss money in as a, 'I want to vote with my wallet, I want to show support for this.' The same way that you can do for GitHub repositories and stuff. But it's really, at least at the moment, the partners are the ones doing the subsidizing of free access to everyone, rather than every ad department on earth.
Brian Kardell: It's different too. It's coming from engineering budgets. And engineering budgets inherently do more with less. That's what they...
Eric Meyer: There you go. So it's a different model. And is it a sustainable model? We don't know. We'd like to think that it can be made sustainable in some way. Is it a model that could be replicated to other project? Could other projects just take that model and say, 'We're going to do the same thing'? Don't know, but it's a bit unusual to have any browser try to fund itself in any way other than ad revenue, basically. I suspect it will be hard going, but at least it's trying something different.
Dave Rupert: Well, don't sell y'all's selves short. I like that Igalia has some skin in the game. Y'all adopted the Mozilla Reality Project and are now owning a browser. You've worked on browsers for a long time, kind of guerrilla teaming into browsers that need extra support built on capacity. And now you have something, a browser you work on. So hopefully if Mozilla asks, cool, we actually have that browser and we know how it works, and so we can build out that feature because we've on it for a long time or whatever. I think that's, for other whatever funding models, you are the paid support model of open source or the contract for hire, contractor subsidized.
Brian Kardell: I think you called us A-Team somewhere, that I thought was pretty funny.
Dave Rupert: I think it's A-Team, because it's just like, 'How are we going to make Grid?' It's like, 'Call Igalia.'
Brian Kardell: When we were talking about what is a browser and all of the bits of this, we didn't talk about a WebView and the fact that there is a default WebView. Since Microsoft, there is the concept of your operating system should have an integrated WebView, because useful for so many more things than just the browser. And now we go the other way, we make products where we ship, we package up another copy of the engine to ship a project, but that is also just another WebView. I don't know if you have seen, but Duck Duck Go has a browser now.
Dave Rupert: Really?
Brian Kardell: And they don't do what anybody does. They are making their thing use whatever the default engine is. So on iOS, the default engine and the only engine is WebKit, and Duck Duck Go is saying, 'Well, actually that makes a lot of sense.' Because that one is always the better one, it's the more powerful one, it's the one that's integrated with all of your stuff and it's just a lot simpler to plug into that. We can have a really lightweight install and we're just giving you the part on top. So that's another really interesting take on this.
Dave Rupert: I've just downloaded it. I guess getting back to the Arc thing, I hope I didn't just make this my default.
Chris Coyier: There was a great comment about Arc that said, 'The reason we can be so innovative with Arc in a way that you haven't seen before is specifically because we're not beholden to a search engine, and that all these search engines have this incentive to when you're trying to get somewhere, if they can have you execute a search, that's awesome. That's perfect. That's the metric that we care about.' So why would you build a UI that's when I type in Eric Meyer CSS wishlist, I have that tab open somewhere that it'll just go right to that tab instead of open a new tab, execute that search, and hopefully it's somewhere near the top and I can click it. That latter one is better for the search engine because I've executed a search and the line goes up. Whereas the former was a better user experience. 'Dude, you already got the tab open. It's right there. You don't need to search again.'
Eric Meyer: Rather than having the same thing open in four tabs, which I've heard happens to some people.
Dave Rupert: I'm blaming myself. I'm insulting myself.
Chris Coyier: It'll be the same problem with Duck Duck Go though. It's kind of cool to see Arc not have that. Anyway. Until they get bought and then it's all over.
Brian Kardell: Maybe. That's really interesting. It will be interesting to see how AI changes this too, because there are some things that an AI bot will probably be better for, and depending on where that technology lands, maybe you can, in some cases, give better privacy that way or something. I don't know. There's so many variables here that all of them seem to think about search somehow and disrupting something about search to make a better experience. And the pressures are completely different. So Arc is getting Angel investor money, so they're not currently dependent on the search. Whereas if you're Firefox, I would guess probably it would be a big problem if you did something that interfered and made you get only half as many searches.
Dave Rupert: I like that Duck Duck Go is doing this, and I like that they're using whatever the WebView is, because they can just be a skin around it. And as I understood Arc, it is kind of... I'm sure there's some deeper Google integrations, but as I understood it's just a swift UI over some sort of browser rendering technology. They're not getting deep internals as I'm understanding it. So I like this Duck Duck Go as we worked with a company that's like that company, Klarna, I don't know if you're familiar. But it's basically, it's a browser plugin and you go to an e-commerce shop, Best Buy, you want to get an iPad, but you don't have enough money. They'll issue you a loan basically, it's a little banking kind of backend. Does that make sense? It's kind of like you signed up, you get rewards while you're shopping.If I did a lot of e-commerce, and I'm living and dying, my month is determined by my effectiveness at using Klarna. A Klarna browser might be very good. And that's what their iOS app is, is basically just a iOS WebKit view, WebView or whatever, plus the Klarna plugin. And I think I like... I mean, Coil, who I like, or rip RIP, R-I-P, they're going away. I like the web monetization.
Brian Kardell: Just moving to Interledger I think, really.
Dave Rupert: Hopefully. And hopefully... Whatever. We haven't even talked about web monetization as a possible avenue for browsers. Because if I open it, you could just ding my ledger, my wallet. That would be great. But Coil's big thing was I had to download the Puma browser to use Coil on my iPhone. I'm not going to do that, I just wanted a browser plugin. But if I was maybe a dedicated Coil super fan, I could have downloaded Puma and did that.
Brian Kardell: Coil did have a plugin or...
Dave Rupert: They have a Chrome extension and Brave's bat is connected there, but for iOS specifically, they didn't have the APIs they needed to build a web extension. Anyway,
Chris Coyier: We got that email where they're closing down and then three days later I got one where they charged me again and I was like, 'Cool. Good job. Thanks.'
Dave Rupert: Well, I literally have a to-do list on my desk that was like, 'Stop Coil? Question mark.' I was like, 'I guess that's done.'
Chris Coyier: You might want to double check it.
Dave Rupert: I like these bespoke uses. I like that idea. Would I have used a Coil browser on my desktop? Maybe. If it has dev tools, but just because I believed in web monetization.
Brian Kardell: So we're rapidly hitting our hour. There are two things I want to try to fit in really, really quick. One is, I think that one of the things that prevents businesses, the engineering department of businesses, from spending money toward these open source projects, especially these big important ones, is I think we should work on making tax breaks for funding this kind of work. Identifying a few of these really important things, like the web engines as a comments, the way we did with roads and bridges and things like that. They're infrastructure of the modern world. So we probably can't make people just pay taxes for them, but maybe some incentives as a write off, you could write off... Sponsoring some of that work would be, I think, would encourage businesses to do that. The engineering part.
Dave Rupert: I think that'd be cool. I mean open source too. Put that in the same bucket.
Brian Kardell: No, I am.
Dave Rupert: I fund quite a few things on whatever, Open Click, GitHub, blah blah, blah. If I could just be, 'That was actually just a total whatever public trust maneuver.' But maybe that's ripe for abuse, but maybe... I don't know. That's not my problem.
Brian Kardell: I think there are definitely... It would be difficult to apply to all open source, but it would not be difficult to identify open source on which the world currently, totally depends. So I think you could do, like I say, with you did with roads and bridges and things. So last thing, I just want to say, Arc, so cool. I've been using it for a week. And when people describe it, the pitch is, 'Well, the tabs are on the side, but then they can go away.' That's not a good pitch. I know I talked to both of you about this when we came out with Wolvic, which was like, you can't understand, and then you see it and you go, 'Oh my God, why has nobody done this?' This idea of the spaces that you can flip through is brilliant, it's just brilliant. I love it so much. It's the thing that I always wanted that I never knew I wanted.
Chris Coyier: Really? That's the number one thing for you, is this right?
Brian Kardell: I love it. I love it so much.
Chris Coyier: That's wild.
Brian Kardell: It's a way for me to use pin tabs and groups and just organize my life. So where I go, 'I wanted to go to my art stuff, just flip over there and there's all my art stuff and it's fine.' I can just say, don't close those. Or if I do accidentally close them, the archive thing is really nice. But anyway, the thing is, some of these features that will get developed in these bespoke browsers they are killer features, but how long is that... Do you think they're patenting these ideas? Or what prevents Google or Apple from going, 'That's a good idea, let's do that.'? And then it's no longer competitive advantage. It's kind of what happened with tabs, right?
Dave Rupert: It's weird because it is tabs. And it's pin tabs, it's profiles and bookmarks, and your actual open tabs, but it changes your relationship with tabs. And that's what's cool about it. And I found myself, even I have Notion, here's all the web apps I use Notion, Discord, Slack, VS Code, Figma. I have all these apps on my desktop that are just WebViews, or electronic apps or whatever you want to call them. And I'm like, 'I could use those just in my browser now,' because of how they've structured it and the mental paradigm, just how they've reorganized it. Just that subtle reorganization has changed my experience with tabs entirely. And so, I think that's cool about it and I wish more people would try that. And I don't know, more browsers would... We're all just copying each other's homework. And so it'd be cool if somebody could just do something different. And I think Arc is doing that, in their own weird, unique way. The color picker is a weird synthesizer. Why? I don't know. But it's cool, it's unique.
Brian Kardell: Do you have any final thought, before we go? About what... It is a competitive advantage right now, that they have a very unique, bespoke thing where they can experiment with all these, and I guess the thing keeping others from doing it too is that it does interfere with your search, I guess.
Dave Rupert: It's a weird mode and I think every browser could have a weird mode. I don't know.
Brian Kardell: Weird mode, I like it.
Dave Rupert: We had quirks mode for ages. Let's just do weird mode now. I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how they monetize. And when they put Microsoft News Network ads into my whatever pop out bar, I might be upset.
Brian Kardell: Let's see what happens. And if you think of anything that you think is a way to help that, let us know. Love to hear more conversation on all these things, because it seems like a hard problem and one that we need to eventually solve, and it would be great to not solve it when it's already emergency crisis.
Dave Rupert: Let's get ahead of the apocalypse.
Brian Kardell: Thanks for coming on. We're at time. I want to make sure that we don't keep you too long, but thanks so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Eric Meyer: Thanks you two.
Dave Rupert: There you go.
Chris Coyier: I really appreciate it. It's big stuff. It's good to talk about. Let's keep it going.
Brian Kardell
Eric Meyer
Chris Coyier
Dave Rupert