Browsers are becoming invisible to the average internet person and when they gain visibility, it's usually for the wrong reasons. It's the app where content is particularly full of ads and pop-ups. Even ignoring all that spam, many websites still have issues when opened on a phone screen. The freedom and openness of the web are held back by bad first impressions. The web wasn't invented with monetization, discoverability, or security as built-in features, so we're still figuring that out. Meanwhile, there's Google.

The web was adopted by Google as their ecosystem. For monetization, we get their ads and for discoverability, we get their search. We even get the browsers themselves. Google is the main developer and maintainer of Chromium, a huge open-source project that provides a codebase not only for Google's Chrome but also Microsoft's Edge, Samsung's Internet, and many other browsers like Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, etc. Browsers are a cross-platform effort that is very difficult to maintain given lots of moving targets from HTML/CSS/JS standards to security requirements. By sharing the same browser engine, all these companies get to benefit from this combined effort of keeping Chromium safe and functional. 

There are other browser engines besides Chromium, namely Apple's Webkit which powers Safari, and Mozilla's Gecko which powers Firefox. However, these two cases aren't completely independent from Google as they have gotten a lot of money to provide Google search as a default. Search has become crucial because it has co-opted the browser address bar. As people never get to learn what a URL is, every time they go to any website they've become used to passing through Google. No other company knows so much about how people use the web. 

Therefore it's not surprising that we've come to United States v. Google LLC, an ongoing federal antitrust case that accuses Google of illegally monopolizing the web's advertising market and aims to force the company to sell off significant portions of its business. It's possible that Google is forced to separate itself from Chromium and/or any deals made to favor its search engine in browsers. This could be a seismic shift for a web that has become dominated by a single company. We have become convinced that this is the only way for a browser engine to exist. 

The alternative offered by Apple through Safari isn't very much aligned with their business interests. Apple makes money through the App Store and can't make space for web apps to compete with that. On the other hand, Mozilla is in a completely different position of having no real source of funding besides Google. More importantly, Mozilla seems to have abandoned its focus on privacy to offer just another niche browser looking to sell user data. 

From a longer-term perspective, there's also a new browser called Ladybird with its own independent engine, some community support, and sponsors interested in fostering a better web. The current scope of the project is only targeting Linux and macOS, but still, some say such a project is impossible. At the very least, within a couple of years, we'll find out if it's viable to maintain a real browser without Google levels of money. 

We can't just wait for some Microsoft to maybe pick up Chromium and reinforce the status quo or for Google to perhaps lobby their accusations away. A web outside of corporate silos has always existed and it deserves to be run on independent browsers that support the freedom, privacy, and safety of their users.