Web Browsers, Innovation, and the Future (Premium)

Decades ago, I made the argument that Microsoft popularizing the GUI was its own form of innovation, even though Apple had gotten there first, so to speak, with the Mac. In the same vein, one might argue that the private and secure default configuration provided by the Brave web browser is likewise innovative on some level, even though the browser otherwise functions exactly like Google Chrome and other mainstream browsers.

I am comfortable making that assertion, I guess, but the term innovation has somewhat grander connotations, and one could likewise argue to the contrary that it’s possible to make almost any web browser private and secure with the right extensions. And that innovation is really about changing the world. Windows met that bar in the early 1990s, as did the Internet—as embodied by the World Wide Web and the web browsers that we used to access it—in the late 1990s, the iPhone in 2007, and now the AI wave that started in 2023. Put another way, innovation is obvious and inarguable. If it’s open to debate, it’s not innovative.

And on that note, I’m not sure that any of the web browsers we use or have at least heard of are truly innovative. In fact, from a general usage perspective, these browsers are all the same, whether we look at Chrome, the runaway market leader, second-tier alternatives like Safari, Edge, and Firefox, or third-stringers like Brave, DuckDuckGo, Opera, and Vivaldi. The user experiences aren’t just similar, they’re nearly identical. Worse, any of these web browsers would be immediately recognizable to a Netscape Navigator-using time traveler from 1996.

Were this fictional time traveler to dig a bit deeper, they would discover that web browsers have, in fact, changed a lot since 1996. It’s just that the most profound changes—the real innovation, if you will—has occurred under the covers. And the web these browsers access has evolved as a platform that not only rivals the capabilities we get from native desktop and mobile platforms, but exceeds them by being cross-compatible between both. That is inarguably innovation, and the realization of the dreams expressed by such things as Java in the 1990s—one app that runs everywhere—and Longhorn in the early 2000s, through which Microsoft promised truly scalable user interfaces that would dynamically adapt to different screen sizes, aspect ratios, and bit depths. The web is the only platform that works everywhere.

And yet, the web browsers we use to access this uber platform remain rooted in the user interfaces of the 1990s. As with any popular personal computing product, there was a period of rapid improvement followed by maturity, stasis, and conformity. The biggest UX difference between the Navigator of 1996 and the Chrome of 2023 is probably tabs, and that feature literally dates back to the 1990s—thanks, Opera!—and the MDI/SDI (multiple document interface/single document interface) debates of that era. Hell, tabs are so fundamental to our daily workflows that Microsoft tried to add them to Windows 10 with Sets, failed, and then added them in piecemeal fashion to just a handful of apps in Windows 11 years later.

Which brings up an interesting point. In the heady early days of Netscape, co-founder Marc Andreessen infamously—and, as it turns out, foolishly—declared that Navigator would reduce Windows’ role on the PC to that of “a set of slight buggy device drivers,” raising Bill Gates’ ire and, well, you know. I wrote a 900+ book about the history of Windows from a technical perspective, and the conclusion was that Microsoft fought the web and the web won. Which means that Andreessen, ultimately, was right. He just got there too soon.

As long ago as the Windows 7 era—so, 2009 to 2012—Microsoft saw that web browser usage outstripped that of all other Windows apps combined, and the company saw that as a clear and present danger that threatened not only its native apps platforms but Windows itself. Apple saw this as well. When it introduced the iPhone in 2007, the initial apps platform was web-based specifically because it was so limited. But after it had introduced its own native apps platform a year later and the web matured, Apple, uniquely among the major platform makers, refused to fully adopt the industry standards that enabled web apps. It still does. That’s how serious it sees this threat: It enshittifies its desktop and mobile platforms and its Safari web browser to protect its App Store monopoly.

Indeed, it’s not coincidental that the only three major platform makers—Apple, Google, and Microsoft—each make a web browser. Each integrates these browsers deeply into their own platforms, which is understandable, but each also artificially hobbles competing web browsers on their own platforms, as Mozilla so ably demonstrated recently, which is disgusting. So it’s not just Apple enshittifying its platforms, it’s all of them.

Does this explain why the web browsers of today are fundamentally unchanged from their 1990s predecessors? Ultimately, yes, I think it does: Each of these companies is protecting something valuable, and they are thus operating more out of fear than attempting to meet customer needs. More generally, none of them have the best interests of the web or its users at heart either. Even Google’s Chrome OS is just a thin wrapper around Chrome, which is itself a protectionist play for Google’s online services and ad revenues. There’s no desire or need within these companies to truly innovate.

This explains, too, why alternative browsers of any stripe, including Mozilla Firefox, aren’t in any way innovative: Because Chrome is so dominant and so familiar to billions of people worldwide, no browser maker can get past their strategic desire to be “Chrome, but … better.” They design their products to look and work like Chrome to ease migration concerns, just as Chrome itself mimicked Firefox, which mimicked Internet Explorer, which mimicked Netscape Navigator. Designing something radically different, truly rethinking how a web browser might look and work is beyond them. They’re struggling to survive, to gain an appreciable user base. But they are also thinking small.

Fortunately, this is about to change.

Thanks to AI, more sophisticated mobile capabilities, and innovative startups that aren’t beholden to traditional business models or Big Tech lock-in, the web browsers we use in the near future could look quite a bit different from the me-too browsers of today. And if these efforts are successful, the web platform will finally take its rightful place as the one true platform that spans form factors and device types and moves us past the enshittification strategies that Apple, Google, and Microsoft employ.

AI is going to shake up all kinds of platforms, from search to office productivity to operating systems, and the Big Tech firms that control these markets today will try to retain their customer bases and revenues by liberally sprinkling AI everywhere and doing what they always do by hobbling real innovation. But there is a broader movement happening in the world that you can see in upstarts like Grammarly, Notion, and Slack that threatens these strategies and platforms. And there is perhaps no important battle coming than with web browsers, since all of those solutions are, at heart, web-based.

This is a big topic. But let’s just focus on the web browser today.

It all sounds so simple. Web browsers display web pages using rendering engines optimized for the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code they contain. But continuous improvements over nearly 30 years have made these pages, and the browsers that render them, much more powerful. They can be private and secure. They can host web apps and integrate deeply with native features in the underlying computing platform. And they can be displayed in single web page views or augmented with groups, workspaces, and split-screen views. Web browsers are in many ways more important than the underlying platforms they run on, as the one-time focus on native apps has long since been eclipsed by cross-platform capabilities. And there is no better way to achieve that than with the web.

Big Tech isn’t going to innovate in web browsers, as noted: They are circling the wagons, protecting their vital revenue streams. And, again, most alternative browsers simply ape the user experiences and functionality of market leaders, offering just minor advances in limited ways. For example, Brave promotes its privacy and security and almost completely ignores the user interface. DuckDuckGo targets the same privacy and a security concerns as Brave, but is probably better known thanks to its popular mobile app. Microsoft Edge is the default choice in Windows, offers deep integration with that platform, and is packed with additional features, maybe too packed. Opera is a minimalist option and seems to target power users. And Vivaldi, packed with even more features than Edge, is for users who prize personalization and customization above all else.

These differentiators can be worthwhile—I’m a fan of Brave’s and DuckDuckGo’s privacy- and security-first approach, personally—but it is notable that all these browsers, all of them, fundamentally offer the same user experience. We use them to access the content that matters most to us, but they all look and work almost exactly the same despite their promoted differences.

But again, this is about to change.

This wake-up call came courtesy of the Arc web browser, which is nothing less than a complete rethinking of the web browser and the type of product that could never come from a protectionist market leader. I can’t recall when Arc first entered my radar, but its June 2023 availability on Mac and iOS after years of testing was interesting enough for me to write it up. And when I was finally offered the chance to test it myself, I was blown away by what I saw. Despite providing the same basic functions as any other web browser, Arc is nothing like any other web browser.

That can be confusing: Thanks to the me-too-ism that has dominated this market for 20 years, we’ve all been using web browsers for what feels like forever, and we’ve developed well-worn usage habits and expectations. When a web browser does something a little differently, as Opera or Brave does in small ways, or is missing key features we need, as DuckDuckGo does in its current, incomplete state, people typically retreat to the safe confines of their current browser. That’s why it took me so long to adopt Brave, despite multiple attempts, and it’s why I finally wrote How I Configure Brave (Premium), so I could help others get past their suspicions and the unfamiliarity of something the same but different.

But Arc does almost everything differently, and as I noted in my review, using it effectively requires time and effort, during which you will make mistakes and experience frustration. Mastering it will take even more time and effort. But as I’ve heard from several people who have taken this leap, the payoff is there. Adapting to Arc is akin to discovering some form of alchemy, an almost magical transformation that enables new levels of efficiency and functionality. For some people, Arc is the answer to a problem most didn’t know we had. Myself included. You just need to get past that hump.

The differences between Arc and other web browsers are many, but they broadly come down to just two key things, UI and AI. And in both cases, the small company behind Arc, whimsically named The Browser Company, has seen a future in which the web browser isn’t just a tool to access the Internet, it’s a tool that improves the Internet. Put another way, it’s a platform that obviates the need for other platforms.

Arc’s Darrin Fisher explained this philosophy in a 2022 interview. The web browser is basically an operating system for the web, with task management and organizational features. But today’s web browsers, he says, are archaic, and they’re kept archaic by the needs of their makers. Exactly right.

Since developing and releasing Arc on Mac, The Browser Company has pivoted on AI, and you can see the direction it’s heading with Browse For Me on both mobile and desktop. Well, you can’t see it, probably, because Arc is a small enough company that the Windows version of the browser is still functionally limited compared to the initial Mac version and is behind a waitlist. But there is good work happening there, even controversial work given that the AI capabilities they’re promoting could disrupt not just Big Tech but content makers big and small. Including me.

AI and its impact on content makers is another big topic, so let’s again limit this discussion to web browsers. And here, my mind wanders to the alternative web browsers makers, given that Big Tech will never adopt any of these innovations anyway. Or at least not unless they are forced to. And there is no alternative web browser maker more germane to this discussion than Mozilla.

As I noted in Tilt Shift: Mozilla Shines a Harsh Light on Enshittification in the Smartphone Era (Premium), Firefox isn’t perfect, but there is no browser more worthy of our attention. And yet, thanks largely to the predations of Big Tech, this product has seen its dominant 30+ percent usage share of 2009 dwindle to just 3.5 percent today, making it an also-ran.

But we can’t just blame Big Tech for Firefox’s usage share losses. Mozilla has also made some strategic mistakes that contributed to these losses. And the biggest and most obvious is its insistence on using its own rendering engine, ensuring that Firefox will always be behind on compatibility, performance, reliability, and security. As I argued when some complained about Microsoft adopting Chromium for Edge, the rendering engine is the wrong place to innovate because multiple rendering engines slow innovation by forcing browser and web app developers to focus on low-level technologies instead of new features and functionality.

Microsoft was right to compete on features in Edge, though they of course screwed that up royally by making their browser an ad tracking nightmare as bad as Chrome and by piling far too many superfluous features into the product. But Mozilla should do the same, freeing it to focus on user experience and AI, the only differentiations that matters in this space. And what I realize now, thanks to Arc, is that not doing so years ago was a missed opportunity. Mozilla, which respects and protects the open web more than any other organization, has done poorly by its fans and users. And by the web itself.

It may not be too late. Thanks to a recent executive shuffle and a wise shift to diversify its offerings to include both free and paid options, Mozilla is talking about change and could turn talk into reality and move its web browser forward instead of laterally. Arc is what Firefox should have been. But Arc is also what Firefox could be.

This is true of the other browser makers as well, of course. Brave, DuckDuckGo, Opera, and Vivaldi can and arguably should try to shake things up. It’s not like their current efforts are succeeding: Across all platforms, only Opera shows up explicitly, with 2.56 percent usage share, and that’s roughly equal to Samsung Internet, a product most of you haven’t even heard of. The others fall, literally, under “Other” and collectively account for, wait for it, just 0.07 percent usage share. Which is 0 percent.

The time for change isn’t now, it’s long overdue. But since we can’t roll back the clock, let’s just agree there’s no time like the present. And if Mozilla, Brave, and the others want to survive and then grow, it’s time for less me-too and more innovation. And there’s Arc showing the way. Not for the other browsers to copy, necessarily, but as an inspiration for what’s possible. Yes, the web is 20 years old and mature as a platform. But there’s still so much more potential there. We just have to collectively stop letting Big Tech and our fear of change from preventing us from realizing that potential. From changing the world, again.

After all, that’s what innovation is all about.