This might just be me, but I’ve recently been wondering—has anyone ever floated the idea of potentially creating a decentralized and/or federated alternative to the browser engines dominating the market?
Right now, it feels like options are increasingly monopolized, with Google Chromium (Blink) being the backbone of almost every browser, and Mozilla’s Gecko engine fighting to hold on.
While platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, and others prove that decentralization/federation can work remarkably well for social media, could this model apply to browser engines or even search platform ecosystems?
Maybe something open and community-driven that allows different stakeholders or communities to innovate independently while ensuring compatibility standards?
I recognize this would be a monumental challenge, requiring deep technical expertise, time, and resources.
I’d love to explore it myself, but I just don’t have the energy, time, or knowledge to get such a thing off the ground.
However, I’m hoping to hear if anyone has had similar thoughts, knows of any related projects in development, or has ideas about how this could work.
Imagine a world where browser developers aren’t forced to rely on Google’s Chromium, and instead, we could have a crowd-sourced federated system where each contributor could bring something unique to the table without centralized control.
Would this even be feasible?
What do you think?
Is it worth dreaming about, or are there insurmountable hurdles that make such an initiative unrealistic?
Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts.
You seem to be conflating browser technology (Chrome, Chromium, Blink, Gecko, etc.) and search engine technology, but they are unrelated technologies. I can’t imagine what your mental model for these technologies might be to create this conflation. Their only relationship to each other is that search engines are accessed via web browsers, and that web browsers often (but not always) embed a widget for calling search engines.
I suspect that the cancerous “appification of the web” has reached an advanced stage where people don’t know how to distinguish between client and server.
Are you talking about search engines or browser rendering engines? For search, searxng already exists. A decentralized browser rendering engine doesn’t really make sense, since it’s just software that runs locally.
Ladybird is a new open source engine.
I am not sure what you mean by a decentralized/federated rendering engine. Do you know what they are?
Browser engines are the clients in a client-server system. Social media interactions follow a client-server-client pattern. Federation merely allows for something like client-server-server-client, and wouldn’t make sense for browsers.
What you’re probably looking for is simply communities built around forking the codebase of those engines for innovation and development. Those probably already exist, since that’s part of the cultural backbone of the FOSS movement.
That’s not really how browsers and web standards work
The biggest issue is economies of scale. Browser engines generally require a lot more coding and maintenance than social media software does (unless you are engineering to be the next Twitter will millions of users). This means more people involved and more organization is required than your typical ActivityPub-related project.
There actually have been many alternate browsers proposed and built, but they usually wind up being abandoned because of the lack of adoption and the amount of work it takes.
And, depending on the type of changes you are making, sometimes it is better to just use what someone else has built and modify it. That is why we have Waterfox, Opera, Brave, and numerous other browsers that use Chromium or Firefox as the base. Why build an entire car, when you can repaint it, change out the seats, add a quality sound system, and swap out the wheels for something nicer?
I do think that there needs to be more choices for browser engines, but I am not sure decentralization is the right word. What we need is more competition, or put another way, more players. The standards are open, so anyone with resources can build a browser. It is a matter of whether people will use the new browsers.
