2025 Browser Funding After Search Deals

WEH 2025 - Browser Funding After Search Deals

• GitHub issue: https://github.com/Igalia/webengineshackfest/issues/55
• URL: https://meet.jit.si/WEH2025-Funding

• Ladybird is cheap
• CI/releng/... costs $$MM/yr
• Also need experts on fonts, ...
• Testing/shipping on many different platforms for security fixes is expensive
• Running things like MDN, wpt, ... is also expensive
• can find a 100M$ for a browser (similar budget to Wikipedia), 4B$ would be harder
• Maintaining is also very expensive - many new features
• https://www.island.io/ has lots of money
• Ladybird gets money by asking people for money, don't want to monetize users. Working for the time being.
• You can also give Servo money (https://opencollective.com/servo)
• Hard to create a browser that you can use for the things you actually use the web for. You can download servo today, it has tabs, but I wouldn't put my credit card into it. Until you get to the point where you can be a browsers, it's hard to monetize.
• Having diversity is amazing. Benevolent givers are cool, but there's a limit to it.
• Can get money from people who want to use parts for other things
• Issue: dependence on other companies to move forward
• Also non-techy people use browsers
• Web as a public good, but funded and controlled by a handful of US corporations. Some governments starting to get anxious about it. Could EU governments fund a significant fraction of this? Who will get this money? To do what? Who will they be accountable to?
• How does stuff like Electron make money?
  • Not profitable
  • CI / infra costs sponsored by MS
  • Slack funds engineering because they get security benefits for their desktop app
• What are the alternative business models?
• We can scale things up faster if we do them collectively. Marketers not interested in a browser with 1% of market share, but might be if several had shared infrastructure and principles
• Choice screens for browsers and search; could have a working group improve those
• Danger of government imposing support for SOAP and RDF. need many stakeholders. Very far from what governments know right now - hard to get across the schasm. Could ask for money to set up some infrastructure that's eventually self-funding
• Used to work in international development - 100M is peanuts
• Could have a .50$ tax on your internet bill to fund browsers, or 10% tax on big tech companies
• Igalia partially funded by companies who need middleware. People expect google or apple to fix their issues - when they don't, people try to fund that themselves
• If actions on the web are legible, they're taxable
• Do browser companies have a sense of the cost per user, assuming no free browsers exist? 50 cents per user per year. Regressive though - we've not paid for browsers recently
• 1000 largest companies could pay 2M/yr
• Media has different models (pay per view, broadcast, ...). Would be good to have diverse funding approaches
• Who's getting the EU to pay?
  • Robin is! But is just one guy
• NLNet are funding some browser development with fairly small grants. They ask direct piercing questions
• Philantropy
• The UN - internet access as human right
• Let billionaires avoid taxes by giving money to us
• Marketing - using words that policy makers understand - "public infrastructure"