A few years ago, covering browsers got boring.
Chrome had clearly won the desktop, the great JavaScript speed wars were over and Mozilla seemed more interested in building a mobile operating system than its browser. Microsoft tried its best to rescue Internet Explorer/Edge from being the punchline of nerdy jokes, but its efforts essentially failed.
Meanwhile, Opera had shuttered the development of its own rendering engine and redesigned its browser with less functionality, alienating many of its biggest fans. On mobile, plenty of niche players tried to break the Chrome/Safari duopoly, but while they did have some innovative ideas, nothing ever stuck.
But over the course of the last year or so, things changed. The main catalyst for this, I would argue, is that the major browser vendors — and we can argue about Google’s role here — realized that their products were at the forefront of a new online privacy movement. It’s the browser, after all, that allows marketers to set cookies and fingerprint your machine to track you across the web.
Add to that Microsoft’s move to the Chromium engine, which is finally giving Microsoft a seat at the browser table again, plus the success of upstarts like Brave and Vivaldi, and you’ve got the right mix of competitive pressure and customer interest for innovation to come back into what was a stagnant field only a few years ago.
Let’s talk about privacy first. With browsers being the first line of defense, it’s maybe surprising that we didn’t see Mozilla and others push for more built-in tracking protections before.
In 2019, the Chrome team introduced handling cookies in the browser and a few months ago, it launched a broader initiative to completely rethink cookies and online privacy for its users — and by extension, Google’s advertising ecosystem. This move centers around differential privacy and a ‘privacy budget’ that would allow advertisers to get enough information about you to group you into a larger cohort without providing so much information that you would love your anonymity.
At the time, Google said this was a multi-year effort that was meant to help publishers retain their advertising revenue (vs their users completely blocking cookies).
Google proposes new privacy and anti-fingerprinting controls for the web
The overall reaction from the browser ecosystem was muted at best. Unlike Google, its competitors don’t have an advertising business to protect, after all, and can take more extreme approaches. Indeed, if you look at the privacy settings of any major browser except for Chrome right now (which still groups its privacy settings under its ‘advanced’ tab), you’ll find settings to manage how the browser should handle trackers. Microsoft’s new Edge and Firefox, for example, allow users to switch between three settings that range from allowing anybody to track them to a very restrictive setting that virtually eliminates any tracking but is also likely to break a few online experiences in the process.
Brave, which recently launched version 1.0 of its browser, has made privacy, in combination with ad blocking and its own cryptocurrency-based ad scheme, the focal point of its browser efforts. I can’t say I fully buy into Brave’s crypto scheme (maybe that’s because I’m a crypto-skeptic anyway), but there’s clearly user demand for a browser like this.
Vivaldi, which made a name of itself as a browser for advanced users, has stayed on the sidelines of the privacy debate. While it offers some settings, including the ability to opt out of Google services, you’ll need a third-party blocker to get parity with its competitors.
Google risks being left behind and my sense is that there is real friction between what the Chrome team would like to do and the needs of the company’s advertising business, which generates the vast majority of its income. It’ll be interesting to watch this in the coming year as users get more sensitive to these issues and Chrome risks being left behind.
Out of all of these efforts, Mozilla’s is likely the one with the widest impact and the organization is starting to take its efforts beyond the browser with plans for a systemwide mobile VPN that will launch sometime this year, as well as a browser-based VPN that’s currently in testing. We’ve seen similar moves from Opera in recent years, though Mozilla has a bit more reach and market power.
On the technical side, the launch of Microsoft’s new Edge browser was probably the biggest news of the year. Version 1.0 will launch in the middle of January, but it has long been stable enough to be used on a day-to-day basis (that’s what I’ve been doing, at least). Microsoft gave up on building its own browser engine in favor of Chromium and there is an argument to be made that all of this focus on the Chromium engine is leading to a bit of a monoculture on the web.
Microsoft’s Edge team argues that its minimal market share for IE and the old Edge browser didn’t give it any power to help steer browser standards anyway, and I tend to be sympathetic to that view, especially now that Microsoft has started to contribute a number of features to the Chromium project. Plus, Mozilla’s engine remains a viable alternative, even with its diminished market share, though browser vendors are clearly gravitating more to Chromium than Mozilla’s Gecko.
Since Microsoft’s Edge team doesn’t have to worry about the browser and trying to keep it compatible with Chromium, it’s now free to actually innovate. So far, we haven’t seen all that much in this area, but that’s no surprise, given that the team is mostly focused on shipping version 1.0. What we’ve seen, though, including Collections, Microsoft’s take on a hybrid of bookmarks and a reading list, looks interesting.
All of these developments, plus recent developments like WebAssembly becoming an official W3C standard, likely mean we’ll see even more development in this area in 2020. Only two years ago, I’d recommend Chrome to anybody who asked me which browser to use. Today, there is thankfully more choice than ever, with performance (at least from the end-user perspective) being similar, so that you can find the right browser for your needs.
Thanks to Firefox’s Quantum release and its soon to launch WebRender update, I lean toward recommending Firefox again these days. Even on mobile, Mozilla has made great strides and I like what the team is doing with its Firefox Focus experiment. But I also use the new Microsoft Edge on many of my own machines, while I like Brave on Android for its built-in tracking protection.
And every now and then I dip my toes into what Vivaldi is doing (which now also finally offers a mobile version) and what Opera is up to. What’s exciting now is that all of these vendors are offering real alternatives to Chrome — and I can’t help but think that the Chrome team will have to get with the privacy program and offer more technical innovations next year if it doesn’t want to lose market share against these incumbents.
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