Browsers are interesting again

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).