Window dressing

BROWSERS, pieces of internet software that people probably spend more time with than they do in bed, have long been boring affairs. Save for occasional innovations such as tabs, these programs have remained fundamentally the same since the release of Mosaic, the first mainstream browser, nearly a quarter of a century ago. Just four browsers account for nearly all users: Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox. It is difficult to tell them apart.

New, more interesting browsers have started cropping up. In August internet users will be able to download the first full version of Brave, the brainchild of a co-founder of Mozilla. Mozilla itself is working on a new type of browser which will give users suggestions on where to navigate next. Both are only the latest in a series of such efforts: last year Microsoft unveiled Edge, meant to replace Internet Explorer; March saw the release of Cliqz, a browser developed in Germany; a month later came Vivaldi.

If most browsers are boring and unwieldy, it is because they are expected to do more than ever before: not just surfing the web, but editing documents, streaming music and much more besides. As a result, priority is given to stability and ease of use. Too many fiddly buttons could scare away novice users. Innovation is outsourced to developers of “plug-ins”, which add features to a browser.

Building a new browser from scratch is a fiendishly difficult and expensive undertaking. Only Apple, Google and Microsoft have the money and resources to throw at developing a fast “engine”, as the core of a browser is called. Their dominance also scares off investors. Few venture capitalists are foolhardy enough to invest in a product that needs to take on three of the world’s most powerful tech companies. Mozilla is a non-profit which partially relies on volunteer developers and donations.

Insurgents are trying to overcome the obstacles in three ways. To reduce development costs, their products are based on existing open-source projects, such as Chromium, which also powers Google’s Chrome. They get money from angel investors, who have an appetite for risk. And most important, they aim their products at niche segments. Brave, for instance, is for surfers who prize privacy. It can block annoying online advertisements and privacy-invading “trackers”, which lurk on websites to follow users around. Cliqz also blocks trackers and is integrated with a new search engine. Vivaldi pitches itself as a browser for “power users”. It is packed with customisable features and comes bundled with an e-mail client.

Such small browser-makers do not need the scale of their competitors to make money (Chrome has more than 1 billion users). Both Vivaldi and Brave say they can break even with a few million users apiece. The easiest source of revenue is search deals. Companies such as Google pay roughly one dollar per user per year to be the default search engine on rival browsers. Vivaldi is also experimenting with charging firms to be featured on its home page. Brave is trying to subvert the dominant online-advertising model: it blocks intrusive advertisements such as self-starting videos, replaces them with less irksome ones and shares the revenues with publishers and users.

The market for browsers has grown large enough to sustain such niche players. But the chances that these small fry will turn into big businesses are low. Most people will continue using the boring browsers—if only because they are too lazy to install a slightly more interesting one.