While Google awaits a decision about whether it will be required to sell its Chrome browser as an antitrust remedy, the search giant has joined with the Linux Foundation to announce an initiative to support the open source Chromium project upon which the Chrome browser depends.
The project, called Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers, aims “to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders,” explained Shruthi Sreekanta, technical program manager at Google, in a blog post.
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Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, which gets at least $500,000 annually from Google for its platinum membership fee [PDF], said the browser foundation support group will “provide much-needed funding and development support for open development of projects within the Chromium ecosystem,” without specifying the source or amount of that funding.
The Linux Foundation did not immediately respond to a request to clarify the funding arrangements. The Register understands that all the members will be contributing funds.
According to Sreekanta, Google last year made more than 100,000 commits to the Chromium code base, representing about 94 percent of the contributions. Google’s hope is that other organizations building their browsers on Chromium will step up their contributions.
The Chromium project has become the de facto standard foundation for web browsers since Microsoft in 2018 announced that it would release a new version of its Edge browser based on Chromium and its underlying Blink engine, effectively sunsetting Microsoft’s Trident engine.
Google Chrome – Chromium plus some proprietary features – already has a dominant global browser market share of about 68 percent, a figure made even more expansive when other Chromium-based browsers such as Brave, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi, among others, are included.
The popularity of Chromium, a testament to the cost and technical challenge of competing with Google’s monopoly-funded stable of software engineers, helps with web standardization but threatens to eclipse alternative technologies, specifically other browser engines, as more organizations jump on the bandwagon.
There are presently three actively supported browser engines – Google’s Blink, Apple’s WebKit, and Mozilla’s Gecko – and a few niche or in-progress engines like Goanna and Servo. Browser engines handle the parsing and rendering of web pages and include an engine for running JavaScript (e.g., V8 in Blink, JavaScriptCore in WebKit, and SpiderMonkey in Gecko).
Apple has managed to make its Safari browser, powered by its WebKit engine, the second most popular browser with a global market share of about 17 percent, aided by self-preferencing defaults and platform rules that require all iOS browsers – though not in Europe anymore – to be built upon WebKit. It remains to be seen whether Safari could sustain that position in the absence of the platform distribution advantages bestowed by Apple.
Mozilla’s Firefox browser, powered by its Gecko rendering engine, is also not a part of the Chromium ecosystem. And its global market share, just 2.47 percent in December 2024, according to StatCounter, has dwindled significantly as the Chromium ecosystem has grown. Mozilla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers is likely to benefit those committed to the Chromium world.
“Microsoft is pleased to join this initiative which will help drive collaboration within the Chromium ecosystem,” said Meghan Perez, VP of Microsoft Edge, in a statement.
“This initiative aligns with our commitment to the web platform through meaningful and positive contributions, engagement in collaborative engineering, and partnerships with the community to achieve the best outcome for everyone using the web.”
Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner told The Register, “We welcome this effort and we support it. We have not signed up yet, but we expect to do so in the future. We have been in contact with other members already.”
Even so, if the Chromium ecosystem gets stronger still, it could further diminish the browser diversity.
As web developer Rachel Nabors observed in 2018, “Chrome has the most resources and leads the pack in building the Web forward to the point that we can’t be sure if we’re building the Web we want… or the Web Google wants.” ®
