There Is No Real Browser Market

79% of all web browsing on the planet runs on a single engine. Not a single company's browser, a single engine, built and controlled by a single company, Google.

Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, you name it. Different logos, different colors, different values and ideologies, built on the same foundation. Google's Blink engine is underneath all of it. But, it wasn't always like that.

The origins of Blink goes back to 2001. Apple forked an open-source Linux browser engine called KHTML, built by the KDE team, to create WebKit, the engine that would come to power Safari. Google then used WebKit as the foundation for the Chrome browser when it launched in 2008. For five years, Google and Apple shared the same engine codebase, contributing changes back and forth.

In 2013 however, Google forked WebKit into its own engine and called it Blink. Google claimed that maintaining a shared codebase at this point was slowing both down.

The remaining 21% of web browsing is split between Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox. Safari runs on Apple devices. That means Firefox is the only somewhat independent option left standing, but it survives on an annual payment from Google that makes up about 85% of Mozilla's entire income.

You don't have a browser market. You have a Google product, an Apple product, and a Google-funded alternative.

The day your ad blocker got put on a leash.

Every browser built on Blink shares one other thing besides the engine: the Chrome Web Store. It is pretty much the only place you can get extensions for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, and every other Chromium browser. Google writes the rules for what is allowed on it. Google decides what stays and what goes.

In 2024, they rewrote the rules.

The change was called Manifest V3, three years in the making, and the official justification was security and user privacy (We could write a joke here, but we won't). What it actually did was change the fundamental architecture of how browser extensions are allowed to work and in doing so, broke the most effective ad blocker ever built.

Here is a quick explanation on how ad blocking works. Your browser makes thousands of requests every time you load a page, to the website you are visiting, but also to a bunch of other servers running in the background on the webpage for tracking, ads and data collection scripts. An ad blocker watches that traffic in real time, compares each request against a list of known bad addresses, and kills the ones that match before they load.

Manifest V3 ended that. Extensions can no longer intercept traffic themselves. Instead they submit a list of pre-approved rules to the browser, and the browser decides what to block on their behalf. In case it is not clear, Google decides about what the browser should decide.

A functioning ad blocker needs roughly 300,000 filtering rules to do its job properly.

A rule is basically just "ignore that server, always skip that domain". The modern web is huge, the ad industry is just as big, and 300,000 rules is what it takes to keep up with both.
Now Manifest V3 put a cap to those rules, the cap sits at 30,000 rules. That is just 10% of its original potential. Not because the hardware can't handle it. It's by design. Google chose 30,000. It is written into the spec. That is the leash.

uBlock Origin, the most widely used ad blocker ever built, was running well above that limit. When Chrome completed the Manifest V3 transition in late 2024, it began automatically disabling uBlock Origin across hundreds of millions of browsers. The notification Chrome showed users said the extension was "no longer supported." Nothing more, nothing less.

So any browser powered by the Blink browser engine, basically what people call "Chrome based browsers", like Vivaldi or Brave, all have that same leash. It does not matter what the browser is called or promises on the label. If it runs on Blink, it runs on Google's rules.

A stripped-down replacement called uBlock Origin Lite now exists for Chrome users. Its own developer describes it as less effective, and more and more websites detect and fight ad-blockers to the point it is starting to look like the new norm.

Google's own advertising network runs trackers on 75% of the top one million websites on the internet. There are roughly 5.65 billion people online. Most of them will touch a Google tracker before their first coffee in the morning. Worth noting is that the company that wrote the 30,000 cap also wrote a significant chunk of the addresses that now slip through it.

Ad blockers are just where most people felt it first, but obviously not the only type of extensions affected. The same API that powered ad blocking powered everything else too. Security extensions that flag malicious redirects and phishing attempts before they load. Antivirus tools monitoring browser traffic in real time. Parental controls filtering content for children. In other words, extensions you use to keep your device safe, are now also put on a leash with reduced capabilities. Cookie managers. Tracking blockers. All of them relied on the same real-time interception that Manifest V3 took away.

Engineers from F-Secure and Amnesty International communicated this directly in Google's own developer forum before the transition happened, warning that the changes would break security tools protecting journalists and at-risk communities from targeted attacks. The policy shrank the capability of every extension that stood between your browser and the web, and then, on top of all this, a November 2024 report found that Manifest V3 had not actually fixed the security problems Google said it was designed to solve.

The one major browser that never adopted Google's restrictions is Mozilla's Firefox.

Built on its own independent engine called Gecko, Firefox kept the full capability intact. It never capped your filter rules at 30,000. It never stripped the API that ad blockers, security tools, and parental controls depend on, among much else. Firefox even spawned a number of privacy-focused browsers built on the same Gecko engine, like Zen, Waterfox, and the privacy-hardened LibreWolf, to mention a few. On Firefox, your ad blocker is unleashed.

So switch to Firefox, right?
Problem solved. Not quite. If you want to use extensions with their full capability, then yes. However, Mozilla, the nonprofit behind Firefox, receives a large majority of its entire income from a single source. That source is Google. Google pays Mozilla to make Google Search the default search engine in Firefox. A deal that dates back to 2004, and has been renewed ever since, except for a brief period between 2014-2017 when Mozilla switched to Yahoo, but the deal collapsed when Yahoo was bought by Verizon. Mozilla went back to Google and has stayed there since. During the 2011 renewal, Microsoft's Bing tried to outbid Google for the default search spot, and Google paid nearly triple the previous amount to keep them out.

Firefox reached its peak in November 2009, holding around 31.82% of global market share, with Internet Explorer still dominant at 55.89% at the time. So at its best, Firefox was the browser for nearly a third of the internet. That's remarkable for an open-source nonprofit project going up against a browser bundled with Windows on basically every computer sold. Firefox was the second-most used web browser until November 2011, when Google Chrome surpassed it.

As of February 2025, Firefox had a 6.36% usage share on desktop, making it the fourth-most popular PC browser after Chrome, Edge and Safari. Safari is actually bigger than Firefox on overall numbers because of iPhone, but Safari only runs on Apple hardware. Firefox runs on everything. Making it the largest truly cross-platform non-Blink browser by a wide margin.

The current deal expires at the end of 2026, and what comes after is an open question. Before that question gets answered though, Mozilla nearly didn't make it this far.

In August 2024, it was almost game over.

A US federal judge ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in search, in one of the most significant antitrust cases against a tech company in decades. The DOJ's proposed remedies included forcing Google to sell Chrome entirely, a potential Android divestiture, and banning Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers.

That part about banning Google from paying to be the default search engine in browsers? That would have ended Mozilla's funding model overnight. Which created a situation nobody really anticipated: Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the only independent browser engine left on earth, the self-described champion of the open web, showed up in court and argued in Google's defense.
The judge ultimately stopped short of the most drastic measures. Google gets to keep Chrome. The ban on default search payments was rejected. Google can still pay companies to prefer its services, it just can't make those deals exclusive. For Mozilla, the ruling was survival. For Google, analysts called the consequences "minimal." Alphabet's stock jumped 8% the day the ruling was announced.

The last self-described independent browser engine on earth had been saved. By a court ruling that kept Google's money flowing. The same Google that Mozilla's own CFO had just finished testifying in defense of.

There are people trying to build a way out. The most ambitious is Ladybird, a browser being built entirely from scratch with no code borrowed from Blink, WebKit, or Gecko. A completely new engine. It was started by Swedish developer Andreas Kling, now based in the US, who originally built it as part of SerenityOS, a hobby operating system he wrote during recovery in a Swedish state rehabilitation facility.
What started as an HTML viewer for a hobby project now has several paid full-time engineers, backing from Cloudflare, Shopify, and Proton VPN among others, and a clear no-monetization policy, no default search deals, no crypto tokens, nothing. An alpha release targeting Linux and macOS is planned for 2026, with a stable public release on the roadmap for 2028. As of October 2025, Ladybird passed 90% of the official web platform tests. It is not ready yet. But it is moving.


Then there is Servo. Originally a Mozilla research project started in 2012, Mozilla fired the entire Servo team in 2020. The project survived, transferred to Linux Foundation Europe, and has been quietly shipping monthly releases since October 2025. Servo is not a consumer browser and does not plan to be one. Its goal is to be an embeddable engine, a building block that other applications can use instead of reaching for Chromium. Think of it less as a browser and more as infrastructure. It is written in Rust, it is under open governance with no Big Tech owner, and it is still very early. Whether either of these projects ever becomes something a normal person uses on a Tuesday morning is a very much justified question. But they exist, they are active, and right now that is more than can be said for most alternatives.


Also worth mentioning is Orion, an upcoming browser built by Kagi, the paid privacy-focused search engine. Orion runs on WebKit, the same engine underneath Apple's Safari. That means it is not a new independent engine, and it does put Apple's architecture underneath your browsing. But WebKit is not Blink. Apple's business model is not the same as Google's. Orion itself adds zero telemetry, no built-in AI, no advertising deals, and no third-party data partnerships on top of that. Kagi's business model is simple: users actually pay for their search engine, so users are the customer. Orion the browser is however free to download and use.
Orion 1.0 launched for macOS and iOS in November 2025, a Linux and a Windows version is on the roadmap for late 2026. It is not open source, which is worth knowing. But in a landscape where most browsers are just re-skinned Chromium variations and the occasional Gecko one, Orion is at least asking a different question.