David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I love the fact that the Ladybird project, for example, is trying to make a new browser engine from scratch.

I've supported that project.

I would encourage people to look into that.

It's really a wonderful thing.

It's staffed by a bunch of people who worked on other browser projects in the past.

We really need that.

But I can hold that thought in my head.

At the same time, I hold the thought in my head that Google's Chrome was pivotal to the web surviving as the premier web development platform.

If it had not been for Google and their entire business depending on a thriving open web,

Apple, Microsoft, I think would have been just as fine to see the web go away, to disappear into being something that just served native mobile applications and native desktop applications that they could completely control.

So I have all sorts of problems with Google, but it's not Chrome.

Chrome is a complete gift to web developers everywhere, to the web as a development platform, and...

They deserve an enormous amount of credit, I think, for that, even if it's entangled with their business model and half of Chrome is code that spies on you or informs targeted ads and a bunch of things I'm not a big fan of.

I can divorce that from the fact that we need champions in the corner of the web who have trillions of dollars of market cap value riding on the open web.

is a disaster.

And I say that as someone who's been very sympathetic to the antitrust fight, because I do think we have antitrust problems in technology.

But the one place where we don't have them, by and large, is with browsers, is with...

the tools we use to access the open web.

First of all, we have Firefox.

Now Firefox is not doing all that great, and Firefox has been propped up by Google for many years to deter from exactly what's going on with the DOJ, that they were the only game in town.