Wow, Keith Jarrett, Encore from Tokyo: open.spotify.com/track/7dRiJ2j… I know, I know, it's only five chords, but how well does he develops the theme. Very soul-grabbing! #music #piano
"Europe can afford to build a browser." Interesting analysis on the why, the how and the how much of building a Web browser to avoid the dependency on US software.
Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check
Reading in Servo’s latest weekly report that it’s now passing 1.7 million Web Platform Subtests, I started wondering: How much investment would it build it into a competitive, independent browser, in the context of all this talk on digital sovereignty?
The current browser landscape reveals how concentrated digital control has become. Roughly 75% of global web traffic flows through browsers based on Google’s Chromium engine; not just Chrome, but Microsoft Edge, Samsung, and dozens of others. Apple’s Safari dominates iOS but remains locked to their ecosystem. Firefox, once a genuine alternative, has declined to under 5% market share globally. This means American companies control how billions of users worldwide access the web. Every search, transaction, and digital service flows through infrastructure ultimately controlled by Silicon Valley. For societies valuing their independence and sovereignty, this represents a fundamental vulnerability that recent geopolitical events have made impossible to ignore.
Digital infrastructure is as important as energy or transportation networks. Unlike physical infrastructure, however, digital systems can be controlled remotely, updated unilaterally, and modified to serve the interests of their controllers rather than their users. Browsers exemplify this challenge because they’re both critical and seemingly replaceable. In theory, anyone can build a browser. The web standards are open, and rendering engines like Servo prove it’s technically feasible.
In practice, building browsers requires sustained investment, institutional coordination, and overcoming network effects that entrench existing players. If democratic societies can successfully coordinate to build and maintain competitive browser alternatives, it demonstrates their capacity for more complex digital sovereignty goals. If they cannot, it reveals the institutional gaps that need addressing.
Firefox offers important lessons about the challenges facing independent browsers. Mozilla has indeed faced difficulties: declining market share, organizational challenges, and ongoing technical issues. The organization has also alienated its most dedicated supporters by pivoting toward advertising, AI initiatives and cutting their impactful public advocacy programs.
However, Firefox remains the only major browser engine not controlled by Apple or Google, serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Its struggles reflect structural challenges that any alternative browser would face: the enormous engineering effort required to maintain web compatibility, the network effects favouring dominant platforms, and the difficulty of sustaining long-term technical projects through diverse funding sources.
Yet, building a competitive alternative browser infrastructure would require substantial but manageable investment. Here is a ballpark estimation I made based on existing browsers: Annual operating costs would include:
Engineering Team of ±50 developers, designers, managers etc.: €15 million.
Quality Assurance and Testing Infrastructure: €10 million
Security Auditing and Vulnerability Management: €10 million
Standards and Specification Development: €5 million.
It would probably take around 3-4 years to fully build an alternative browser from scratch, less so if it’s a fork of one of the existing ones. Forking Chromium/Gecko or building upon Servo’s foundation could reduce this timeline to 18-24 months for basic functionality, though achieving full web compatibility and market readiness would still require several additional years of refinement. The initial development sprint needs to be followed by a sustained engineering effort needed afterward, for maintaining compatibility with evolving web standards, fixing security vulnerabilities, and keeping pace with performance improvements.
The core challenge isn’t technical; it’s institutional. How do you sustain long-term technical projects through democratic processes that span multiple countries with different priorities, resources, and political systems? Successful models exist. The European Space Agency coordinates complex multi-national technical projects. CERN manages cutting-edge research infrastructure across dozens of countries. The Internet Engineering Task Force maintains critical internet standards through voluntary coordination among global stakeholders. The “Reclaiming Digital Sovereignity” proposal specifically addresses this challenge by advocating for “new public institutions with state and civil society representation” to govern universal digital platforms, alongside “multilateral agreements on principles and rules for the internet” as safeguards for autonomous, democratically governed solutions.
Browser development could follow similar patterns: international frameworks that respect national sovereignty while enabling coordinated action, governance structures that balance technical expertise with democratic accountability, and funding mechanisms that provide stability across political cycles. The Reclaiming Digital Sovereignity’s report’s emphasis on “democratic international consortia” and “public knowledge networks led by a new public international research agency” provides concrete institutional models that could be adapted for browser development. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency represents another model for public investment in digital infrastructure for the public interest.
With all that being said, browsers represent one of the more achievable digital sovereignty goals. They’re built on open standards, rely heavily on open source components, and face fewer network effects than platform-based services. Other areas of the technology stack would be far more challenging, and far less open.
Success here would demonstrate that democratic societies can coordinate effectively on complex technical infrastructure and pass the first hurdle. Failure would reveal institutional gaps that need addressing before attempting more ambitious digital sovereignty goals. Democratic digital sovereignty is challenging but feasible, if societies are willing to think institutionally, invest sustainably, and build incrementally rather than trying to recreate Silicon Valley with different ownership structures.
Ultimately, the real question isn’t whether democratic societies can build alternative technologies, but whether they can build the democratic institutions necessary to govern them effectively across the complex realities of international coordination, competing priorities, and long-term sustainability. I believe browsers offer an ideal place to start testing these institutional innovations. The technical challenges are surmountable. The institutional ones remain to be proven.
Views expressed are personal and do not represent any organization.
Corporate funding comes from Huawei, with their own staff and likely paying Igalia.
That article is not wrong for the big picture, but the details about timelines / manpower etc. are pretty much wrong. "It would probably take around 3-4 years to fully build an alternative browser from scratch" lol
Some Servo contributors are funded by EU based grants like NLNet. This is not bad, but lacks long term stability. I don't know how possible it is to create a EU-funded org that would ensure ideally at least 5 years of funding. Who leads? who gets on payroll? etc..
The Trump administration is set to oversee the largest mass resignation in US history on Tuesday, with more than 100,000 federal workers set to formally quit as part of the latest wave of its deferred resignation program.
With Congress facing a deadline of Tuesday to authorize more funding or spark a government shutdown, the White House has also ordered federal agencies to draw up plans for large-scale firings of workers if the partisan fight fails to yield a deal.
Workers preparing to leave government as part of the resignation program – one of several pillars of Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce – have described how months of “fear and intimidation” left them feeling like they had no choice but to depart.
“Federal workers stay for the mission. When that mission is taken away, when they’re scapegoated, when their job security is uncertain, and when their tiny semblance of work-life balance is stripped away, they leave,” a longtime employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) told the Guardian. “That’s why I left.”
The total resignation program is set to cost $14.8bn, with 200,000 workers paid their full salary and benefits while on administrative leave for up to eight months, according to a Senate Democrats’ report in July.
Trump officials argue this outlay is worth it. The Office of Personnel Management claimed the one-time costs lower longer-term spending by the federal government. It also criticized job protections of federal civil servants, claiming the government should have a “modern, at-will employment framework like most employers”.
Federal employees who took the deferred resignation offer requested to speak anonymously in hopes of returning to the federal government in the future and to protect future job prospects.
They are entering a lagging job market as the unemployment rate in August 2025 ticked up to 4.3%, the highest since 2021, and only 22,000 jobs were added amid disruptions and uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariffs.
“It’s a huge grieving process,” said a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employee who took the deferred resignation offer.
“Myself and many others that I know really hoped that we would finish our careers with the government. We felt very tied, especially in the VA, to the mission.
“Many of us thought we could do better for our clients, for our veterans outside of the VA, and a lot of us were so burnt out from the six months before the deferred resignation that it was actually a mental health decision for many as well.”
Russell Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, said of federal workers last October: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
“This is exactly what happened,” the USDA worker said. “I was scared to go to work. Scared that the next day would be the day I would get fired, or barred from future service, scared I would wait too long to leave and not find a job, and just living everyday like a raw nerve.”
“Purging the federal government of dedicated career federal employees will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government,” said AFGE president Everett Kelley in February.
“This offer should not be viewed as voluntary.
“Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.” theguardian.com/us-news/2025/s…
Hey Stephen, just a note to say your alttext isn't all that helpful to someone using a screen reader. Simply saying "projector by pool" without giving any context as to what said projector is displaying doesn't really give a blind user much more info than if you hadn't described it at all. Just a note for the future, and thanks for adding alttext in the first place.
i greatly appreciate the transparency of roberth and ericson on stating their ongoing commitment to ensuring there's fascists in the #nixos community, stunting the ability of the moderation team to be effective and burning out moderators. i hope the results are borne out in election results and community trust of them.
absolutely nothing has been learned in the last year and a half, but i genuinely appreciate them going out and straight up admitting to being the problem. likely tomberek is also part of the fascist enabling contingent (close to the other two, previous behaviour, known views).
the ongoing meddling of the SC in moderation affairs has been a big reason why I've not put a single volunteer commit in nixpkgs in the last year. i only fix stuff i need for my job. i know several people who also hold this view.
I'm posting this because I think it's valuable for people to understand the reason people act like i do about nixpkgs, but otherwise the NixOS project is not my circus, not my monkeys. I'm not going to stress about it, it doesn't represent me anymore, not that it ever really did.
like a wildly abusive ex that left me traumatized, i can't fix her (the NixOS project governance) so i need to disengage and hold my boundaries.
p.s. please do not go harass them. i do not mean to lend any legitimacy to the SC election process producing any outcome that's good for the community, however if you think it is useful to vote them out, be my guest.
The Mormon church just argued in SCOTUS that trans people are not afforded equal protection under the law. This isn't even "separate but equal". This is "you do not have rights".
Tchán si pustil Superdebetu, já jsem tam uviděl tu “panebožetojepíča” Konečnou a rozhodl jsem se dát raději přednost knížce. Odvoleno mám, tak proč si ničit večer. Dobrou plantážníci!
BTW, slyšet komunistickou kurvu básnit o referendu, to je ale úplný vrchol lidského odpadu …
Příjemné nedělní odpoledne s dixileandem na svatováclavské slavnosti. Tak to má být. aktuální nahrávku nemám, tak alespoň poslední vystoupení v hudební kavárně: facebook.com/61552852773492/vi…
Beeindruckend finde ich den lebendigen und vielfältigen Austausch in den #Matrix Räumen von @librechurch@kirche.social auf synod.im Von Fragen und Ideen zu digital souveränen Tools, die auf dem Marktplatz diskutiert werden bis zu Erfahrungen und Herausforderungen immer kleiner werdender christlicher Gemeinden im Raum Glauben teilen.
@aral @joynewacc Dear all, I am still trapped in northern Gaza and do not have enough money to evacuate to the south. The bombing is approaching, and the army is very close to us, with danger surrounding us from all sides. I urgently need $1,500 to secure transportation and escape to a safer area. Any help from you now could save my life. Please, don’t leave me alone. gofund.me/4d8ba4f7 #gazacity #palestine #GazaWar #helpgaza #helping
⏳A Final Call from Gaza ⏳ We are at our most dangerous stage. Roads are closing, safety is fading, and time is running out. ✦ We urgently need your support for the basics: shelter, food, medicine, and a safe place for children. ⏳ This is our last call: If you can help, please donate via gofund.me/334c7485 If not, sharing this appeal or tagging someone who can may save a life. 💔 In Gaza we live on hope and your prayers with your support, we can make it through another day. #gaza #palestine
Hey man, I can't even begin to say how sorry I am for what is happening to you and the people of Gaza. My family is following the work closely and it's frankly insane how long this has been aloud to go on. I will see if I can donate, and get others to do so as well. Stay strong my friend, I promise you things will get better.
The world is waking up to the catastrophe, and I really can't see it being allowed to go on for much longer. That of course doesn't undo the horrific actions taken by the Israeli government, but I hope we can save as many people as possible and somehow begin to re-build.
@ZBennoui Thank you so much, my friend 🙏 Your words mean a lot to me in these dark times. Knowing that you and your family are following, supporting, and spreading awareness gives us strength to keep going. Every bit of help counts, whether through donations or simply sharing our story. I truly hope, as you said, that this nightmare will end soon and that we will have the chance to rebuild our lives with dignity. Grateful always for your solidarity ❤️
💻 📱 🤖 Bots exist on social media. It's often difficult to know if we are simply having a disagreement with a real person or a bot so here's an article what might help us Spot a Bot.
ABC reported that in #Maine, the task of feeding people is getting harder because there are fewer volunteers and food supplies are getting scarce. #BasicIncome kills two birds with one stone. Many people would be more than happy to volunteer if they had the time. And UBI eases the strain on food pantries since more people can buy their own. abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ma…
Over 200 of us have come together as Women Against the Far Right in Scotland and written an open letter rejecting the far right’s racist lies about “protecting” women and girls. news.stv.tv/politics/nicola-st…
“MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, ally of Trump, defamed the election technology company Smartmatic with false statements that its voting machines helped rig the 2020 pres election, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled Friday.”
Mike Lindell defamed the election technology company Smartmatic with false statements that its voting machines helped rig the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge ruled.
Stará čistírna odpadních vod v Praze - Bubenči byla postavena v letech 1901 – 1906 jako poslední článek stokové sítě v Praze. Sloužila až do roku 1967.
Whenever you see someone recommend Cloudflare or something else that decrypts and re-encrypts TLS for something, esp. for something related to open social media or media storage etc., reply with this picture from the Snowden leaks
The first stable release of dav_push 🚀 with day-1 support for Nextcloud 32 🥳.
What's Changed
Removed support for Nextcloud versions < 31.0.3 (newer versions of 31 are still supported)
Added suppor...
Did you get enough input on how to solve the performance issues with pushing updates to many users, yet? If not, I have implementation ideas and would generally recommend to use a similar approach (or even reuse the existing solution?) as the Nextcloud Assistant is using, i.e. service workers that consume a task queue.
Let me know if there are still open questions and you'd like to chat about it (I can't promise the capacity to implement anything myself, though).
Mozilla is introducing Google Lens-powered visual search to Firefox desktop, enabling users to right-click images for contextual searches in an opt-in feature that prioritizes privacy. This partnership aims to boost engagement amid AI-driven browser innovations, though it raises questions about Google dependency and competitive dynamics.
I've been thinking about how this hacker News comment applies to the way we feel about tech, regardless of our positions on broader political issues: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4539... I'm politically a progressive, but prone to being a tech reactionary. But I know the past wasn't all better.
do you think the code block could use slightly more separation from the rest of the post? I.e. a slightly shaded background for the whole block for example?
(I find it sometimes hard to parse where a code block begins and ends when its embedded in a longer post which might also contain inline code.)
@Bubu yes I think, but for now I'm trying to fix what's broken in the current version. Fancy styling will come as well, but later otherwise I'll never be finished 😅
⚠️ GAV ⚠️ 4 activistes de l’association Résistance à l’Agression Publicitaire (RAP) ont été interpellé·es et placé·es en garde à vue à l’issue d’une action antipub non–violente et non–dégradante à Lyon ce samedi soir.
Communiqué de presse de Résistance à l’Agression Publicitaire Quatre activistes antipub placé·es en garde à vue Lyon, le 28 septembre 2025 – Quatre activistes de l’association Résistance à l’Agression Publicitaire (RAP) ont été interpellé·es et pla…
![Rule of three
edit
LLMs overuse the 'rule of three'—"the good, the bad, and the ugly". This can take different forms from "adjective, adjective, adjective" to "short phrase, short phrase, and short phrase".[1] LLMs often use this structure to make superficial analyses appear more comprehensive.
Examples
The Amaze Conference brings together global SEO professionals, marketing experts, and growth hackers to discuss the latest trends in digital marketing. The event features keynote sessions, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/708398 "Rule of three
edit
LLMs overuse the 'rule of three'—\"the good, the bad, and the ugly\". This can take different forms from \"adjective, adjective, adjective\" to \"short phrase, short phrase, and short phrase\".[1] LLMs often use this structure to make superficial analyses appear more comprehensive.
Examples
The Amaze Conference brings together global SEO professionals, marketing experts, and growth hackers to discuss the latest trends in digital marketing. The event features keynote sessions, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.")
Bubu
in reply to 0xC01DC0FFEE • • •