🕸️ The Web Under Threat: Fighting Google’s Monopoly
🧢 Importing iPhone City suicide nets to make America Great Again
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Welcome to HackerPulse Dispatch! This week, we’re exploring the unintended fallout of the U.S. antitrust push that could defund nearly every major Web browser; the brutal reality check hitting devs once treated like royalty, and one dev’s 21-year journey from hobby project to 30k stars.
We’re also unpacking a quirky bug in Windows 7 that left users staring at the Welcome screen thanks to a missing wallpaper, and the .NET doc debates about corporate influence, documentation neutrality, and the blurred line between helpful guidance and quiet promotion.
From crumbling browser budgets to disappearing job perks, it’s a wild tech landscape out there!
Here’s what new:
🍘 All Four Major Web Browsers Are About to Lose 80% of Their Funding: The U.S. government's push to break up Google's browser dominance could unintentionally defund all major web browsers, threatening to break the internet itself.
⛓️ Pluralistic: The Enshittification of Tech Jobs: Once hailed as the pampered elite of labor, tech workers are now being squeezed by layoffs, surveillance, and AI hype, revealing that without unions, even coders are just workers.
📈 I Started an Open Source Project in 2004. This Week, It Hit 30,000 Github Stars. Here’s What I Learned Over 21 Years: From a personal tool in 2004 to a thriving open-source company with 30,000 GitHub stars, this article highlights the challenges, growth, and lessons of building a sustainable open-source business.
🎨 Why Did Windows 7, for a Few Months, Log on Slower if You Have a Solid Color Background?: An exploration of how skipping a wallpaper or hiding desktop icons in Windows 7 triggered a hidden 30-second delay, because the system waited for a readiness signal that never arrived.
✂ Can You Remove Ads From the Documentation? #45996: A quiet mention of GitHub Copilot in .NET documentation sparked loud backlash, with developers debating whether it's helpful guidance or subtle corporate advertising.
All Four Major Web Browsers Are About to Lose 80% of Their Funding (🔗 Read Paper)
Four major browsers, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, dominate how we use the web. But behind the scenes, Google is quietly funding over 80% of the development for all of them. Now, the U.S. Department of Justice wants to tear that model apart, arguing that Google’s payments create a monopoly disguised as competition.
If successful, the lawsuit will not only force Google to stop bankrolling rival browsers, but it may also gut the funding structure of the entire browser ecosystem. What looks like an antitrust win could, in reality, set the web back a decade.
Key Points
Google pays everyone: Google pays Apple around $18B and Mozilla $450M annually to be the default search engine—covering the vast majority of both Safari and Firefox’s development budgets.
Edge runs on Google’s code: Microsoft Edge is essentially Chrome in disguise, built on Google’s Chromium project, which receives 94% of its code contributions from Google.
Browser funding cliff ahead: If the DoJ wins, Google will be banned from these payments and forced to divest from Chrome—simultaneously dismantling the financial foundation for every major web browser.
Pluralistic: The Enshittification of Tech Jobs (🔗 Read Paper)
For decades, tech workers were the unlikely royalty of labor, commanding eye-watering salaries, plush perks, and more kombucha than any office kitchen truly needed. Unlike most labor forces, they didn’t need unions; their power came from scarcity, not solidarity. But the golden age of tech labor is ending fast, and with it, the illusion that tech workers were peers to their bosses.
The shift toward AI-fueled austerity, mass layoffs, and relentless productivity demands is stripping away what little leverage they had left. Tech bosses always treated the workers they didn’t fear like expendable cogs, and now they no longer fear the coders either.
Key Points
From pampered to pressured: Once wooed with gourmet perks and unlimited snacks, tech workers are now expected to work 60-hour weeks while perks disappear and workloads double, without raises, stock grants, or job security.
AI’s stealing workers’ rights: Execs are using AI hype to justify mass layoffs, monitor workers, and centralize control, not to boost productivity but to weaken employee leverage in salary and workload negotiations.
The founders stopped pretending: Tech’s performative town halls and egalitarian vibes are being replaced with scripted events and “no time” for questions; the message is clear, this isn’t a mission, it’s a meat grinder.
I Started an Open Source Project in 2004. This Week, It Hit 30,000 Github Stars. Here’s What I Learned Over 21 Years. (🔗 Read Paper)
In 2004, Ben Haynes, CEO and Co-Founder of @Directus, set out to build a tool for his creative agency. Fast-forward to 2023, that small project reached 30,000 GitHub stars, a testament to a journey of passion, resilience, and growth. From humble beginnings with just PHP and MySQL to founding a full-fledged company, the road was long and full of lessons.
The shift from building for personal needs to navigating the complexities of open source sustainability created its own set of challenges. Today, the team continues to innovate while staying true to the open-source ethos that started it all.
Key Points
0 Stars — Ground Zero (2004–2014): The project started as a personal tool, without community support or contributors, and no roadmap, just a solution to a problem.
10k Stars — Momentum (2015–2020): As the project gained traction, it evolved from a side project into a full-time focus, with new technology stacks and key partnerships.
20k Stars — From Maintainers to a Real Company (2020–2023): The team shifted from a hobbyist project to a legitimate business, raising funding and balancing open-source values with financial sustainability.
Why Did Windows 7, for a Few Months, Log on Slower if You Have a Solid Color Background? (🔗 Read Paper)
Some people change their desktop backgrounds every week. Others, like Raymond Chen, the author of this article, have stuck with the solid Windows 95-era green-blue for decades.
That long-term loyalty once led to a strange discovery: setting a solid background color in Windows 7 could cause a mysterious 30-second delay at logon. The culprit? A missing “ready” signal from components that weren’t initialized due to missing or bypassed conditions. This piece is a classic example of how small coding oversights, especially around defaults and group policies, can lead to major user confusion.
Key Points
Solid background, solid delay: If you chose a solid desktop color in Windows 7, you might have experienced a 30-second hang—because no wallpaper meant no 'ready' signal, and Windows just kept waiting.
Policy problems, again: A similar bug occurred when group policies like “hide desktop icons” prevented certain system components from reporting readiness, unintentionally extending the Welcome screen.
Fixed fast, but revealing: The bug was patched just months after Windows 7 launched, but it highlighted how easy it is to forget that skipping functionality still needs to report back—or systems may wait forever.
Can You Remove Ads From the Documentation? #45996 (🔗 Read Paper)
A small note in the .NET documentation has sparked a big debate: should AI tool suggestions, especially from Microsoft, have a place in official developer docs? When GitHub Copilot was mentioned at the bottom of a page on customizing JSON serialization, some saw it as a helpful tip, while others saw it as a quiet ad.
The controversy reflects broader concerns about documentation neutrality, the role of AI in coding workflows, and Microsoft's influence over ostensibly community-driven projects. While the tool is free in some contexts, its placement raised eyebrows due to potential conflicts of interest. The discussion also highlights deeper worries about whether official docs should endorse specific tools at all.
Key Points
AI or ad?: Several community members criticized the inclusion of Copilot as promotional, arguing that even free tools serve corporate interests when pushed widely through official channels.
Documentation boundaries: Others questioned whether suggesting users “prompt an LLM” fits the purpose of technical documentation, especially when it introduces uncertainty into deterministic processes.
Project independence concerns: The incident reignited debates about the .NET Foundation’s autonomy, with commenters noting the blurry line between Microsoft’s goals and what’s best for the broader developer community.
🎬 And that's a wrap! Catch you next week, frens.