4 ms·

>The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling. A browser is just the most complicated piece of software that there is.

by mahouse 11y ago

byuu 11y ago
The rendering backend and Javascript portion, absolutely. The total lines of code for all of Firefox (Gecko, Spidermonkey, etc) rivals the Linux kernel. But I fail to see why we can't have a full-featured browser front-end that uses Webkit, V8, etc as libraries. We have a lot of these projects, but they are always very spartan on feature-set, portability, extensibility, etc. It's almost always a team of 1-5 hobbyists, instead of a serious team of full-time employees. At $30m per 1% of the market, there's a whole lot of money to be made. Just make it look like a native app on each major OS (Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD), let me move all the toolbar buttons around, let me put my tabs where I want them, let me load my ad blocker and script injector, don't spy on me, don't pack it full of adware, and I'm a happy camper.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  There have been companies that tried to commercialize rebranded Chromium: RockMelt comes to mind. They did not succeed. The reason, to my mind, is simple: unless your underlying technology is better, there's little reason why users should choose your fork over the engine's official skin, which is always going to have better integration, will be first to get new features, gets security updates first, etc.
varelse 11y ago
For ~$30M per 1% share of the browser market, I'm surprised that: 1) There aren't more competitors 2) A subgroup of them hasn't agreed to a conformant subset of HTML/Javascript/CSS and stuck to it
- tedmielczarek 11y ago
  When one of your competitors (Google) controls a bunch of the most widely-visited web properties (Google Search, Gmail, YouTube), it's pretty hard to not implement the things they want to use there.

>The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling. A browser is just the most complicated piece of software that there is.

by mahouse 11y ago

>The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling. A browser is just the most complicated piece of software that there is.

byuu 11y ago

The rendering backend and Javascript portion, absolutely. The total lines of code for all of Firefox (Gecko, Spidermonkey, etc) rivals the Linux kernel. But I fail to see why we can't have a full-featured browser front-end that uses Webkit, V8, etc as libraries. We have a lot of these projects, but they are always very spartan on feature-set, portability, extensibility, etc. It's almost always a team of 1-5 hobbyists, instead of a serious team of full-time employees. At $30m per 1% of the market, there's a whole lot of money to be made. Just make it look like a native app on each major OS (Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD), let me move all the toolbar buttons around, let me put my tabs where I want them, let me load my ad blocker and script injector, don't spy on me, don't pack it full of adware, and I'm a happy camper.

pcwalton 11y ago
There have been companies that tried to commercialize rebranded Chromium: RockMelt comes to mind. They did not succeed. The reason, to my mind, is simple: unless your underlying technology is better, there's little reason why users should choose your fork over the engine's official skin, which is always going to have better integration, will be first to get new features, gets security updates first, etc.

varelse 11y ago

For ~$30M per 1% share of the browser market, I'm surprised that: 1) There aren't more competitors 2) A subgroup of them hasn't agreed to a conformant subset of HTML/Javascript/CSS and stuck to it

tedmielczarek 11y ago
When one of your competitors (Google) controls a bunch of the most widely-visited web properties (Google Search, Gmail, YouTube), it's pretty hard to not implement the things they want to use there.