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One of my biggest problems with the existing web stack is how complicated it is. You basically need to be a company with a budget in the hundreds of millions pe

by Taek 8y ago

One of my biggest problems with the existing web stack is how complicated it is. You basically need to be a company with a budget in the hundreds of millions per year to make a functioning web browser. That gives web browser vendors a ton of control and political power over the internet, a place that ideally is free of all of that. I believe strongly that the Internet would be a more free place and a better place if the barrier to entry to building your own web browser from scratch were an order of magnitude lower. We keep adding more standards and more practices and more compatibility requirements, and so the cost of making a major web browser is just going up. Is WebAssembly something that can help us move in the other direction, or is it yet another standard piled on top of the mountain that already exist?

LamaOfRuin 8y ago
The core of every leading browser is open source. You can create your own browser if you can run the build process. This is how dozens of new browsers have been created over the last 15 years.
- norswap 8y ago
  But then you don't understand your new browser. Also, as new features arrive in the original browser, you fall behind. You can't even hope to review the new changes, you can either merge them blindly or fall behind.
Perseids 8y ago
A path that might bring us out of there would be if the browser vendors defined a subset of HTML, CSS and the DOM API that guarantees an extra fast path through rendering and JIT. Basically leave out everything that makes browsers hard and resource intensive to implement. The increased speed would be the selling point for developers and the simplified and efficient APIs would make it possible to implement something like Electron-Light from scratch which would only need tens of MB RAM, instead of hundreds.
tylerl 8y ago
With one increasingly irrelevant exception, all the major players in the browser space are open source with "fork all you want" licenses. The barrier to entry for a new player from a coding perspective is zeroish. That's not what keeps new players out and what gives incumbents the edge; what keeps them out is precisely the opposite problem, driven by the fact that it's TOO EASY to launch a new platform. There's enough new players that the novelty is gone and the world is _done_ caring. Nobody gives a damn about your new freedom/speech/privacy/blockchain -oriented browser. You're not starting from scratch, but that's like saying that the transportation industry would be better off the barrier to entry for designing new bullet-trains from scratch was lower. Like... OK. Sure. Maybe. But that's probably not the crux of the problem.
- Taek 8y ago
  Simply having an open codebase is not enough to promote diversity in implementation. Sure, you can get an exact clone, but if there's a piece of the code you don't like or want to replace, it's going to take a large team and likely a few experts who worked on the original to get through it. And through all of that, your codebase is just falling behind what teams of hundreds of engineers are doing on the upstream of your fork. If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork.
  - sjellis 8y ago
    "If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork." It's probably very hard to quantify how lucky we are that Mozilla exists as a non-profit. They aren't perfect, and they don't have the weight to directly oppose Google and Apple even if they had to, but they have a seat at the table, and provide a viable alternative for those that want it.
    - pjmlp 8y ago

by Taek 8y ago

LamaOfRuin 8y ago

The core of every leading browser is open source. You can create your own browser if you can run the build process. This is how dozens of new browsers have been created over the last 15 years.

norswap 8y ago
But then you don't understand your new browser. Also, as new features arrive in the original browser, you fall behind. You can't even hope to review the new changes, you can either merge them blindly or fall behind.

Perseids 8y ago

A path that might bring us out of there would be if the browser vendors defined a subset of HTML, CSS and the DOM API that guarantees an extra fast path through rendering and JIT. Basically leave out everything that makes browsers hard and resource intensive to implement. The increased speed would be the selling point for developers and the simplified and efficient APIs would make it possible to implement something like Electron-Light from scratch which would only need tens of MB RAM, instead of hundreds.

tylerl 8y ago

With one increasingly irrelevant exception, all the major players in the browser space are open source with "fork all you want" licenses. The barrier to entry for a new player from a coding perspective is zeroish. That's not what keeps new players out and what gives incumbents the edge; what keeps them out is precisely the opposite problem, driven by the fact that it's TOO EASY to launch a new platform. There's enough new players that the novelty is gone and the world is _done_ caring. Nobody gives a damn about your new freedom/speech/privacy/blockchain -oriented browser. You're not starting from scratch, but that's like saying that the transportation industry would be better off the barrier to entry for designing new bullet-trains from scratch was lower. Like... OK. Sure. Maybe. But that's probably not the crux of the problem.

Taek 8y ago
Simply having an open codebase is not enough to promote diversity in implementation. Sure, you can get an exact clone, but if there's a piece of the code you don't like or want to replace, it's going to take a large team and likely a few experts who worked on the original to get through it. And through all of that, your codebase is just falling behind what teams of hundreds of engineers are doing on the upstream of your fork. If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork.
- sjellis 8y ago
  "If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork." It's probably very hard to quantify how lucky we are that Mozilla exists as a non-profit. They aren't perfect, and they don't have the weight to directly oppose Google and Apple even if they had to, but they have a seat at the table, and provide a viable alternative for those that want it.
  - pjmlp 8y ago