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If the web's reliance on the Chromium code proves to be a hindrance, it will take a monumental effort to correct. Brendan Eich, speaking of Brave, said somethin

If the web's reliance on the Chromium code proves to be a hindrance, it will take a monumental effort to correct. Brendan Eich, speaking of Brave, said something to the effect that it would take hundreds of engineers years to build a new browser equivalent to Chromium in capability. For a free piece of software. I think it's more likely that a new communication paradigm will supplant the web than that a Chromium competitor will replace Chromium, just as the new smartphone/cloud computing platforms finally broke the Windows stranglehold. PCs are still dominated by Windows.

stilisstuk 7y ago
I don't get it. Firefox works great, maybe better
- 1123581321 7y ago
  Firefox is built on a similar level of effort. Brendan Eich is talking about the effort required for a company to develop a new, full-featured browser engine to complete with Firefox and Chromium.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    It may be true that starting from scratch would be impractical, but it might be practical to take Firefox/Chromium and make deep changes, to the point that it's effectively another browser. Mozilla themselves have been doing this with Firefox. They've been replacing C++ by Rust (with the Servo rendering-engine project). They've replaced the JavaScript JIT more than once, if I recall correctly. We've already seen WebKit give rise to two divergent major browsers: Chrome and Safari.
    - acdha 7y ago
      The problem is keeping pace with the upstream: it's not that it's impossible but that it's very expensive — when Google forked WebKit they dedicated a large and very talented (i.e. expensive) engineering team to the project. The same could be done again but you're looking at companies like Microsoft, not startups.
      - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
        The resources needed to maintain a Gecko-based or Blink-based browser will depend on the amount of customisation. Vivaldi/Opera/Brave are doing fine, but they make relatively shallow changes over Chromium. I just discovered Goanna on Wikipedia, a fork of the Gecko engine, presumably with relatively thin resources. Don't know how well it compares to mainstream engines though. [0] I suppose the short version is that the workload is a function of the goals. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software)
        acdha 7y ago
        That’s the point: if you’re not customizing Blink, you’re not changing the huge influence which Google has over de facto web standards. If you want to make more than simple customizations you need a significant commitment just to keep pace with the upstream – Microsoft can afford that, Samsung can, etc. but it’s not clear that Brave or Opera can.
  - zamalek 7y ago
    Mozilla is rebuilding much of an engine with Servo and related (e.g. the CSS bits that are now actually integrated into FF) projects. I can really see them replacing more and more of FF with Rust in the future, because Mozilla really seem to be doubling down on trust, in all forms. For example, they recently announced that the UI is web component based - which means that using Servo for the window chrome is in the realm of possibility. Edit: at that point I wouldn't really consider it "FF of yore." A rewrite is really a new product.
    - cxr 7y ago
      Firefox has been using Gecko for chrome since before it was even called Firefox. It's pretty much the reason why the Google browser has the name that it does. Anyone contributing to Firefox leading up to the birth of Chrome, including major contributors on Google payroll, dealt with chrome:// documents (or bindings, or scripts, or...) on a daily basis.
      - SahAssar 7y ago
        Yeah, but that was via XUL, not via web standards.
        cxr 7y ago
        That's orthogonal to the comment I was responding to.
        zamalek 7y ago
        Your response to my comment isn't only orthogonal, it isn't even in the same realm of what I was talking about. I was referring to "the window chrome." I never once mentioned "Chrome." The comment you called out is directly related to what I was talking about, it is not orthogonal.
        cxr 7y ago
        You can't rewrite history. SahAssar's comment moved the goalposts away from being about the browser engine and towards whether XUL was standardized. Whereas your comment is undeniably about using the browser engine to handle the Firefox UI—which yes, I grasped—although you seem not to have grasped my (incredibly straightforward) response to it, which contained an aside about how Chrome got its name. I'll repeat myself: Firefox is already using the browser engine for its own UI, and that's been the case—I'll repeat again—since before it was even called Firefox.
- djdusuwj3g 7y ago
  Firefox worked great for a few months after the big fuss over Quantum coming out and then went right back to just being a browser for enthusiasts and privacy activists. And that's after that whole dumb advertising push they did with billboards reading scary stuff like "Big Browser is watching." If anything, Firefox is a good example of why it's probably better for aspiring browser competitors to start off by just spinning off from Chromium like Brave did. Not that Brave is perfect either, especially not on desktops, but the saved resources let them focus on finding ways to surpass the competition like improving the mobile ui.
  - samantohermes 7y ago
    Turning Firefox into a Chrome copycat* with built-in blocklists and Tor Browser Bundle features certainly didn't make it gain more users. Mozilla should've left Brave occupy that space. Brave, Pale Moon and Vivaldi deserve praise. * References: 1. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-suckfest.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-suckfest.html 2. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-disable-australis.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-disable-australi... 3. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-directory-tiles.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-directory-tiles.... [Edit (fixing link)]: 4. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-addons-future.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-addons-future.ht...
    - acdha 7y ago
      The thing costing Firefox users is the billion-dollar advertising push and heavy promotion on Google properties. That won’t be changed by trying to satisfy a small number of critics who are not exactly jumping to contribute significant effort to the project, whereas the Mozilla team inevitably has solid answers about maintenance costs bashing their decisions.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Android put Chrome over the top.
rapind 7y ago
The fact that this software is so complex is the problem imo. The focus at this point should be on cleanup and simplification instead of feature bloat. Every design decision should consider "what can we delete?"
- nradov 7y ago
  Complex software is what customers want. A rendering engine for clean, valid XHTML could be very simple. But everyone wants to be able to see web pages created by technically incompetent designers with "tag soup" HTML. There's no point in complaining, that's just the reality of the modern web.
  - ripdog 7y ago
    The complexity in modern browser engines has nothing to do with parsing invalid HTML and everything to do with the vast, absurd feature set of the modern web platform, and the complex interactions between the components.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      Yeah, if you were to design HTML, CSS, and JS from the ground up today they'd likely look very different. The bigger issue is backwards compatibility; the web has bent over backwards to maintain it, which is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it makes the feature set absurd, but on the other hand the web is (relatively) easy to archive since format interpreters for it are widespread, and pages can be built and then forgotten about because they still work.
      - amelius 7y ago
        > Yeah, if you were to design HTML, CSS, and JS from the ground up today they'd likely look very different. I'd like to see that experiment done.
        hencoappel 7y ago
nradov 7y ago
There will probably never be another complete new web browser developed from scratch. Browsers are already being supplanted by native mobile apps, wearable devices, voice interfaces, and (just starting) AR / VR. Browser use is still growing worldwide but the trend is toward slower growth. No one will invest hundreds of person years to build a product in a market with declining growth and entrenched competition.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  doubtful claim, with all the operating systems being brewed as insurance policy against google pulling a google on android. they will all have their browser too.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Modern browser engines are reasonably portable. When a new OS arrives the developers will just port Firefox or Chromium to it.
    - smallstepforman 7y ago
      Haiku had a port of Mozilla and Web+ is Webkit based, and it still doesn’t have a port of Chromium or Firefox.
Aeolun 7y ago
Well, apparently IE has a thousand developers for a few years, so it should still be possible for a megacorp.

stilisstuk 7y ago

I don't get it. Firefox works great, maybe better

1123581321 7y ago
Firefox is built on a similar level of effort. Brendan Eich is talking about the effort required for a company to develop a new, full-featured browser engine to complete with Firefox and Chromium.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  It may be true that starting from scratch would be impractical, but it might be practical to take Firefox/Chromium and make deep changes, to the point that it's effectively another browser. Mozilla themselves have been doing this with Firefox. They've been replacing C++ by Rust (with the Servo rendering-engine project). They've replaced the JavaScript JIT more than once, if I recall correctly. We've already seen WebKit give rise to two divergent major browsers: Chrome and Safari.
  - acdha 7y ago
    The problem is keeping pace with the upstream: it's not that it's impossible but that it's very expensive — when Google forked WebKit they dedicated a large and very talented (i.e. expensive) engineering team to the project. The same could be done again but you're looking at companies like Microsoft, not startups.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      The resources needed to maintain a Gecko-based or Blink-based browser will depend on the amount of customisation. Vivaldi/Opera/Brave are doing fine, but they make relatively shallow changes over Chromium. I just discovered Goanna on Wikipedia, a fork of the Gecko engine, presumably with relatively thin resources. Don't know how well it compares to mainstream engines though. [0] I suppose the short version is that the workload is a function of the goals. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software)
      - acdha 7y ago
        That’s the point: if you’re not customizing Blink, you’re not changing the huge influence which Google has over de facto web standards. If you want to make more than simple customizations you need a significant commitment just to keep pace with the upstream – Microsoft can afford that, Samsung can, etc. but it’s not clear that Brave or Opera can.
- zamalek 7y ago
  Mozilla is rebuilding much of an engine with Servo and related (e.g. the CSS bits that are now actually integrated into FF) projects. I can really see them replacing more and more of FF with Rust in the future, because Mozilla really seem to be doubling down on trust, in all forms. For example, they recently announced that the UI is web component based - which means that using Servo for the window chrome is in the realm of possibility. Edit: at that point I wouldn't really consider it "FF of yore." A rewrite is really a new product.
  - cxr 7y ago
    Firefox has been using Gecko for chrome since before it was even called Firefox. It's pretty much the reason why the Google browser has the name that it does. Anyone contributing to Firefox leading up to the birth of Chrome, including major contributors on Google payroll, dealt with chrome:// documents (or bindings, or scripts, or...) on a daily basis.
    - SahAssar 7y ago
      Yeah, but that was via XUL, not via web standards.
      - cxr 7y ago
        That's orthogonal to the comment I was responding to.
        zamalek 7y ago
        Your response to my comment isn't only orthogonal, it isn't even in the same realm of what I was talking about. I was referring to "the window chrome." I never once mentioned "Chrome." The comment you called out is directly related to what I was talking about, it is not orthogonal.
        cxr 7y ago
        You can't rewrite history. SahAssar's comment moved the goalposts away from being about the browser engine and towards whether XUL was standardized. Whereas your comment is undeniably about using the browser engine to handle the Firefox UI—which yes, I grasped—although you seem not to have grasped my (incredibly straightforward) response to it, which contained an aside about how Chrome got its name. I'll repeat myself: Firefox is already using the browser engine for its own UI, and that's been the case—I'll repeat again—since before it was even called Firefox.
djdusuwj3g 7y ago
Firefox worked great for a few months after the big fuss over Quantum coming out and then went right back to just being a browser for enthusiasts and privacy activists. And that's after that whole dumb advertising push they did with billboards reading scary stuff like "Big Browser is watching." If anything, Firefox is a good example of why it's probably better for aspiring browser competitors to start off by just spinning off from Chromium like Brave did. Not that Brave is perfect either, especially not on desktops, but the saved resources let them focus on finding ways to surpass the competition like improving the mobile ui.
- samantohermes 7y ago
  Turning Firefox into a Chrome copycat* with built-in blocklists and Tor Browser Bundle features certainly didn't make it gain more users. Mozilla should've left Brave occupy that space. Brave, Pale Moon and Vivaldi deserve praise. * References: 1. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-suckfest.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-suckfest.html 2. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-disable-australis.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-disable-australi... 3. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-directory-tiles.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-directory-tiles.... [Edit (fixing link)]: 4. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-addons-future.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-addons-future.ht...
  - acdha 7y ago
    The thing costing Firefox users is the billion-dollar advertising push and heavy promotion on Google properties. That won’t be changed by trying to satisfy a small number of critics who are not exactly jumping to contribute significant effort to the project, whereas the Mozilla team inevitably has solid answers about maintenance costs bashing their decisions.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Android put Chrome over the top.

rapind 7y ago

The fact that this software is so complex is the problem imo. The focus at this point should be on cleanup and simplification instead of feature bloat. Every design decision should consider "what can we delete?"

nradov 7y ago
Complex software is what customers want. A rendering engine for clean, valid XHTML could be very simple. But everyone wants to be able to see web pages created by technically incompetent designers with "tag soup" HTML. There's no point in complaining, that's just the reality of the modern web.
- ripdog 7y ago
  The complexity in modern browser engines has nothing to do with parsing invalid HTML and everything to do with the vast, absurd feature set of the modern web platform, and the complex interactions between the components.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Yeah, if you were to design HTML, CSS, and JS from the ground up today they'd likely look very different. The bigger issue is backwards compatibility; the web has bent over backwards to maintain it, which is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it makes the feature set absurd, but on the other hand the web is (relatively) easy to archive since format interpreters for it are widespread, and pages can be built and then forgotten about because they still work.
    - amelius 7y ago
      > Yeah, if you were to design HTML, CSS, and JS from the ground up today they'd likely look very different. I'd like to see that experiment done.
      - hencoappel 7y ago

nradov 7y ago

There will probably never be another complete new web browser developed from scratch. Browsers are already being supplanted by native mobile apps, wearable devices, voice interfaces, and (just starting) AR / VR. Browser use is still growing worldwide but the trend is toward slower growth. No one will invest hundreds of person years to build a product in a market with declining growth and entrenched competition.

LoSboccacc 7y ago
doubtful claim, with all the operating systems being brewed as insurance policy against google pulling a google on android. they will all have their browser too.
- nradov 7y ago
  Modern browser engines are reasonably portable. When a new OS arrives the developers will just port Firefox or Chromium to it.
  - smallstepforman 7y ago
    Haiku had a port of Mozilla and Web+ is Webkit based, and it still doesn’t have a port of Chromium or Firefox.

Aeolun 7y ago

Well, apparently IE has a thousand developers for a few years, so it should still be possible for a megacorp.