4 ms·

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

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.

4 ms·

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

by MaxBarraclough 7y ago

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.