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By some strange coincidence maintaining a working web browser became a task that only Google can do "properly". Microsoft gave up. Firefox is struggling. Doing

By some strange coincidence maintaining a working web browser became a task that only Google can do "properly". Microsoft gave up. Firefox is struggling. Doing something from scratch is insanity. So here we are. A website choke-full of people who constantly post about modulariy, protocols and advanced type systems, yet sheepishly accept that a browser with its zillion unrelated features is a giant, tightly coupled blob that cannot be tackled by anyone except an ubercorp like Google.

salamander014 7y ago
Web browsers became what operating systems were 20 years ago.
- AgentME 7y ago
  But with great security sandboxing by default, with multiple interoperable open-source implementations, built on open standards, and cross-platform and not bound to any specific machine architecture. Imagine downloading dozens of different unsandboxed apps every single day on a classic operating system. You'd get so many viruses (and just broken software that breaks or slows down your system) doing that. But now we can do that safely in browsers with (web) apps. That's amazing.
  - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
    > But with great security sandboxing by default, with multiple interoperable open-source implementations, built on open standards, and cross-platform and not bound to any specific machine architecture. All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades. > You'd get so many viruses (and just broken software that breaks or slows down your system) doing that. That is simply false, and if you can prove it, there is recognition/money waiting for you. > But now we can do that safely in browsers with (web) apps. No, bugs are still a thing the same way they are for operating systems.
    - untog 7y ago
      > All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades. Windows has had "great security sandboxing" for "decades"? Are you sure about that?
      - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
        Who has talked about Windows? Anyway, Windows has had a proper kernel since Windows NT, 20 years ago.
    - AgentME 7y ago
      What operating systems are you talking about? I'm considering popular operating systems as they're used by end users that are downloading and running applications on their own machines, and I was mostly considering ones that existed 20 years ago. I'm not thinking just of what the OS's kernel technically supports, but the full experience of how it guides users to use it. All of my points go for Windows, MacOS (with apps downloaded outside of the app store), and desktop Linux, and half of my points still apply to modern mobile operating systems (iOS and Android). If you told an arbitrary Windows user to try a game/app you made, and you link them an EXE file, then at a surely 99%+ chance, if they run it, they're going to do it in the default unsandboxed way that exposes their files on the computer to the executable, and gives your executable the chance to hook itself in persistently on their system. It may be technically possible to safely sandbox arbitrary applications from accessing all your user files in Windows by using special tools or by creating a user account per app, but the operating system does not guide users to do that, there's a ton of gotchas, and basically no one does that. I feel pretty confident labelling that as not "great security sandboxing by default". >>But with great security sandboxing by default, with multiple interoperable open-source implementations, built on open standards, and cross-platform and not bound to any specific machine architecture. >All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades. Android is the only OS I can think of that almost ticks all of those boxes, but it still falls short. There aren't multiple separate popular/well-supported implementations of it. Its code is open, but by "open standards" I was referring to the whole decentralized standards process the web has; in Android, Google adds, deprecates, and discontinues APIs without any outside input. In the web, browsers generally only introduce browser-specific APIs in the short term and work towards unifying their APIs with other browsers. It's super rare for anything that makes it through the standards process to ever be removed; browsers prize backwards compatibility of standardized features far more than any comparable platform. Android apps generally aren't usable on non-Android devices; if you point an arbitrary Windows user or an iPhone user at an Android app, they won't be able to run it, at least not without some special expertise.
doublerabbit 7y ago
This is the younger crowd speaking. The crowd who want everything served on a plate. As the new younger generations raise up it's going to end up more slacked to the point where you have dumb-robots for humans. Frameworks have their purpose but we rely on such pseudo nonsense that the internet is so generic, over saturated and choked. To prove this, install something like uMatrix & disable everything apart the home-site. And I highly suspect the site will fail to load. The fact that everything is so interlaced is ridiculous, why should I have to spend my bandwidth on accessing fonts from google? But of course I am forced to. With any remote library; if you are going to use it, host it yourself. To add, we now also live in a pathetic upvote/downvote generation ever since the likes of the Facebook Like button the internet has turned to garbage. Reddit, HN, Twitter are all the same.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
This is very true. Google goes off cowboy coding and says "well we're the big dogs now, and what we say goes" and think everyone has to follow. They don't care about standards, they care about being the last person standing because then they can do what they want to your browser and what goes in your eyeholes.
- close04 7y ago
  They can do it because they have the market share and are the standard for all practical purposes. When MS had the market share they were able to do the same. And I'm sure Mozilla would not look like they're struggling maintaining the browser if they had a commanding lead that made them the standard.
cmroanirgo 7y ago
How do you mean that Firefox is struggling? It is not my experience this is so. Everyone around me is ditching Chrome for Firefox. Firefox is also ahead in a few areas too: containerisation & privacy. It's also now the default browser on a few oses. To me this does not indicate struggling at all.
- to11mtm 7y ago
  My understanding is that they still struggle from a finance and ops perspective. Doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't keep the doors open...
- SEJeff 7y ago
  https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Chrome: 65.54% Firefox: 4.58% Perhaps your sample size of people around you is too small?
  - kybernetikos 7y ago
    You might well be right, but I, along with lots of other firefox users run extensions like NoScript which blocks 3rd party javascript unless explicitly whitelisted, so I expect a much higher proportion of firefox users probably don't show up on analytics packages (which is how statcounter stats are generated). DuckDuckGo Privacy essentials plugin also blocks statcounter, as I'm sure do many other privacy related plugins. Even if you are a firefox user who doesn't use third party plugins, firefox itself will block statcounter if you have enhanced tracking protection turned on. I couldn't find a similar setting in Chrome.
    - w0m 7y ago
      I'd think it's a fairly safe bet that noscript users aren't a statistically significant part of total web users
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
pas 7y ago
Well, the browser market is, simply put, in a state of complete fucked up-ness for the past two? IE6 was released in 2001, so yes, two decades. there was a brief period of huh, thigh might finally be okay when Firefox launched, and when MS finally - literally - buried IE in 2010, but that did not last long. That moment was never a stable equilibrium. Too few participants in the market. Too much money in it indirectly, so Google gives it away for free. This of course absolutely makes it impossible for a real market to emerge where someone pays for the browser tech itself directly.
seanhunter 7y ago
How many good web "working" browsers has there ever been at one time? I submit it has pretty much always been one. That is there has always been a single browser that could browse the web really well and everything else has kind of sucked because it was poorly supported by content producers and has suffered technical limitations. Since I've been using the web it has been: Mosaic, then Netscape Navigator then still netscape for me but a lot of the web shifted to IE, then Mozilla or ie depending on platform, then Chrome ...there hasn't failed to be competition (ie people have tried) but they have failed to get traction. Meanwhile the complexity of the web and its underlying protocols has increased a lot, user expectations have shifted from static page viewing to running all manner of apps in the browser, and necessarily browsers have become more and more complex.
- thewebcount 7y ago
  Over the years I've used Mosaic, Navigator, IE, Cyberdog, iCab, Safari, and Firefox. There were others that I never tried like the original Opera before they became another Chrome fork. They were all capable in their day, and overlapped other capable browsers. The only consistent issues I ran into were websites that assumed everyone was on Windows (I wasn't) and running IE 6.
- asrt 7y ago
  10 years ago you could safely use Firefox (Gecko), Chrome (Webkit), Konqueror (KHTML), Opera (Presto), Internet Explorer and small browsers like Lynx. Today only Blink and Gecko remain. And for some reason web developers want Gecko to dissapear.
nonbirithm 7y ago
Web browsers seem to be the refutation of the "if you don't like it, fork it" sentiment of OSS. If it were nearly any other project people wouldn't be strongly reiterating that using such a fork is irresponsible and dangerous. It mostly seems to be because nobody believes it's even possible for Pale Moon to keep up with the rapidly changing web standards, because not enough people care about it. All the development power is concentrated on the bleeding edge, things are moving rapidly, and this isn't solvable by asking for volunteers. Sure, all of the important code is in the open for anyone to contribute to, but it doesn't matter what your vision of the perfect open source web browser is if you can't get enough people to help work on it. Unlike 99% of other OSS projects, browsers are just too conplex, and their features are added by large committees who decide what's most important to add. Even though the major browsers are open source, the significant developments in the web platform and the code changes necessary for them are practically impossible to implement by an average developer. They're decided on outside the general OSS community. You simply have to have a large team to be able to keep up. It feels way different than just contributing to less significant projects on GitHub with fewer maintainers. OSS doesn't imply the people maintaining things mostly move forward with things between themselves and have goals set by larger organizations outside the general community, but with browsers it can happen. I don't think there's any real solution to this. The alternative was to deliberately limit the browser featureset while it was still small, but now all those features will never go away. And many of them provide enough benefit to both developers and users. It's not at all that adding them was a net negative if it really meant only corporations can implement them successfully. The complexity is probably an unintentional and unavoidable byproduct due to the sheer number of features. I'm starting to view browsers as complicated operating systems in themselves, like the Linux kernel, which has its own significant developer culture and massive codebase. How much can you simplify such a thing while providing all the features people want? It's a tough question.
untog 7y ago
> By some strange coincidence maintaining a working web browser became a task that only Google can do "properly". Microsoft gave up. Firefox is struggling. In what way is Firefox struggling? And you didn't mention Apple, who seem very capable of maintaining Safari. The "strange coincidence" phrasing makes it sound you're saying Google engaged in some kind of clandestine conspiracy. I think it's pretty clear that they wanted to make the web a more capable platform and I'm personally glad they did. Imagine if everyone was required to create a native app on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android to reach all their customers. It would be a nightmare. Google Docs alone is enough demonstration that this is something people want.

salamander014 7y ago

Web browsers became what operating systems were 20 years ago.

AgentME 7y ago
But with great security sandboxing by default, with multiple interoperable open-source implementations, built on open standards, and cross-platform and not bound to any specific machine architecture. Imagine downloading dozens of different unsandboxed apps every single day on a classic operating system. You'd get so many viruses (and just broken software that breaks or slows down your system) doing that. But now we can do that safely in browsers with (web) apps. That's amazing.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
  > But with great security sandboxing by default, with multiple interoperable open-source implementations, built on open standards, and cross-platform and not bound to any specific machine architecture. All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades. > You'd get so many viruses (and just broken software that breaks or slows down your system) doing that. That is simply false, and if you can prove it, there is recognition/money waiting for you. > But now we can do that safely in browsers with (web) apps. No, bugs are still a thing the same way they are for operating systems.
  - untog 7y ago
    > All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades. Windows has had "great security sandboxing" for "decades"? Are you sure about that?
    - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
      Who has talked about Windows? Anyway, Windows has had a proper kernel since Windows NT, 20 years ago.
  - AgentME 7y ago
    What operating systems are you talking about? I'm considering popular operating systems as they're used by end users that are downloading and running applications on their own machines, and I was mostly considering ones that existed 20 years ago. I'm not thinking just of what the OS's kernel technically supports, but the full experience of how it guides users to use it. All of my points go for Windows, MacOS (with apps downloaded outside of the app store), and desktop Linux, and half of my points still apply to modern mobile operating systems (iOS and Android). If you told an arbitrary Windows user to try a game/app you made, and you link them an EXE file, then at a surely 99%+ chance, if they run it, they're going to do it in the default unsandboxed way that exposes their files on the computer to the executable, and gives your executable the chance to hook itself in persistently on their system. It may be technically possible to safely sandbox arbitrary applications from accessing all your user files in Windows by using special tools or by creating a user account per app, but the operating system does not guide users to do that, there's a ton of gotchas, and basically no one does that. I feel pretty confident labelling that as not "great security sandboxing by default". >>But with great security sandboxing by default, with multiple interoperable open-source implementations, built on open standards, and cross-platform and not bound to any specific machine architecture. >All that applies to operating systems and has been like that for decades. Android is the only OS I can think of that almost ticks all of those boxes, but it still falls short. There aren't multiple separate popular/well-supported implementations of it. Its code is open, but by "open standards" I was referring to the whole decentralized standards process the web has; in Android, Google adds, deprecates, and discontinues APIs without any outside input. In the web, browsers generally only introduce browser-specific APIs in the short term and work towards unifying their APIs with other browsers. It's super rare for anything that makes it through the standards process to ever be removed; browsers prize backwards compatibility of standardized features far more than any comparable platform. Android apps generally aren't usable on non-Android devices; if you point an arbitrary Windows user or an iPhone user at an Android app, they won't be able to run it, at least not without some special expertise.

doublerabbit 7y ago

This is the younger crowd speaking. The crowd who want everything served on a plate. As the new younger generations raise up it's going to end up more slacked to the point where you have dumb-robots for humans. Frameworks have their purpose but we rely on such pseudo nonsense that the internet is so generic, over saturated and choked. To prove this, install something like uMatrix & disable everything apart the home-site. And I highly suspect the site will fail to load. The fact that everything is so interlaced is ridiculous, why should I have to spend my bandwidth on accessing fonts from google? But of course I am forced to. With any remote library; if you are going to use it, host it yourself. To add, we now also live in a pathetic upvote/downvote generation ever since the likes of the Facebook Like button the internet has turned to garbage. Reddit, HN, Twitter are all the same.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

This is very true. Google goes off cowboy coding and says "well we're the big dogs now, and what we say goes" and think everyone has to follow. They don't care about standards, they care about being the last person standing because then they can do what they want to your browser and what goes in your eyeholes.

close04 7y ago
They can do it because they have the market share and are the standard for all practical purposes. When MS had the market share they were able to do the same. And I'm sure Mozilla would not look like they're struggling maintaining the browser if they had a commanding lead that made them the standard.

cmroanirgo 7y ago

How do you mean that Firefox is struggling? It is not my experience this is so. Everyone around me is ditching Chrome for Firefox. Firefox is also ahead in a few areas too: containerisation & privacy. It's also now the default browser on a few oses. To me this does not indicate struggling at all.

to11mtm 7y ago
My understanding is that they still struggle from a finance and ops perspective. Doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't keep the doors open...
SEJeff 7y ago
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Chrome: 65.54% Firefox: 4.58% Perhaps your sample size of people around you is too small?
- kybernetikos 7y ago
  You might well be right, but I, along with lots of other firefox users run extensions like NoScript which blocks 3rd party javascript unless explicitly whitelisted, so I expect a much higher proportion of firefox users probably don't show up on analytics packages (which is how statcounter stats are generated). DuckDuckGo Privacy essentials plugin also blocks statcounter, as I'm sure do many other privacy related plugins. Even if you are a firefox user who doesn't use third party plugins, firefox itself will block statcounter if you have enhanced tracking protection turned on. I couldn't find a similar setting in Chrome.
  - w0m 7y ago
    I'd think it's a fairly safe bet that noscript users aren't a statistically significant part of total web users
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

pas 7y ago

Well, the browser market is, simply put, in a state of complete fucked up-ness for the past two? IE6 was released in 2001, so yes, two decades. there was a brief period of huh, thigh might finally be okay when Firefox launched, and when MS finally - literally - buried IE in 2010, but that did not last long. That moment was never a stable equilibrium. Too few participants in the market. Too much money in it indirectly, so Google gives it away for free. This of course absolutely makes it impossible for a real market to emerge where someone pays for the browser tech itself directly.

seanhunter 7y ago

How many good web "working" browsers has there ever been at one time? I submit it has pretty much always been one. That is there has always been a single browser that could browse the web really well and everything else has kind of sucked because it was poorly supported by content producers and has suffered technical limitations. Since I've been using the web it has been: Mosaic, then Netscape Navigator then still netscape for me but a lot of the web shifted to IE, then Mozilla or ie depending on platform, then Chrome ...there hasn't failed to be competition (ie people have tried) but they have failed to get traction. Meanwhile the complexity of the web and its underlying protocols has increased a lot, user expectations have shifted from static page viewing to running all manner of apps in the browser, and necessarily browsers have become more and more complex.

thewebcount 7y ago
Over the years I've used Mosaic, Navigator, IE, Cyberdog, iCab, Safari, and Firefox. There were others that I never tried like the original Opera before they became another Chrome fork. They were all capable in their day, and overlapped other capable browsers. The only consistent issues I ran into were websites that assumed everyone was on Windows (I wasn't) and running IE 6.
asrt 7y ago
10 years ago you could safely use Firefox (Gecko), Chrome (Webkit), Konqueror (KHTML), Opera (Presto), Internet Explorer and small browsers like Lynx. Today only Blink and Gecko remain. And for some reason web developers want Gecko to dissapear.

nonbirithm 7y ago

Web browsers seem to be the refutation of the "if you don't like it, fork it" sentiment of OSS. If it were nearly any other project people wouldn't be strongly reiterating that using such a fork is irresponsible and dangerous. It mostly seems to be because nobody believes it's even possible for Pale Moon to keep up with the rapidly changing web standards, because not enough people care about it. All the development power is concentrated on the bleeding edge, things are moving rapidly, and this isn't solvable by asking for volunteers. Sure, all of the important code is in the open for anyone to contribute to, but it doesn't matter what your vision of the perfect open source web browser is if you can't get enough people to help work on it. Unlike 99% of other OSS projects, browsers are just too conplex, and their features are added by large committees who decide what's most important to add. Even though the major browsers are open source, the significant developments in the web platform and the code changes necessary for them are practically impossible to implement by an average developer. They're decided on outside the general OSS community. You simply have to have a large team to be able to keep up. It feels way different than just contributing to less significant projects on GitHub with fewer maintainers. OSS doesn't imply the people maintaining things mostly move forward with things between themselves and have goals set by larger organizations outside the general community, but with browsers it can happen. I don't think there's any real solution to this. The alternative was to deliberately limit the browser featureset while it was still small, but now all those features will never go away. And many of them provide enough benefit to both developers and users. It's not at all that adding them was a net negative if it really meant only corporations can implement them successfully. The complexity is probably an unintentional and unavoidable byproduct due to the sheer number of features. I'm starting to view browsers as complicated operating systems in themselves, like the Linux kernel, which has its own significant developer culture and massive codebase. How much can you simplify such a thing while providing all the features people want? It's a tough question.

untog 7y ago

> By some strange coincidence maintaining a working web browser became a task that only Google can do "properly". Microsoft gave up. Firefox is struggling. In what way is Firefox struggling? And you didn't mention Apple, who seem very capable of maintaining Safari. The "strange coincidence" phrasing makes it sound you're saying Google engaged in some kind of clandestine conspiracy. I think it's pretty clear that they wanted to make the web a more capable platform and I'm personally glad they did. Imagine if everyone was required to create a native app on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android to reach all their customers. It would be a nightmare. Google Docs alone is enough demonstration that this is something people want.