4 ms·

Site seems to be down. I’m glad to see someone working on a new browser. They’re such huge apps though, I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re

by lukevp 6y ago

Site seems to be down. I’m glad to see someone working on a new browser. They’re such huge apps though, I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible... it is unfortunate that Chromium is influenced by decision makers at Google. It would be great if they could spin that off into another company but there’s no way they ever would. At least with MS there is a potential to fork and have some accountability, at least on issues that are not mutually beneficial. See the Microsoft and Google feud where Google withheld all their apps from the windows phone for evidence of the animosity possible between these 2 companies.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
> I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible Of course it's faster than developing a browser from scratch, or working with a browser startup on integration etc. but that isn't the question. The question is whether it's even feasible to develop a browser with publicly available information (HTML 5 specs including SVG and MathML, but which one/version? tens of CSS specs and growing as we speak [1], hefty ECMAScript specs, http2+http3/quic, A/V codecs, multiple font formats, etc. etc.). As a glimpse into browser development, yesterday we learned [2] that even a RegExp engine for JavaScript poses a challenge, with specs being "fitted to match reality" eg Chrome behaviour. Honestly, with these results of creating almost a browser monopoly and driving browser development out of existence (Opera, MS), and now even Moz beginning to integrate Chrome code, I don't understand why the clowns at WHATWG and W3C even bother writing specs; they just can't stop it seems. Never has a standardization effort failed so miserably and went so totally out of control, and it'll be a huge problem for generations to come. Talking about almost all human communications (in law, education, politics, medicine, science, culture, personal docs) being held hostage by an ad company; even stone age humans had more liberties in cultural expression. [1]: https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 Edit: big congrats to the Flow developers!
- Santosh83 6y ago
  More than Google, the bigger culprit here is scope creep. The web should have been split into multiple interoperating protocols so that each protocol by itself could be manageable enough for multiple applications and a rich ecosystem. Instead everything including the kitchen sink is shoe-horned into the browser so it becomes impossible for anyone except the largest companies to come up with competitive alternatives and they will slowly stop bothering and start cartelizing around Chromium, one way or another, because no corp except for Mozilla solely depends on their browser, so they will all be happy enough to re-skin Chromium and be done with it. And Mozilla is facing an increasingly Sisyphean task ahead.
  - frutiger 6y ago
    Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn’t worth it. MSFT has a 1.4T market cap, GOOG (Alphabet) has 964B.
    - citruspi 6y ago
      > Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn’t worth it. MSFT has a 1.4T market cap, To be fair, Apple has (or had on the 10th of June) a market cap of 1.5T and they maintain Safari and Webkit (which GOOG forked to create Blink).
      - soperj 6y ago
        and Webkit was forked from KHTML. blah blah blah.
        citruspi 6y ago
        Sure, but I wasn't suggesting that Webkit is an original work of art - the discussion wasn't about the history of rendering engines and browsers - it was about which companies _today_ are willing to maintain their own rendering engines and browsers instead of just skinning Chromium. - Apple has Safari which uses Webkit (which was forked from KHTML as you noted) - Mozilla has Firefox which uses Gecko (originally from Netscape) - Google has Chrome which uses Blink (forked from Webkit) - Microsoft has Edge which uses Blink - Opera has Opera which uses Blink ... The only two major players currently maintaining a non-Chromium and Blink based browser are Firefox (mentioned by the OP) and Apple (mentioned by myself). I was simply trying to provide some additional context about the history of Chrome, perhaps I should've also included the context about the history of Safari. But anyways... blah blah blah
londons_explore 6y ago
Decision making on Chromium is pretty seperate from Google - there are lots of subsystems where the final technical say is with a non-Google employee.
- joosters 6y ago
  So, non-Google employees decided to make Chromium spy on its users and send lots of usage data to Google? That was kind of them!
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Chromium != Chrome Chrome’s product management is all-Google.
ajb 6y ago
Ekioh have been working on browsers for years, this is new in the sense that it's a rewrite of their previous one. Still an amazing achievement though.
- detaro 6y ago
  As far as I know it's also new in the sense that unlike their previous work it's not based on an existing engine.
  - ajb 6y ago
    Yes, I could have stood to be more clear. They say it's a clean sheet rewrite, and I have no reason to doubt them. All I'm saying is that no doubt the team having written one before massively benefits the process of writing a new one.

by lukevp 6y ago

tannhaeuser 6y ago

> I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible Of course it's faster than developing a browser from scratch, or working with a browser startup on integration etc. but that isn't the question. The question is whether it's even feasible to develop a browser with publicly available information (HTML 5 specs including SVG and MathML, but which one/version? tens of CSS specs and growing as we speak [1], hefty ECMAScript specs, http2+http3/quic, A/V codecs, multiple font formats, etc. etc.). As a glimpse into browser development, yesterday we learned [2] that even a RegExp engine for JavaScript poses a challenge, with specs being "fitted to match reality" eg Chrome behaviour. Honestly, with these results of creating almost a browser monopoly and driving browser development out of existence (Opera, MS), and now even Moz beginning to integrate Chrome code, I don't understand why the clowns at WHATWG and W3C even bother writing specs; they just can't stop it seems. Never has a standardization effort failed so miserably and went so totally out of control, and it'll be a huge problem for generations to come. Talking about almost all human communications (in law, education, politics, medicine, science, culture, personal docs) being held hostage by an ad company; even stone age humans had more liberties in cultural expression. [1]: https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960 Edit: big congrats to the Flow developers!

Santosh83 6y ago
More than Google, the bigger culprit here is scope creep. The web should have been split into multiple interoperating protocols so that each protocol by itself could be manageable enough for multiple applications and a rich ecosystem. Instead everything including the kitchen sink is shoe-horned into the browser so it becomes impossible for anyone except the largest companies to come up with competitive alternatives and they will slowly stop bothering and start cartelizing around Chromium, one way or another, because no corp except for Mozilla solely depends on their browser, so they will all be happy enough to re-skin Chromium and be done with it. And Mozilla is facing an increasingly Sisyphean task ahead.
- frutiger 6y ago
  Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn’t worth it. MSFT has a 1.4T market cap, GOOG (Alphabet) has 964B.
  - citruspi 6y ago
    > Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn’t worth it. MSFT has a 1.4T market cap, To be fair, Apple has (or had on the 10th of June) a market cap of 1.5T and they maintain Safari and Webkit (which GOOG forked to create Blink).
    - soperj 6y ago
      and Webkit was forked from KHTML. blah blah blah.
      - citruspi 6y ago
        Sure, but I wasn't suggesting that Webkit is an original work of art - the discussion wasn't about the history of rendering engines and browsers - it was about which companies _today_ are willing to maintain their own rendering engines and browsers instead of just skinning Chromium. - Apple has Safari which uses Webkit (which was forked from KHTML as you noted) - Mozilla has Firefox which uses Gecko (originally from Netscape) - Google has Chrome which uses Blink (forked from Webkit) - Microsoft has Edge which uses Blink - Opera has Opera which uses Blink ... The only two major players currently maintaining a non-Chromium and Blink based browser are Firefox (mentioned by the OP) and Apple (mentioned by myself). I was simply trying to provide some additional context about the history of Chrome, perhaps I should've also included the context about the history of Safari. But anyways... blah blah blah

londons_explore 6y ago

Decision making on Chromium is pretty seperate from Google - there are lots of subsystems where the final technical say is with a non-Google employee.

joosters 6y ago
So, non-Google employees decided to make Chromium spy on its users and send lots of usage data to Google? That was kind of them!
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Chromium != Chrome Chrome’s product management is all-Google.

ajb 6y ago

Ekioh have been working on browsers for years, this is new in the sense that it's a rewrite of their previous one. Still an amazing achievement though.

detaro 6y ago
As far as I know it's also new in the sense that unlike their previous work it's not based on an existing engine.
- ajb 6y ago
  Yes, I could have stood to be more clear. They say it's a clean sheet rewrite, and I have no reason to doubt them. All I'm saying is that no doubt the team having written one before massively benefits the process of writing a new one.