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> But what if you didn't have to implement all of them? People will very much tend to prefer using browsers that are fully capable. If your browser only works
by Taek 6y ago
> But what if you didn't have to implement all of them?
People will very much tend to prefer using browsers that are fully capable. If your browser only works on 90% of sites, that's not good enough to keep users, it's exhausting to keep switching back and forth.
To escape the modern web, you have to offer something that the modern web can't which people are willing to go out of their way to get.
Some ideas: privacy, anonymity, no tracking, no DRM, global identity (pubkey based). I don't know if any of these would actually be sufficient to drive a new market, but I think creating a new market is the only way.
- als0 6y ago> global identity (pubkey based) Pubkey based is good, but a global identity is a recipe for disaster. Ideally, you derive a unique identity per domain, while still managing only a single (master) key pair at the user-level.
- kristiandupont 6y agoThe way Firefox initially solved this was with a user-facing version of the Strangler pattern: IE Tab. You could simply tell FF that a given URL needed to be rendered by IE and that would be the case inside your otherwise strictly FF browser. It worked perfectly. That pattern could be reused in such a scenario I guess.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y agoThis is briliant. It means bundling Chromium. But it could work.
- Hello71 6y agoIE Tab was an extension, never a native feature. It was one of the many innovations allowed by the open extensions API, allowing anybody to make major features without formal approval.
- jefftk 6y agoThat isn't how it was. When Phoenix was initially released, it was running the Netscape rendering engine with everything else stripped away. There was no IE Tab. Throughout the process of becoming Firebird, and then Firefox, IE Tab was never part of the core browser or default installation. I know: I ran all of these browsers as they came out. Even though many sites were built specifically for IE, it was very rarely bad enough that you couldn't manage with Firefox. Compatibility hadn't gotten that bad. (If you were going to make a dramatically simplified browser today, however, I do think this would be an excellent route to go.)
- jefftk 6y ago> Some ideas: privacy, anonymity, no tracking, no DRM, global identity (pubkey based). These are strongly in conflict with each other: if you have global identity what keeps that being used for tracking? This is the controversy around advertising IDs in mobile apps.