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That worked back then. Ten years ago, browsers were, compared to today, ridiculously simple and thus could easily be replaced. I wouldn't be surprised if today'

That worked back then. Ten years ago, browsers were, compared to today, ridiculously simple and thus could easily be replaced. I wouldn't be surprised if today's Chrome had more LoC than Linux in 2010. Also, the mobile platform might be a good indicator of what ordinary people are willing to put up with. Chrome doesn't support extensions there, so everybody and their uncle is browsing the web with the full ad experience. I've never seen a non-tech savvy person use Firefox, or just anything but chrome (or the system browser), on an Android device, which easily allows to install uBO. Yet on the desktop somehow even those people somehow learned to install uBO or ABP. It appears that "apparently you cannot do this on your phone" is an acceptable answer to most people.

wjnc 6y ago
Let's get that quantified: Chromium LoC: 34,900,821 [1] Linux 2010: about 12 million [2] It appears that Chromium has more LoC than Linux. (With LoC being a bad measure, Linux being GNU/Linux, blah). Browsing is hard. [1] via Google since OpenHub appears down [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lines_of_Code_Linux_Kernel.svg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lines_of_Code_Linu...
- maccam94 6y ago
  I'm afk so I can't check the current numbers, but as of a year ago Linux was up to 27.8M loc: https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/06/linux_2020_kernel_systemd_code/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/06/linux_2020_kernel_sys...
xnx 6y ago
It would be hard to write a browser from scratch now that had the features of a modern browser, but creating a first-class browser is much easier than it has ever been because of Chromium and Firefox. I agree that mobile is the direction many things are headed, but currently it's very easy to install any number of (sometimes shady) browsers from the Google app store that include ad blocking.

wjnc 6y ago

Let's get that quantified: Chromium LoC: 34,900,821 [1] Linux 2010: about 12 million [2] It appears that Chromium has more LoC than Linux. (With LoC being a bad measure, Linux being GNU/Linux, blah). Browsing is hard. [1] via Google since OpenHub appears down [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lines_of_Code_Linux_Kernel.svg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lines_of_Code_Linu...

maccam94 6y ago
I'm afk so I can't check the current numbers, but as of a year ago Linux was up to 27.8M loc: https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/06/linux_2020_kernel_systemd_code/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/06/linux_2020_kernel_sys...

xnx 6y ago

It would be hard to write a browser from scratch now that had the features of a modern browser, but creating a first-class browser is much easier than it has ever been because of Chromium and Firefox. I agree that mobile is the direction many things are headed, but currently it's very easy to install any number of (sometimes shady) browsers from the Google app store that include ad blocking.