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Maintaining browsers has become a significant undertaking, so complex that only well-funded corporate interests can afford to keep one patched and up-to-date wi

Maintaining browsers has become a significant undertaking, so complex that only well-funded corporate interests can afford to keep one patched and up-to-date with the latest web standards. It surpassed operating system complexity. It surpassed pretty much everything else too. So we can forget about it ever being truly "free" (and free from ads) unless we simplify the web somehow. I also don't think we're going to go back in time and start cutting features out of browsers. So that isn't going to happen. What might work is a browser funded by massive numbers of small user donations. That's the Firefox model. It kinda works? But Firefox still pushes things on their users and defaults to Google Search. Another option is to pay for a browser. But there isn't enough interest in a paid browser to get one off the ground.

hvgk 5y ago
Back to gopher. Use native compiled apps and APIs for everything else. I’m serious. Probably shave a few gigawatts off the grid killing off electron apps.
- slx26 5y ago
  The advantage of browsers is that they are becoming the de-facto "universal operating systems". That's why users like them, and that's why devs like them, despite all their defects. I kinda believe in that direction too. It's just the path that is a massive mess. Would I delete and rewrite? Yeah, but browsers and traditional OSes both, to become a single thing. ..and then regret it afterwards :D
  - chillingeffect 5y ago
    Theyre multi-platform portals to the capitalist endpoints of work, and shopping, and paid leisure, but abstractions to hardware they are not. Merely abstractions to differing operating systems.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    Devs might like them, but it would be hard to find a user who grew up in a mobile native world that "likes" a web browser. That's the problem. It doesn't really do anything that 1st and 3rd party apps can't do. Much of the functionality around identity, payments, ad and ui rendering just works so much better in native apps. This is because of API crafting and data management by the platform and partnerships with 3rd parties, like payments. It can all be integrated in a product focused way. Regular users don't even need to understand it. They are just trained that its better. They will learn that once they get into Safari things might not work very well based on prior experience.
    - behnamoh 5y ago
      >> They will learn that once they get into Safari things might not work very well based on prior experience. Well, last I checked, Safari didn't support 4k YouTube videos. Apple may have fixed it, but it's an example for your argument.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  It's not a bad idea. I've switched to terminal UI als for some stuff and the clean, fast and high visual density is really simulating. A lot of the web is really just distraction and ad peddling crap
- cyanydeez 5y ago
  or produce content people actually find valuable and ensue the decades long desire tomactually pay for valuable information, rather than swim in bullshit and pretend quantity will just "bubble up"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mkl 5y ago
> What might work is a browser funded by massive numbers of small user donations. That's the Firefox model. That's not the Firefox model at all. Firefox development done by the Mozilla Corporation is primarily funded by search engine partnerships. Donations to the Mozilla Foundation (which owns the corporation) fund other initiatives instead, and are a much smaller amount. https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_to_mozilla_foundation_are_not_used_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t... https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ow9k0y/is_there_a_point_to_donating_to_mozilla/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ow9k0y/is_there_a_...
- tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
  It's one particular search engine partnership cough cough.
  - mkl 5y ago
    Primarily, but there are others. Yandex and Baidu in 2020 and presumably still: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-firefox-search-engine-browser https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-f.... Others in the past, not sure if any are still active: https://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-and-bing-together-at-last/ https://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-and-bing-together-at-last/. They're currently trialling Bing too: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/17/firefox-experiment-is-testing-bing-as-the-default-search-engine/ https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/17/firefox-experiment-is-test...
bleachedsleet 5y ago
I’m currently beta testing two paid browsers and I’m about to be trying a third. We are seeing a bit of a golden age for software right now where it seems a certain subset of the population has become not only comfortable paying for it, but also paying realistic (read not subsidized) pricing for it. I’m not saying this will ever be mainstream per se, but I am suggesting that enough people may be interested to make the model a sustainable alternative.
- afavour 5y ago
  How many of those browsers are Chromium based? Because if they are that’s still not actually an answer, they’re piggybacking off Google’s work.
  - austhrow743 5y ago
    How is it not an answer?
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Perhaps because they won't be truly independent because of the cost to hard fork?
    - afavour 5y ago
      Because no matter what their subscription price is it’s only reflective of the development work required to add features on top of Chromium, not of building a web browser. As such it’s not sustainable. If it ever became a competitive issue Google could very easily close source Chrome. Then suddenly all these Chromium-based subscription browsers would be on the hook for all browser development, security updates included. And that would be enormously expensive. So their prices would have to go up. Would their business still be sustainable? It’s questionable at the very least.
      - cpeterso 5y ago
        > Google could very easily close source Chrome. Only today did I realize that most of Chromium (and WebKit) is BSD licensed. So closing the source would be much easier than I expected. Firefox and Gecko are MPL licensed, which is like GPL but scoped to individual source files.
msie 5y ago
A new HTML/JS/CSS standard should be defined based on lessons learned implementing past browsers. Such a standard would make it easy to implement a browser.
- OccamsMirror 5y ago
  Oh yay a new standard! https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Here’s my suggestion: make a base browser support wasm, canvas (or something like webgpu, I’m not sure) and APIs, unavailable from sandbox. And then build JS engine, HTML, CSS, etc on top of this base platform. Now all the complexity is encapsulated and can actually be replaced by a particular website. Web apps can avoid this complexity. Web sites will just `import html from google-chrome` or something like that. The point is that base browser should be simple enough to be implemented by a single developer. And all those complex standards are just libraries, like Angular.
- tacotacotaco 5y ago
  Except that corporations join standard bodies to exert influence in their favor. If a standard is easy to implement then there would be more competition. E.g. Microsoft pushed standardization of their Open Office XML format. A party critical of their standard printed out the two competing specifications. ODF sat on the table and OOXML sat on the floor. My memory is hazy but I think the OOXML stack was still taller than the ODF stack.
WalterBright 5y ago
> It surpassed operating system complexity Gates understood that early on (that the browser would become the platform), hence giving Explorer away for free.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  I think what you meant to say was that Marc Andreeson understood it would become the platform, and Gates came to realize that he was on to something, and used Microsoft's monopoly to steal the implementation of the idea.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I didn't mean to say that. I don't know what Marc understood, but I do know that Gates made it clear what he thought.
KarlKemp 5y ago
There are what, two billion people using a browser every day? Three? For some amount of time measured in hours? There is nothing that could prevent a product in that spot from becoming more sophisticated over time, and it doesn't require any corrupt "corporate interests". The alternative does exist: you can surf the text-only web with lynx, or by reading pure HTML. Even today, most content is available via RSS as well. Nobody wants that because the modern web is better than it used to be. Arguably, Google's interests have been aligned with web users' for the last decade or two. Because their #1 fear is/was "walled gardens, both of the Facebook variety as well as native apps. So they need(ed) the web platform to be just as good as native applications, which is how we got joystick and USB web APIs. This is a chance of this changing because they have their own walled garden in the form of Android, but I'm not seeing it yet. Besides, all browsers are open-source, standards support is incredibly good today compared to the past, none of them try to lock you into their Windows-only ActiveX components, they don't intercept ads and resell them in the black market (except the self-proclaimed "brave" browser)... I really don't think browsers are epitome of corruption you consider the, to be. Microsoft's attempts to upsell you aren't really evil, they are just tasteless. Seriously: one of the features of really high end products is that they don't quite need as many flashing lights to get your attention. Apple does earn a lot of money, and it likes nothing more than selling you more stuff. But they certainly have enough self-respect not to run banner ads for third parties in their software. (The difference is (was?) most obvious with these insane stickers ("Intel Inside", "Windows Ready") every other manufacturer had to ruin their notebooks with. But, then again, I know enough people who never took them off to suspect they don't care. Or worse.)
Nextgrid 5y ago
The browser has become the application runtime for most purposes today, including in the enterprise. It's also on the front-line for most security threats as its functionality relies on parsing & executing untrusted and potentially malicious code safely. It's the perfect place for security features, enforcing policies and productivity improvements. The Enterprise™ spends huge amounts of money on (often dubious) security products and productivity tools and their complexity sometimes even exceeds browsers. A paid browser that offers better security, supports policies such as restrictions or data loss prevention and productivity features (such as ad blocking, reader mode, an easy automation API) would definitely have customers.
nsv 5y ago
>I also don't think we're going to go back in time and start cutting features out of browsers. Well, there has been a recent spike of interest in small protocols (Gemini, Gopher). It's mostly limited to esoteric tech enthusiasts though.

hvgk 5y ago

Back to gopher. Use native compiled apps and APIs for everything else. I’m serious. Probably shave a few gigawatts off the grid killing off electron apps.

slx26 5y ago
The advantage of browsers is that they are becoming the de-facto "universal operating systems". That's why users like them, and that's why devs like them, despite all their defects. I kinda believe in that direction too. It's just the path that is a massive mess. Would I delete and rewrite? Yeah, but browsers and traditional OSes both, to become a single thing. ..and then regret it afterwards :D
- chillingeffect 5y ago
  Theyre multi-platform portals to the capitalist endpoints of work, and shopping, and paid leisure, but abstractions to hardware they are not. Merely abstractions to differing operating systems.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Devs might like them, but it would be hard to find a user who grew up in a mobile native world that "likes" a web browser. That's the problem. It doesn't really do anything that 1st and 3rd party apps can't do. Much of the functionality around identity, payments, ad and ui rendering just works so much better in native apps. This is because of API crafting and data management by the platform and partnerships with 3rd parties, like payments. It can all be integrated in a product focused way. Regular users don't even need to understand it. They are just trained that its better. They will learn that once they get into Safari things might not work very well based on prior experience.
  - behnamoh 5y ago
    >> They will learn that once they get into Safari things might not work very well based on prior experience. Well, last I checked, Safari didn't support 4k YouTube videos. Apple may have fixed it, but it's an example for your argument.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
It's not a bad idea. I've switched to terminal UI als for some stuff and the clean, fast and high visual density is really simulating. A lot of the web is really just distraction and ad peddling crap
cyanydeez 5y ago
or produce content people actually find valuable and ensue the decades long desire tomactually pay for valuable information, rather than swim in bullshit and pretend quantity will just "bubble up"

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mkl 5y ago

> What might work is a browser funded by massive numbers of small user donations. That's the Firefox model. That's not the Firefox model at all. Firefox development done by the Mozilla Corporation is primarily funded by search engine partnerships. Donations to the Mozilla Foundation (which owns the corporation) fund other initiatives instead, and are a much smaller amount. https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_to_mozilla_foundation_are_not_used_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t... https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ow9k0y/is_there_a_point_to_donating_to_mozilla/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ow9k0y/is_there_a_...

tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
It's one particular search engine partnership cough cough.
- mkl 5y ago
  Primarily, but there are others. Yandex and Baidu in 2020 and presumably still: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-firefox-search-engine-browser https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-f.... Others in the past, not sure if any are still active: https://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-and-bing-together-at-last/ https://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-and-bing-together-at-last/. They're currently trialling Bing too: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/17/firefox-experiment-is-testing-bing-as-the-default-search-engine/ https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/17/firefox-experiment-is-test...

bleachedsleet 5y ago

I’m currently beta testing two paid browsers and I’m about to be trying a third. We are seeing a bit of a golden age for software right now where it seems a certain subset of the population has become not only comfortable paying for it, but also paying realistic (read not subsidized) pricing for it. I’m not saying this will ever be mainstream per se, but I am suggesting that enough people may be interested to make the model a sustainable alternative.

afavour 5y ago
How many of those browsers are Chromium based? Because if they are that’s still not actually an answer, they’re piggybacking off Google’s work.
- austhrow743 5y ago
  How is it not an answer?
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Perhaps because they won't be truly independent because of the cost to hard fork?
  - afavour 5y ago
    Because no matter what their subscription price is it’s only reflective of the development work required to add features on top of Chromium, not of building a web browser. As such it’s not sustainable. If it ever became a competitive issue Google could very easily close source Chrome. Then suddenly all these Chromium-based subscription browsers would be on the hook for all browser development, security updates included. And that would be enormously expensive. So their prices would have to go up. Would their business still be sustainable? It’s questionable at the very least.
    - cpeterso 5y ago
      > Google could very easily close source Chrome. Only today did I realize that most of Chromium (and WebKit) is BSD licensed. So closing the source would be much easier than I expected. Firefox and Gecko are MPL licensed, which is like GPL but scoped to individual source files.

msie 5y ago

A new HTML/JS/CSS standard should be defined based on lessons learned implementing past browsers. Such a standard would make it easy to implement a browser.

OccamsMirror 5y ago
Oh yay a new standard! https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
vbezhenar 5y ago
Here’s my suggestion: make a base browser support wasm, canvas (or something like webgpu, I’m not sure) and APIs, unavailable from sandbox. And then build JS engine, HTML, CSS, etc on top of this base platform. Now all the complexity is encapsulated and can actually be replaced by a particular website. Web apps can avoid this complexity. Web sites will just `import html from google-chrome` or something like that. The point is that base browser should be simple enough to be implemented by a single developer. And all those complex standards are just libraries, like Angular.
tacotacotaco 5y ago
Except that corporations join standard bodies to exert influence in their favor. If a standard is easy to implement then there would be more competition. E.g. Microsoft pushed standardization of their Open Office XML format. A party critical of their standard printed out the two competing specifications. ODF sat on the table and OOXML sat on the floor. My memory is hazy but I think the OOXML stack was still taller than the ODF stack.

WalterBright 5y ago

> It surpassed operating system complexity Gates understood that early on (that the browser would become the platform), hence giving Explorer away for free.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
I think what you meant to say was that Marc Andreeson understood it would become the platform, and Gates came to realize that he was on to something, and used Microsoft's monopoly to steal the implementation of the idea.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I didn't mean to say that. I don't know what Marc understood, but I do know that Gates made it clear what he thought.

KarlKemp 5y ago

There are what, two billion people using a browser every day? Three? For some amount of time measured in hours? There is nothing that could prevent a product in that spot from becoming more sophisticated over time, and it doesn't require any corrupt "corporate interests". The alternative does exist: you can surf the text-only web with lynx, or by reading pure HTML. Even today, most content is available via RSS as well. Nobody wants that because the modern web is better than it used to be. Arguably, Google's interests have been aligned with web users' for the last decade or two. Because their #1 fear is/was "walled gardens, both of the Facebook variety as well as native apps. So they need(ed) the web platform to be just as good as native applications, which is how we got joystick and USB web APIs. This is a chance of this changing because they have their own walled garden in the form of Android, but I'm not seeing it yet. Besides, all browsers are open-source, standards support is incredibly good today compared to the past, none of them try to lock you into their Windows-only ActiveX components, they don't intercept ads and resell them in the black market (except the self-proclaimed "brave" browser)... I really don't think browsers are epitome of corruption you consider the, to be. Microsoft's attempts to upsell you aren't really evil, they are just tasteless. Seriously: one of the features of really high end products is that they don't quite need as many flashing lights to get your attention. Apple does earn a lot of money, and it likes nothing more than selling you more stuff. But they certainly have enough self-respect not to run banner ads for third parties in their software. (The difference is (was?) most obvious with these insane stickers ("Intel Inside", "Windows Ready") every other manufacturer had to ruin their notebooks with. But, then again, I know enough people who never took them off to suspect they don't care. Or worse.)

Nextgrid 5y ago

The browser has become the application runtime for most purposes today, including in the enterprise. It's also on the front-line for most security threats as its functionality relies on parsing & executing untrusted and potentially malicious code safely. It's the perfect place for security features, enforcing policies and productivity improvements. The Enterprise™ spends huge amounts of money on (often dubious) security products and productivity tools and their complexity sometimes even exceeds browsers. A paid browser that offers better security, supports policies such as restrictions or data loss prevention and productivity features (such as ad blocking, reader mode, an easy automation API) would definitely have customers.

nsv 5y ago

>I also don't think we're going to go back in time and start cutting features out of browsers. Well, there has been a recent spike of interest in small protocols (Gemini, Gopher). It's mostly limited to esoteric tech enthusiasts though.