5 ms·

The scope of what a "web browser" is has been steadily inflating at an insane rate. Not only that, but a lot of features are basically "required" to be able to

The scope of what a "web browser" is has been steadily inflating at an insane rate. Not only that, but a lot of features are basically "required" to be able to deal with modern websites. You would need a team the size of Chrome's to be able to just _keep up the pace_ and never actually close the feature gap. That's a ludicrous amount of money for an incredibly risky project, since users are very complacent and get attached to their browser choice. In fact, the browser is so multi-featured and has space for so many individual behaviours that users will get used to specific things (shortcuts, menu behaviours, even the sorting of address autocomplete results) that they develop the same (understandable) attachment to the exact way a browser works, just like what happens with operating systems. Then it's not even a rational choice anymore, and only another equally irrational event would cause them to reconsider their choice (either a major fuck-up by the browser they use, or some apparently inconsequential thing about the alternative). You could make a feature-slim browser, but it would never reach wide adoption, because non-technical people would still need to open one of the big ones to do their online banking, or make video calls, or whatever.

foxfluff 5y ago
> You could make a feature-slim browser, but it would never reach wide adoption, because non-technical people would still need to open one of the big ones to do their online banking, or make video calls, or whatever. Yeah. There are slim browsers around, but feels quite pointless if you need to keep Chrome or Firefox installed anyway. (Last week I used Dillo because Firefox was broken: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918052)
- JALTU 5y ago
  There was a time just a year or so ago where I had Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all ready to roll because some bank-of-mine's website would break right at the crucial point (click to confirm bill pay, transfer, whatever). Maybe it was my ad blocker? Whatever, I had to switch to another browser to actually complete my transaction. And then, in two months, the fail behavior would appear on the browser du jour and I would switch back to another one of the three. Not a problem lately, but I don't expect this to last forever, unfortunately.
jasode 5y ago
>You could make a feature-slim browser, but it would never reach wide adoption, because non-technical people would still need to open one of the big ones to do their online banking, or make video calls, or whatever. A prime example of that practical reality is ex-Mozilla founder/programmer Brendan Eich having to switch Brave's forked code from Firefox to Chromium ... because one of the reasons is "Chromium can play Netflix videos": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 Similar to Eich's decision, other entities like Opera and Microsoft gave up on trying to maintain their own proprietary browser engines and just decided to fork Chromium. If Microsoft with billions sees no strategic need to invest in their own Trident/Edge browser and are willing to switch to a competitor's browser as a baseline, that should give an idea of how daunting a task it is for a hypothetical group of FOSS programmers to code an alternative browser. EDIT reply to: >Gecko is just relatively unfriendly to embed in an app. That may be true but that difficulty didn't stop Eich/Brave from using Gecko at first. His comment said they had to switch to Chromium because of performance issues and the DRM to watch things like Netflix.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  > because one of the reasons is "Chromium can play Netflix videos" Is that a recent issue (or fix on FF)? I watch NF on Firefox all the time. Windows, Mac and Linux all.
  - debugnik 5y ago
    Firefox has been using widevine since 2016, but the comment says they switched away from Gecko in late 2015. Prior to that, the comment explains: > Mozilla had an Adobe deal that did not extend to non-Firefox Gecko embeddings.
  - swills 5y ago
    You're not using open source code to watch Widevine.
- sp332 5y ago
  Gecko is just relatively unfriendly to embed in an app. That's one reason Mozilla is working on Servo.
ozten 5y ago
100%. To add a little more detail, the scope is both broad and deep. Broad - You have many, many new features like WebAssembly or WebXR Device API. All of these are bets and it is hard to know which will gain adoption, so you build things like WebSQL, only to have them abandon for a new winner (IndexedDB). Deep - Rendering HTML5 content with CSS3 styles is such a massive effort. Check out the Servo project, Mozilla's attempt to rewrite the rendering engine in Rust. You have world experts that have already written a rendering engine and after years of progress (2012 - 2018) there was still more to do[1]. TODOs include implement Flexbox, which is core primitive in today's web design toolkit. I'm not sure how feature complete Servo is today, but it is shocking how much effort is required to build a production rendering engine. [1] https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Remaining-work https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Remaining-work
codegeek 5y ago
Agreed. Back in 2004, we did a college project to build a web browser for our CS Class and I built a poor man's browser using Java and Swing (Yes I know I know). Honestly, I was able to load a few websites using it and I was super proud of myself :). Today though, I doubt I can write something like that so quickly and get any adoption since browsers are fully loaded with so much stuff these days.

foxfluff 5y ago

> You could make a feature-slim browser, but it would never reach wide adoption, because non-technical people would still need to open one of the big ones to do their online banking, or make video calls, or whatever. Yeah. There are slim browsers around, but feels quite pointless if you need to keep Chrome or Firefox installed anyway. (Last week I used Dillo because Firefox was broken: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918052)

JALTU 5y ago
There was a time just a year or so ago where I had Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all ready to roll because some bank-of-mine's website would break right at the crucial point (click to confirm bill pay, transfer, whatever). Maybe it was my ad blocker? Whatever, I had to switch to another browser to actually complete my transaction. And then, in two months, the fail behavior would appear on the browser du jour and I would switch back to another one of the three. Not a problem lately, but I don't expect this to last forever, unfortunately.

jasode 5y ago

>You could make a feature-slim browser, but it would never reach wide adoption, because non-technical people would still need to open one of the big ones to do their online banking, or make video calls, or whatever. A prime example of that practical reality is ex-Mozilla founder/programmer Brendan Eich having to switch Brave's forked code from Firefox to Chromium ... because one of the reasons is "Chromium can play Netflix videos": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 Similar to Eich's decision, other entities like Opera and Microsoft gave up on trying to maintain their own proprietary browser engines and just decided to fork Chromium. If Microsoft with billions sees no strategic need to invest in their own Trident/Edge browser and are willing to switch to a competitor's browser as a baseline, that should give an idea of how daunting a task it is for a hypothetical group of FOSS programmers to code an alternative browser. EDIT reply to: >Gecko is just relatively unfriendly to embed in an app. That may be true but that difficulty didn't stop Eich/Brave from using Gecko at first. His comment said they had to switch to Chromium because of performance issues and the DRM to watch things like Netflix.

michaelcampbell 5y ago
> because one of the reasons is "Chromium can play Netflix videos" Is that a recent issue (or fix on FF)? I watch NF on Firefox all the time. Windows, Mac and Linux all.
- debugnik 5y ago
  Firefox has been using widevine since 2016, but the comment says they switched away from Gecko in late 2015. Prior to that, the comment explains: > Mozilla had an Adobe deal that did not extend to non-Firefox Gecko embeddings.
- swills 5y ago
  You're not using open source code to watch Widevine.
sp332 5y ago
Gecko is just relatively unfriendly to embed in an app. That's one reason Mozilla is working on Servo.

ozten 5y ago

100%. To add a little more detail, the scope is both broad and deep. Broad - You have many, many new features like WebAssembly or WebXR Device API. All of these are bets and it is hard to know which will gain adoption, so you build things like WebSQL, only to have them abandon for a new winner (IndexedDB). Deep - Rendering HTML5 content with CSS3 styles is such a massive effort. Check out the Servo project, Mozilla's attempt to rewrite the rendering engine in Rust. You have world experts that have already written a rendering engine and after years of progress (2012 - 2018) there was still more to do[1]. TODOs include implement Flexbox, which is core primitive in today's web design toolkit. I'm not sure how feature complete Servo is today, but it is shocking how much effort is required to build a production rendering engine. [1] https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Remaining-work https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Remaining-work

codegeek 5y ago

Agreed. Back in 2004, we did a college project to build a web browser for our CS Class and I built a poor man's browser using Java and Swing (Yes I know I know). Honestly, I was able to load a few websites using it and I was super proud of myself :). Today though, I doubt I can write something like that so quickly and get any adoption since browsers are fully loaded with so much stuff these days.