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> It's weird how a forum full of technologists, free software believers and millionaire entrepreneurs have decided that browser technology is so hard and comple

> It's weird how a forum full of technologists, free software believers and millionaire entrepreneurs have decided that browser technology is so hard and complex that it would literally be more feasible to rebuild the entire web Have you built a web browser? I have. It quickly became useless as the web moved on. I've also been involved in other web browser projects (including a small webkit based browser as well as Firefox). My experience is that the web is 1) broken beyond repair 2) building a new browser is virtually impossible 3) for all the effort, building a good browser [such as one that pleases Gemini users] is literally impossible because the web standards themselves require you to implement hostile functionality without which your browser is broken and not actually a web browser, and with which you lose control and enable all kinds of malicious and user-hostile behavior. Ostensibly open standards and open source technology does not help you when said technology enables the other end to run a bunch of code on your client, and decline service because it doesn't approve of your client. Building a gemini client is actually very easy.

krapp 5y ago
>My experience is that the web is 1) broken beyond repair 2) building a new browser is virtually impossible 3) for all the effort, building a good browser [such as one that pleases Gemini users] is literally impossible because the web standards themselves require you to implement hostile functionality without which your browser is broken and not actually a web browser, and with which you lose control and enable all kinds of malicious and user-hostile behavior. Your first item has nothing to do with browsers, it's a purely subjective opinion (albeit one so strongly held by so many here I'm not going to bother trying to disabuse anyone of it anymore.) Your second item implies that it's too difficult for a hobbyist to build a modern browser in their free time, but the unstated assumption that any new browser must be simple enough to be built by a single person, entirely from scratch, is an arbitrary technical limit based on political ideals. Obviously it isn't actually impossible and, given the number of Firefox forks in the wild, doesn't even require billions of dollars in resources. And your final item dismisses the entire premise of modern browsers as user-hostile and "not actually web browsers." Which again, has nothing at all to do with the actual technical difficulty of browser implementation but is essentially a declaration that "it sucks any way so why bother?" You're proving my point, as are the other commenters. This is obviously an argument driven primarily by emotion (disgust with the modern web and complexity) and politics (anti-capitalist and anti-corporatist sentiment) rather than fundamental technical limitations.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  My first item has everything to do with the web technology, which browsers are intimately related to. Outdated and insecure firefox forks and their bitter users who complain about the web being broken when they browse it on their Firefox fork serve to prove the point more than to disprove it. And yes, the third point doesn't stop at merely claiming that the web is complex and hard; it just claims that even if you somehow manage to implement it all, you're still at the mercy of corporations because the very technology you implemented has built-in support for discrimination; Google, Cloudflare, et al can decide that they don't want your browser. It is broken technology and it should be thrown away.
  - throw10920 5y ago
    > Outdated and insecure firefox forks and their bitter users who complain about the web being broken when they browse it on their Firefox fork serve to prove the point more than to disprove it. Wait, most Firefox forks that I've seen (such as Pale Moon) were forked because the XUL addon model was deprecated in mainline, and they want to keep it - it had nothing to do with the complexity of the web. Unless you're saying that "the web" is "too large and complex" (because that's the cause of those forks becoming insecure and outdated) - in which case yes, I think that you can make a case for that. However, that doesn't have anything to do with the infeasibility of building a new web browser, so it's irrelevant. > you're still at the mercy of corporations because the very technology you implemented has built-in support for discrimination; Google, Cloudflare, et al can decide that they don't want your browser If by "Built-in support" you mean user agents - those are trivially spoofable. If you mean browser fingerprinting - that's not built-in, that's an attack against the technology. If you mean checking for the presence of features - that is a feature, not a bug. > It is broken technology and it should be thrown away. The technology isn't broken - everything else is. The reason why Google has so much control over the web is because so many people use (1) Chrome and (2) Google services. If neither of those were the case, the web could be technologically identical and yet there wouldn't be a constant feature churn. The problem is not technical, it's a market and social problem. It's not solvable on a technological level, because (1) even if you convinced everyone to switch to Gemini, if everyone started using the Microsoft Gemini Browser (or whatever), the exact same problem would arise (embrace, extend, extinguish!) and (2) you are never going to be able to convince anything more than a tiny sliver of the population to use Gemini. The only viable solutions are social (convince people to use Firefox/Safari/Opera and complain when it doesn't work, convince webdevs to support/prefer non-Chromium engines) and political (antitrust action against Google, more regulation). Gemini is not a solution to this problem. (you also conveniently didn't answer the rebuttal to your second point, so, to quote krapp: "the unstated assumption that any new browser must be simple enough to be built by a single person, entirely from scratch, is an arbitrary technical limit based on political ideals") (also, I don't know why you're saying "should" - why "should" I throw it away? You have no authority on this matter, as far as I can tell)

krapp 5y ago

>My experience is that the web is 1) broken beyond repair 2) building a new browser is virtually impossible 3) for all the effort, building a good browser [such as one that pleases Gemini users] is literally impossible because the web standards themselves require you to implement hostile functionality without which your browser is broken and not actually a web browser, and with which you lose control and enable all kinds of malicious and user-hostile behavior. Your first item has nothing to do with browsers, it's a purely subjective opinion (albeit one so strongly held by so many here I'm not going to bother trying to disabuse anyone of it anymore.) Your second item implies that it's too difficult for a hobbyist to build a modern browser in their free time, but the unstated assumption that any new browser must be simple enough to be built by a single person, entirely from scratch, is an arbitrary technical limit based on political ideals. Obviously it isn't actually impossible and, given the number of Firefox forks in the wild, doesn't even require billions of dollars in resources. And your final item dismisses the entire premise of modern browsers as user-hostile and "not actually web browsers." Which again, has nothing at all to do with the actual technical difficulty of browser implementation but is essentially a declaration that "it sucks any way so why bother?" You're proving my point, as are the other commenters. This is obviously an argument driven primarily by emotion (disgust with the modern web and complexity) and politics (anti-capitalist and anti-corporatist sentiment) rather than fundamental technical limitations.

foxfluff 5y ago
My first item has everything to do with the web technology, which browsers are intimately related to. Outdated and insecure firefox forks and their bitter users who complain about the web being broken when they browse it on their Firefox fork serve to prove the point more than to disprove it. And yes, the third point doesn't stop at merely claiming that the web is complex and hard; it just claims that even if you somehow manage to implement it all, you're still at the mercy of corporations because the very technology you implemented has built-in support for discrimination; Google, Cloudflare, et al can decide that they don't want your browser. It is broken technology and it should be thrown away.
- throw10920 5y ago
  > Outdated and insecure firefox forks and their bitter users who complain about the web being broken when they browse it on their Firefox fork serve to prove the point more than to disprove it. Wait, most Firefox forks that I've seen (such as Pale Moon) were forked because the XUL addon model was deprecated in mainline, and they want to keep it - it had nothing to do with the complexity of the web. Unless you're saying that "the web" is "too large and complex" (because that's the cause of those forks becoming insecure and outdated) - in which case yes, I think that you can make a case for that. However, that doesn't have anything to do with the infeasibility of building a new web browser, so it's irrelevant. > you're still at the mercy of corporations because the very technology you implemented has built-in support for discrimination; Google, Cloudflare, et al can decide that they don't want your browser If by "Built-in support" you mean user agents - those are trivially spoofable. If you mean browser fingerprinting - that's not built-in, that's an attack against the technology. If you mean checking for the presence of features - that is a feature, not a bug. > It is broken technology and it should be thrown away. The technology isn't broken - everything else is. The reason why Google has so much control over the web is because so many people use (1) Chrome and (2) Google services. If neither of those were the case, the web could be technologically identical and yet there wouldn't be a constant feature churn. The problem is not technical, it's a market and social problem. It's not solvable on a technological level, because (1) even if you convinced everyone to switch to Gemini, if everyone started using the Microsoft Gemini Browser (or whatever), the exact same problem would arise (embrace, extend, extinguish!) and (2) you are never going to be able to convince anything more than a tiny sliver of the population to use Gemini. The only viable solutions are social (convince people to use Firefox/Safari/Opera and complain when it doesn't work, convince webdevs to support/prefer non-Chromium engines) and political (antitrust action against Google, more regulation). Gemini is not a solution to this problem. (you also conveniently didn't answer the rebuttal to your second point, so, to quote krapp: "the unstated assumption that any new browser must be simple enough to be built by a single person, entirely from scratch, is an arbitrary technical limit based on political ideals") (also, I don't know why you're saying "should" - why "should" I throw it away? You have no authority on this matter, as far as I can tell)