12 ms·

History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today (2022)

196 points by phil294 4y ago

no_wizard 4y ago
Interesting synopsis and confirms something I've always felt: There was never really a plurality of web browsers, there was always one that held an outsized majority vs the rest and drove web development practice. The closest, perhaps, was a brief period before Chrome became dominate and IE was waning fast, where I believe Safari, Firefox, and Chrome held approximately the same market share vs IE, which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer, it was also before Chrome forked Webkit fully IIRC. FWIW, I know having Chrome / Chromium as the overwhelming majority browser is not great, if for the sheer fact competition keeps everyone "honest" in a way, but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective. IE was truly both stagnant and terrible. EDIT: that's not to say I approve the Chromium dominance, as a daily Firefox user especially, but I would be lying if I said, from a developer perspective, that Chromium hasn't been pretty good so far on balance. They do innovate. They do push new features. They do usually support the latest specs. Though again, I don't approve of it being so dominate, I'd prefer a plurality. Its a shame that Microsoft didn't use Firefox as its base for new Edge
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Common story with platforms, isn't it? It's like a huge magnet drawing everyone to Windows or Intel. I wonder how much is end user driven, and how much is intermediary driven though. Is it that the customers are only comfortable with one item in each category, or is it the middle men who prefer to sell things that are all connected by the same platform?
  - doublerabbit 4y ago
    Psychology plays a big part, change and differences. Folk don't like change nor difference. You have to be willing to embrace it. You can do this yourself. Watch your mind freakout and give yourself a panic attack if you were to drag an frequented used app; icon from your phone in to an obscure new location or app folder. Frequent bookmark to another folder or off the bookmark bar. You get used to it but change is scary because its unknown and so unless you can adjust the user quickly and promptly they will reject whats given to them. Or innovate something whole and new thats never been done before. Add the fact that major brands have user friendly in hand, trying to convince someone to install Linux with its clunky installer as an example; really throws them off edge. Nowadays trying to get anyone to change really causes them to melt and its only going to get worse as we go on further through the rabbit hole of social media. So why change when you already have something that just works, that your used to and friends with. Even if it backstabs you with updates, missing icons and leaks your data to the world. It's still feels like your old friend, cosy and comforting.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    It's both. The vast, vast bulk of computer users are more interested in the destination than the journey. They don't really want to have to care what browser or OS or app they're using... They want to manage their finances, or make art, or surf the web, etc. When the destination is the point, small amounts of asymmetry tends to accrue more asymmetry because it's easier to solve problems if the help ecosystem is larger to address when the tool doesn't work the way the user wants it to.
- password4321 4y ago
  Saying 'Chrome / Chromium [...] are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective' is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think. edit: (over Firefox, sorry I wasn't clear)
  - vkou 4y ago
    > is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think. Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, and how much work it took to overcome the inertia of a crappy browser[1] shipped by a monopolist that did not want you to use the web. There are many legitimate reasons to grouse about Chrome, Google, Google owning Chrome, etc, but the problems surrounding it are, I feel, an order of magnitude smaller than what we had in the 00s. [1] The delta between IE6 and Firefox 1.0 was incredible, and everyone working on the web despised the work required to make websites work on the former.
    - irrational 4y ago
      But... Firefox came out before Chrome. It's not like we had to use IE6 until Chrome came out. I started using Firefox as soon as it came out and have used it continuously ever since.
      - boundlessdreamz 4y ago
        For an end user, Firefox was great. But the wide prevalence of IE meant that * Sometimes sites worked only in IE or broke subtly in other browsers. The subtle breaking could be layout differences or functionality not available/working because the developers used IE specific technology/javascript * Developers had to code for the lowest common denominator - IE. It really held back web applications * Debugging any errors in IE was a royal pain
    - bruce511 4y ago
      >> Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, As a web dev I hate ie6 as much as the next guy. I was in the fortunate position to simply drop ie6 support early (the phrase "use a modern browser" springs to mind.) But it's worth pointing out that ie6 itself was great when it came out. It wasn't that ie6 was bad, it became bad because it got _old_. IE brought us AJAX which transformed the web from being a read-only system (with a few forms) to an interactive platform, which is the root from which today's Web grows. In its time IE6 was great. But a lack of competition caused it to stagnate. MS rested on their laurels. MS themselves rallied hard against it after IE7 and later came out, but end-users refused to upgrade. They rebranded as Edge to get away from IE. The Trident engine was hard to work on though, and switching to the Blink engine has made Edge completely acceptable. The problem isn't that one has big market share over the others, its that viable others exist. Basically, if a feature is implemented, it works pretty much the same in all browsers. These days the issue is not different behaviour [1] as much as the speed that new features spread at. Safari has been the slowest here, although recent improvements there are welcome. [1] yeah, yeah, there are some differences. But it's nothing like the work necessary to make a site work under IE6 and Firefox 1.
- jedberg 4y ago
  > which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer Oh man, it depends on your definition of interesting. That was the time we had 3-5 engineers at reddit, and let me tell you, making reddit work for all the browsers was awful (and I barely had anything to do with it, it mostly fell on the other guys). It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html, because a bunch of people were still using it and it didn't support a lot of the stuff the other browsers did. While the consolidation of browsers isn't great from a market perspective, it's been great for developers sanity. :)
  - deburo 4y ago
    Haha, I was interviewing for an internship in those years, and I remember asking the only webdev guy there if he thought he had the coolest job in the company (I sure thought that the web was better than Windows). The guy just looked at me like I was crazy.
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  - no_wizard 4y ago
    Yes, dealing with IE (even IE 11, up until the last 2-3 years for me) was a pain back then, as it was circa 2020. That said, it saw a lot of innovations broadly, web development was taken alot more seriously as a profession, and saw some interesting frameworks come out (Ember, Angular, and later React) and jQuery sure made life easier by that time. I even have some fond memories of KnockoutJS. My most favorite, and probably most underrated framework in the history of web development, was SproutCore, which had legs at this time. From a culture side (user?) it was the heyday of things like Delicious, Foursquare, Good Twitter (IMO) and blog rolls. Mobile web was rolling out in earnest. Alot of innovation was happening in this space.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    > It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html LOL. I too have been guilty of doing this. HTML, CSS, JS... you name it. "Fuck IE6"
- irrational 4y ago
  > but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective Can you clarify what you mean by this? I've been using Firefox continuously since version 1 for both personal and development purposes. I've never felt like Firefox was not benevolent.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    Over IE and its dominance. IE 6 and onward was genuinely not great. IE 11 being maybe the least worst of them all, but still really bad. Chrome has managed, despite its dominance, not to become complacent, from a developer perspective. They add new features, propose new features, listen to developers and their feed back etc. The chrome teams overwhelming influence on the web as a whole and other factors are very concerning, but from a pure developer experience perspective, Chrome is n't really all that bad. I'm talking about supporting standard APIs etc.
    - hakfoo 4y ago
      Microsoft was always of two minds about the Web, in a similar way to Apple's stance recently. It's the universal runtime environment, so it stands the chance of commoditizing their platforms. There's no reason that you can't access the next killer web-app on a smart-fridge running HarmonyOS. But they do recognize that they have to supply a servicable browser, because if they don't, people will pick up one from somewhere else. So look where Edge (and Safari) focus their efforts-- begrudgingly matching the things they HAVE to match on Chrome, and adding on stuff like search and shopping tools or privacy gimmicks-- nothing that would make the web environment as a more free-standing platform that could displace native software.
- smm11 4y ago
  I use Firefox for M365 access, since it assumes nothing from Windows, and doesn't try to suck everything in like Chrome. Edge for 365 can't figure out which of the 11 accounts it finds should be the one I'd like to use.
santoshalper 4y ago
"Gecko (Firefox). Down to 4% market share, mismanaged by Mozilla which prioritizes pushing its toxic politics over improving the browser." Unlike the author, who clearly has no agenda or axe to grind.
- Y_Y 4y ago
  I love Firefox the browser, but they keep throwing stuff at me that I have no interest in. After the Pocket debacle and the Mr. Robot thing I stopped paying attention, but I bet if I found out what colorways was or that new little pinned tab thing then I'd get upset too. All that to say, I think a personal blog is a better place to grind axes than the start page of a hugely important software tool.
  - awelxtr 4y ago
    I'm ootl, Pocket debacle?
    - johnny22 4y ago
      really out of the loop then, because it was like 5 years ago or so :) Firefox add a button to integrate a third party service (pocket) in the default install and i think it added it to your current pinned icon areas (where extension button go). It was also not implemented as a proper extension, so you couldn't actually remove support for it, but only the icon. Later on Mozilla did buy pocket, so it was no longer third party. Anyways, a lot of people got super mad with the way they went about it.
      - awelxtr 4y ago
        thank you!
  - sfink 4y ago
    Is the presence of Pocket pushing toxic politics, or is it the Mr. Robot extension? I understand that people have complaints and want to hang onto others' past mistakes, but I fail to see how either of those (Pocket&Robot) can be classified as either toxic politics or axe grinding. They're both monetization tactics that many people disliked. Which somehow resulted in people finding Mozilla untouchable, because apparently nobody else has problematic monetization attempts?
egberts1 4y ago
Add-On topic of what I think is the most important component of a web browser: A timeline of JavaScript Just-In-Time (JIT) engines. https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html sorry, last time I checked on March 2022, Google Chrome cannot negotiate for my ChaCha-only TLS website; instead try using a Safari, Brave, Firefox, Edge, Aloha, OnionBrowser, Orion, Links, or Lynx web broswer, to name a few). Meanwhile it is an ongoing crazy ride just mapping the evolution of WASM (in my next planned blog).
- jwilk 4y ago
  It's still broken in Google Chrome 109 (the latest stable version) on Linux: > egbert.net uses an unsupported protocol. > ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH
  - egberts1 4y ago
    which is what I expected given that Google Chrome chose to ignore the server's "my options only or nothing".
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230113174325/Https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230113174325/Https://egbert.ne...
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- londons_explore 4y ago
  Perhaps send them a pull request to fix it, and see what they say? I can't really imagine why they wouldn't want to support it... I wonder if it was an oversight rather than a policy decision?
  - egberts1 4y ago
    I merely configured the website server TLS protocol to my exacting specs (in cryptographic and network security theatre) and Chrome failed because its client "demands" the non-ChaCha variants despite my TLS server INSISTING "my way or the highway". Beside, I am quite partial toward Firefox browser so there is little benefit for me to file a report to help Firefox's competitors.
Y_Y 4y ago
Cool graph, but I think in cases where. Lot of your data ends up indistinguishable from zeros it's better to use something like a log scale. We all know Chrome is the biggest by far, but I have now well to tell how the usage of, say, Links has changed over time.
hiena03 4y ago
It's a shame Opera didn't go to the open source route. Opera with Presto was a great browser.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  It was tragic when they they switched from the Presto engine. I was an Opera user from the exact day they stopped charging for it, but they slowly stopped innovating in ways I found useful and when they ditched their engine I ditched them, reluctantly.
  - ivlad 4y ago
    It’s very hard to make money from, you know, a freeware browser without earning them somewhere else, i.e., in targeted advertising.
    - Eisenstein 4y ago
      I agree, it was a terrible business plan. I loved the browser though.
    - hakfoo 4y ago
      Their big business idea was embedding and customization; the Wii's browser was an Opera derivative, for example. I suspect they were an inadvertent victim of the smartphone/cheap data revolution. Products like Opera Mini (was that the one that did a lot of the lifting server side) were rapidly obsolesced when we moved from spotty data and Blackberry scroll-wheels to touchscreens and 3G/4G
jmyeet 4y ago
Obligatory reference to the inverse relationship between Firefox market share and the Mozilla Foundation's chair's compensation [1]. It is sad to see Firefox become so irrelevant. As much as people blame Google for this (and it is true Google relentlessly pushed Chrome) but people forget just how innovative Chrome was and how Firefox didn't respond to these issues. I remember when Chrome launched and it was revolutionary how it was one-process-per-tab (technically, it's site isolation not tab isolation but let's not get lost in the sauce). No longer could an errant website take down your entire browser (mostly). I kept wondering why Firefox didn't copy this. It took them years. What were they doing? Now I appreciate Mozilla bringing Rust into existence (not without problems and early design mistakes [2]) but the initial goal seemed to be rewriting the browser in a memory-safe language and that never seem to eventuate.. [1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html [2]: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity/ https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity...
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- zackmorris 4y ago
  Wow I didn't know that! Looks like it's $3 million now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash. That's so disappointing that I don't think I can ever look at Mozilla or Firefox the same way again. As a software engineer, I would not work at an organization with such a huge discrepancy in pay. It almost makes me feel better about a lifetime of failure, so I guess I should be grateful. It's just looking more and more every day like wealth inequality is the great problem of our time, effectively halting progress beyond a certain point.
  - vkou 4y ago
    > An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash. Only if you think you could re-implement Twitter in a weekend.
acheron 4y ago
First graphical browser I used was Slipknot [0], which doesn’t appear to be listed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_(web_browser) (Edit: I see it now, must have skipped over it before.)
jonahbenton 4y ago
I wrote a browser for Macs (System 7) in 1995-7 through a contract with James Gleick's Pipeline ISP [0], commercially available in the US. Don't see it listed, will reach out. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pipeline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pipeline
- classichasclass 4y ago
  Is the source code anywhere? Those of us resurrecting old Mac software might be able to dust it off and update it a bit.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
> This promising engine [Servo] was developed by Mozilla[...] Mozilla fired a quarter of their developers, which apparently included the whole Servo team. There have still been some commits to the code since then (presumably by hobbyists) but it is questionable if Servo will have a future. Why do people keep framing the story this way? Servo's future is in Gecko. always_has_been.jpg The Servo repo was a testbed that allowed people to work on new, Rust-based browser components without anyone having to pass the type of code reviews that are necessary for a production Web browser that is by the way already continually shipping to millions of existing users. This (far too common) meme of Servo as a somehow failed separate browser engine that was supposed to, I dunno, be swapped out at some indefinite point and retire the lizard or something is very weird.
- AprilArcus 4y ago
  They are probably referring specifically to Servo parallel layout.
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gernb 4y ago
What does it mean "WebKit peak 49% market share" in 2012. That doesn't pass the sniff test. AFAIK, Safari never had a big install based on Windows and MacOS+iOS certainly didn't account for 49% of web traffic in 2012
- cpeterso 4y ago
  The page is about browser engines, not browsers. Chrome was still using WebKit in 2012. Chrome switched to Blink in 2013.
- normaljoe 4y ago
  Chrome used WebKit until the Blink fork in 2013. That should make the numbers work. :)
gnufx 4y ago
Others I know of: MMM (CAML Light with applets, '90s), Emacs/W3 (which Bill Perry claimed had the first CSS implementation), Abaco (Plan9)
forgotmypw17 4y ago
One cool option missing from this list is OffByOne. Very fast and lightweight, Peak HTML 3.2. https://wiki.c2.com/?OffByOneWebBrowser https://wiki.c2.com/?OffByOneWebBrowser I develop a framework for building hyper-compatible Any Browser websites (applications include retro-computing audience) and I include it in my test suite.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  I used this a lot on 9x and 2K. Loved it. Forgot about it until you made this post. Thanks m8!
olliej 4y ago
This only briefly references Tasman which was the rendering engine from IE For Mac. It was in many respects better than trident - the big bit was it had a much lighter footprint which meant it became the engine used for mobile IE.
DataCrayon 4y ago
Some of you may enjoy watching this too: Desktop Browsers Market Share over time (pie chart race) https://plotapi.com/explore/view/563abc04-f196-4992-aefe-973b91f5c639 https://plotapi.com/explore/view/563abc04-f196-4992-aefe-973...
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
There is a large amount of HTML found on the web that only serves to wrap textual information and is therefore human readable without rendering. Basic text processing is enough. IMHO, HTML tables are where "rendering" becomes a must-have.
annoyingnoob 4y ago
What comes after Blink? pours one out for Opera 12 (Presto)
shortlived 4y ago
Has anyone tried to make a browser using the MS Word engine? It would be horrible but also kinda neat.
slmjkdbtl 4y ago
Curious what are the advantages of using expensive custom embedded browser engine like sciter / ultralight over system webview, or using system webview wrapper like https://github.com/webview/webview https://github.com/webview/webview?

196 points by phil294 4y ago

Interesting synopsis and confirms something I've always felt: There was never really a plurality of web browsers, there was always one that held an outsized majority vs the rest and drove web development practice. The closest, perhaps, was a brief period before Chrome became dominate and IE was waning fast, where I believe Safari, Firefox, and Chrome held approximately the same market share vs IE, which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer, it was also before Chrome forked Webkit fully IIRC. FWIW, I know having Chrome / Chromium as the overwhelming majority browser is not great, if for the sheer fact competition keeps everyone "honest" in a way, but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective. IE was truly both stagnant and terrible. EDIT: that's not to say I approve the Chromium dominance, as a daily Firefox user especially, but I would be lying if I said, from a developer perspective, that Chromium hasn't been pretty good so far on balance. They do innovate. They do push new features. They do usually support the latest specs. Though again, I don't approve of it being so dominate, I'd prefer a plurality. Its a shame that Microsoft didn't use Firefox as its base for new Edge

lordnacho 4y ago
Common story with platforms, isn't it? It's like a huge magnet drawing everyone to Windows or Intel. I wonder how much is end user driven, and how much is intermediary driven though. Is it that the customers are only comfortable with one item in each category, or is it the middle men who prefer to sell things that are all connected by the same platform?
- doublerabbit 4y ago
  Psychology plays a big part, change and differences. Folk don't like change nor difference. You have to be willing to embrace it. You can do this yourself. Watch your mind freakout and give yourself a panic attack if you were to drag an frequented used app; icon from your phone in to an obscure new location or app folder. Frequent bookmark to another folder or off the bookmark bar. You get used to it but change is scary because its unknown and so unless you can adjust the user quickly and promptly they will reject whats given to them. Or innovate something whole and new thats never been done before. Add the fact that major brands have user friendly in hand, trying to convince someone to install Linux with its clunky installer as an example; really throws them off edge. Nowadays trying to get anyone to change really causes them to melt and its only going to get worse as we go on further through the rabbit hole of social media. So why change when you already have something that just works, that your used to and friends with. Even if it backstabs you with updates, missing icons and leaks your data to the world. It's still feels like your old friend, cosy and comforting.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's both. The vast, vast bulk of computer users are more interested in the destination than the journey. They don't really want to have to care what browser or OS or app they're using... They want to manage their finances, or make art, or surf the web, etc. When the destination is the point, small amounts of asymmetry tends to accrue more asymmetry because it's easier to solve problems if the help ecosystem is larger to address when the tool doesn't work the way the user wants it to.
password4321 4y ago
Saying 'Chrome / Chromium [...] are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective' is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think. edit: (over Firefox, sorry I wasn't clear)
- vkou 4y ago
  > is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think. Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, and how much work it took to overcome the inertia of a crappy browser[1] shipped by a monopolist that did not want you to use the web. There are many legitimate reasons to grouse about Chrome, Google, Google owning Chrome, etc, but the problems surrounding it are, I feel, an order of magnitude smaller than what we had in the 00s. [1] The delta between IE6 and Firefox 1.0 was incredible, and everyone working on the web despised the work required to make websites work on the former.
  - irrational 4y ago
    But... Firefox came out before Chrome. It's not like we had to use IE6 until Chrome came out. I started using Firefox as soon as it came out and have used it continuously ever since.
    - boundlessdreamz 4y ago
      For an end user, Firefox was great. But the wide prevalence of IE meant that * Sometimes sites worked only in IE or broke subtly in other browsers. The subtle breaking could be layout differences or functionality not available/working because the developers used IE specific technology/javascript * Developers had to code for the lowest common denominator - IE. It really held back web applications * Debugging any errors in IE was a royal pain
  - bruce511 4y ago
    >> Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, As a web dev I hate ie6 as much as the next guy. I was in the fortunate position to simply drop ie6 support early (the phrase "use a modern browser" springs to mind.) But it's worth pointing out that ie6 itself was great when it came out. It wasn't that ie6 was bad, it became bad because it got _old_. IE brought us AJAX which transformed the web from being a read-only system (with a few forms) to an interactive platform, which is the root from which today's Web grows. In its time IE6 was great. But a lack of competition caused it to stagnate. MS rested on their laurels. MS themselves rallied hard against it after IE7 and later came out, but end-users refused to upgrade. They rebranded as Edge to get away from IE. The Trident engine was hard to work on though, and switching to the Blink engine has made Edge completely acceptable. The problem isn't that one has big market share over the others, its that viable others exist. Basically, if a feature is implemented, it works pretty much the same in all browsers. These days the issue is not different behaviour [1] as much as the speed that new features spread at. Safari has been the slowest here, although recent improvements there are welcome. [1] yeah, yeah, there are some differences. But it's nothing like the work necessary to make a site work under IE6 and Firefox 1.
jedberg 4y ago
> which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer Oh man, it depends on your definition of interesting. That was the time we had 3-5 engineers at reddit, and let me tell you, making reddit work for all the browsers was awful (and I barely had anything to do with it, it mostly fell on the other guys). It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html, because a bunch of people were still using it and it didn't support a lot of the stuff the other browsers did. While the consolidation of browsers isn't great from a market perspective, it's been great for developers sanity. :)
- deburo 4y ago
  Haha, I was interviewing for an internship in those years, and I remember asking the only webdev guy there if he thought he had the coolest job in the company (I sure thought that the web was better than Windows). The guy just looked at me like I was crazy.
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- no_wizard 4y ago
  Yes, dealing with IE (even IE 11, up until the last 2-3 years for me) was a pain back then, as it was circa 2020. That said, it saw a lot of innovations broadly, web development was taken alot more seriously as a profession, and saw some interesting frameworks come out (Ember, Angular, and later React) and jQuery sure made life easier by that time. I even have some fond memories of KnockoutJS. My most favorite, and probably most underrated framework in the history of web development, was SproutCore, which had legs at this time. From a culture side (user?) it was the heyday of things like Delicious, Foursquare, Good Twitter (IMO) and blog rolls. Mobile web was rolling out in earnest. Alot of innovation was happening in this space.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  > It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html LOL. I too have been guilty of doing this. HTML, CSS, JS... you name it. "Fuck IE6"
irrational 4y ago
> but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective Can you clarify what you mean by this? I've been using Firefox continuously since version 1 for both personal and development purposes. I've never felt like Firefox was not benevolent.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Over IE and its dominance. IE 6 and onward was genuinely not great. IE 11 being maybe the least worst of them all, but still really bad. Chrome has managed, despite its dominance, not to become complacent, from a developer perspective. They add new features, propose new features, listen to developers and their feed back etc. The chrome teams overwhelming influence on the web as a whole and other factors are very concerning, but from a pure developer experience perspective, Chrome is n't really all that bad. I'm talking about supporting standard APIs etc.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    Microsoft was always of two minds about the Web, in a similar way to Apple's stance recently. It's the universal runtime environment, so it stands the chance of commoditizing their platforms. There's no reason that you can't access the next killer web-app on a smart-fridge running HarmonyOS. But they do recognize that they have to supply a servicable browser, because if they don't, people will pick up one from somewhere else. So look where Edge (and Safari) focus their efforts-- begrudgingly matching the things they HAVE to match on Chrome, and adding on stuff like search and shopping tools or privacy gimmicks-- nothing that would make the web environment as a more free-standing platform that could displace native software.
smm11 4y ago
I use Firefox for M365 access, since it assumes nothing from Windows, and doesn't try to suck everything in like Chrome. Edge for 365 can't figure out which of the 11 accounts it finds should be the one I'd like to use.

santoshalper 4y ago

"Gecko (Firefox). Down to 4% market share, mismanaged by Mozilla which prioritizes pushing its toxic politics over improving the browser." Unlike the author, who clearly has no agenda or axe to grind.

Y_Y 4y ago
I love Firefox the browser, but they keep throwing stuff at me that I have no interest in. After the Pocket debacle and the Mr. Robot thing I stopped paying attention, but I bet if I found out what colorways was or that new little pinned tab thing then I'd get upset too. All that to say, I think a personal blog is a better place to grind axes than the start page of a hugely important software tool.
- awelxtr 4y ago
  I'm ootl, Pocket debacle?
  - johnny22 4y ago
    really out of the loop then, because it was like 5 years ago or so :) Firefox add a button to integrate a third party service (pocket) in the default install and i think it added it to your current pinned icon areas (where extension button go). It was also not implemented as a proper extension, so you couldn't actually remove support for it, but only the icon. Later on Mozilla did buy pocket, so it was no longer third party. Anyways, a lot of people got super mad with the way they went about it.
    - awelxtr 4y ago
      thank you!
- sfink 4y ago
  Is the presence of Pocket pushing toxic politics, or is it the Mr. Robot extension? I understand that people have complaints and want to hang onto others' past mistakes, but I fail to see how either of those (Pocket&Robot) can be classified as either toxic politics or axe grinding. They're both monetization tactics that many people disliked. Which somehow resulted in people finding Mozilla untouchable, because apparently nobody else has problematic monetization attempts?

egberts1 4y ago

Add-On topic of what I think is the most important component of a web browser: A timeline of JavaScript Just-In-Time (JIT) engines. https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html sorry, last time I checked on March 2022, Google Chrome cannot negotiate for my ChaCha-only TLS website; instead try using a Safari, Brave, Firefox, Edge, Aloha, OnionBrowser, Orion, Links, or Lynx web broswer, to name a few). Meanwhile it is an ongoing crazy ride just mapping the evolution of WASM (in my next planned blog).

jwilk 4y ago
It's still broken in Google Chrome 109 (the latest stable version) on Linux: > egbert.net uses an unsupported protocol. > ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH
- egberts1 4y ago
  which is what I expected given that Google Chrome chose to ignore the server's "my options only or nothing".
shadowgovt 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230113174325/Https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230113174325/Https://egbert.ne...
- deleted 4y ago
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londons_explore 4y ago
Perhaps send them a pull request to fix it, and see what they say? I can't really imagine why they wouldn't want to support it... I wonder if it was an oversight rather than a policy decision?
- egberts1 4y ago
  I merely configured the website server TLS protocol to my exacting specs (in cryptographic and network security theatre) and Chrome failed because its client "demands" the non-ChaCha variants despite my TLS server INSISTING "my way or the highway". Beside, I am quite partial toward Firefox browser so there is little benefit for me to file a report to help Firefox's competitors.

Y_Y 4y ago

Cool graph, but I think in cases where. Lot of your data ends up indistinguishable from zeros it's better to use something like a log scale. We all know Chrome is the biggest by far, but I have now well to tell how the usage of, say, Links has changed over time.

hiena03 4y ago

It's a shame Opera didn't go to the open source route. Opera with Presto was a great browser.

Eisenstein 4y ago
It was tragic when they they switched from the Presto engine. I was an Opera user from the exact day they stopped charging for it, but they slowly stopped innovating in ways I found useful and when they ditched their engine I ditched them, reluctantly.
- ivlad 4y ago
  It’s very hard to make money from, you know, a freeware browser without earning them somewhere else, i.e., in targeted advertising.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    I agree, it was a terrible business plan. I loved the browser though.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    Their big business idea was embedding and customization; the Wii's browser was an Opera derivative, for example. I suspect they were an inadvertent victim of the smartphone/cheap data revolution. Products like Opera Mini (was that the one that did a lot of the lifting server side) were rapidly obsolesced when we moved from spotty data and Blackberry scroll-wheels to touchscreens and 3G/4G

jmyeet 4y ago

Obligatory reference to the inverse relationship between Firefox market share and the Mozilla Foundation's chair's compensation [1]. It is sad to see Firefox become so irrelevant. As much as people blame Google for this (and it is true Google relentlessly pushed Chrome) but people forget just how innovative Chrome was and how Firefox didn't respond to these issues. I remember when Chrome launched and it was revolutionary how it was one-process-per-tab (technically, it's site isolation not tab isolation but let's not get lost in the sauce). No longer could an errant website take down your entire browser (mostly). I kept wondering why Firefox didn't copy this. It took them years. What were they doing? Now I appreciate Mozilla bringing Rust into existence (not without problems and early design mistakes [2]) but the initial goal seemed to be rewriting the browser in a memory-safe language and that never seem to eventuate.. [1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html [2]: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity/ https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity...

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zackmorris 4y ago
Wow I didn't know that! Looks like it's $3 million now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash. That's so disappointing that I don't think I can ever look at Mozilla or Firefox the same way again. As a software engineer, I would not work at an organization with such a huge discrepancy in pay. It almost makes me feel better about a lifetime of failure, so I guess I should be grateful. It's just looking more and more every day like wealth inequality is the great problem of our time, effectively halting progress beyond a certain point.
- vkou 4y ago
  > An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash. Only if you think you could re-implement Twitter in a weekend.

acheron 4y ago

First graphical browser I used was Slipknot [0], which doesn’t appear to be listed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_(web_browser) (Edit: I see it now, must have skipped over it before.)

jonahbenton 4y ago

I wrote a browser for Macs (System 7) in 1995-7 through a contract with James Gleick's Pipeline ISP [0], commercially available in the US. Don't see it listed, will reach out. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pipeline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pipeline

classichasclass 4y ago
Is the source code anywhere? Those of us resurrecting old Mac software might be able to dust it off and update it a bit.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

> This promising engine [Servo] was developed by Mozilla[...] Mozilla fired a quarter of their developers, which apparently included the whole Servo team. There have still been some commits to the code since then (presumably by hobbyists) but it is questionable if Servo will have a future. Why do people keep framing the story this way? Servo's future is in Gecko. always_has_been.jpg The Servo repo was a testbed that allowed people to work on new, Rust-based browser components without anyone having to pass the type of code reviews that are necessary for a production Web browser that is by the way already continually shipping to millions of existing users. This (far too common) meme of Servo as a somehow failed separate browser engine that was supposed to, I dunno, be swapped out at some indefinite point and retire the lizard or something is very weird.

AprilArcus 4y ago
They are probably referring specifically to Servo parallel layout.
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gernb 4y ago

What does it mean "WebKit peak 49% market share" in 2012. That doesn't pass the sniff test. AFAIK, Safari never had a big install based on Windows and MacOS+iOS certainly didn't account for 49% of web traffic in 2012

cpeterso 4y ago
The page is about browser engines, not browsers. Chrome was still using WebKit in 2012. Chrome switched to Blink in 2013.
normaljoe 4y ago
Chrome used WebKit until the Blink fork in 2013. That should make the numbers work. :)

gnufx 4y ago

Others I know of: MMM (CAML Light with applets, '90s), Emacs/W3 (which Bill Perry claimed had the first CSS implementation), Abaco (Plan9)

forgotmypw17 4y ago

One cool option missing from this list is OffByOne. Very fast and lightweight, Peak HTML 3.2. https://wiki.c2.com/?OffByOneWebBrowser https://wiki.c2.com/?OffByOneWebBrowser I develop a framework for building hyper-compatible Any Browser websites (applications include retro-computing audience) and I include it in my test suite.

BirAdam 4y ago
I used this a lot on 9x and 2K. Loved it. Forgot about it until you made this post. Thanks m8!

olliej 4y ago

This only briefly references Tasman which was the rendering engine from IE For Mac. It was in many respects better than trident - the big bit was it had a much lighter footprint which meant it became the engine used for mobile IE.

DataCrayon 4y ago

Some of you may enjoy watching this too: Desktop Browsers Market Share over time (pie chart race) https://plotapi.com/explore/view/563abc04-f196-4992-aefe-973b91f5c639 https://plotapi.com/explore/view/563abc04-f196-4992-aefe-973...

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

There is a large amount of HTML found on the web that only serves to wrap textual information and is therefore human readable without rendering. Basic text processing is enough. IMHO, HTML tables are where "rendering" becomes a must-have.

annoyingnoob 4y ago

What comes after Blink? pours one out for Opera 12 (Presto)

shortlived 4y ago

Has anyone tried to make a browser using the MS Word engine? It would be horrible but also kinda neat.

slmjkdbtl 4y ago

Curious what are the advantages of using expensive custom embedded browser engine like sciter / ultralight over system webview, or using system webview wrapper like https://github.com/webview/webview https://github.com/webview/webview?