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What is Firefox? Mozilla took Netscape stripped it to bare components and made them better. Why not do that again? Take Chromium, strip it to bare components an

by lcnmrn 4y ago

What is Firefox? Mozilla took Netscape stripped it to bare components and made them better. Why not do that again? Take Chromium, strip it to bare components and make them better. We need a hard fork of Chromium today or it will happen in the future anyway.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
Even stripping down Chromium and hard forking will cause significantly more problems than it resolves. Google will always be pushing updates, and filtering which ones to incorporate and which ones to leave out will become a nightmare over time as the ones left out become increasingly more integrated. Plus Google will pull stupid shit like their anti-adblocker push. Hard forking Netscape worked when there was a much lower floor of behaviors and entrenched, anticompetitive conglomerates.
vorticalbox 4y ago
There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.
- sfink 4y ago
  > There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. Yeah, but the argument is a really bad one. > for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. Yes, because it's no longer even a concern. Your single implementation will have bugs, because every implementation of a new feature has always had cross-compatibility bugs. Only now they're not bugs, they're backwards compatibility land mines that can never be fixed. > I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date. Why? What would be the motivation to innovate on browser features when you've already won? It would enable new things to be done on the web, which would be good for the people doing those things, but would increase the revenue of the browser makers by $0. If you owned a business and could pay someone $200K to do something that makes $0, or instead pay them $200K to do something else that makes $50K-$5M, which would you choose?
antisthenes 4y ago
There are lots of forks of Chromium that are better than the original (performance, non-gimped manifest, JXL support, built-in ad blocking etc.). Mozilla has already shown in the last decade they aren't interested in making a better browser.

by lcnmrn 4y ago

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

Even stripping down Chromium and hard forking will cause significantly more problems than it resolves. Google will always be pushing updates, and filtering which ones to incorporate and which ones to leave out will become a nightmare over time as the ones left out become increasingly more integrated. Plus Google will pull stupid shit like their anti-adblocker push. Hard forking Netscape worked when there was a much lower floor of behaviors and entrenched, anticompetitive conglomerates.

vorticalbox 4y ago

There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.

sfink 4y ago
> There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. Yeah, but the argument is a really bad one. > for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. Yes, because it's no longer even a concern. Your single implementation will have bugs, because every implementation of a new feature has always had cross-compatibility bugs. Only now they're not bugs, they're backwards compatibility land mines that can never be fixed. > I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date. Why? What would be the motivation to innovate on browser features when you've already won? It would enable new things to be done on the web, which would be good for the people doing those things, but would increase the revenue of the browser makers by $0. If you owned a business and could pay someone $200K to do something that makes $0, or instead pay them $200K to do something else that makes $50K-$5M, which would you choose?

antisthenes 4y ago

There are lots of forks of Chromium that are better than the original (performance, non-gimped manifest, JXL support, built-in ad blocking etc.). Mozilla has already shown in the last decade they aren't interested in making a better browser.