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Let’s be honest: neither Apple needs $18 billion a year, nor does Mozilla need $450 million annually to develop a web browser. Microsoft or Apple could afford 1
by gloosx 1y ago
Let’s be honest: neither Apple needs $18 billion a year, nor does Mozilla need $450 million annually to develop a web browser. Microsoft or Apple could afford 100 lives of browser development without a Google penny. And Mozilla corp was already making millions in “Royalties” 20 years straight.
Yes, Mozilla would probably lose those royalties, but at this point browsers are good. Not a single browser needs a billion $ development budget each year to keep working – it is stable, fast, feature-complete. No one’s asking for major changes anymore. Keeping them running doesn’t require billion-dollar budgets, and we can probably use latest Chromium build for free forever even if random asteroid destroyed the whole Google HQ tomorrow.
But of course — we are devastated. A few corporate bozos lost billions, others now need to figure out where to burn them next. Very sad. Not a dry eye in the house.
- xiphias2 1y agoThe main inhibitor of browsers advancing was not lack of funding, but lack of will. It would be relatively straightforward to make web browsers competitive with Java/Swift mobile apps, but 2 specific companies would lose a lot of money on it.
- gloosx 1y agoLack of will is a lack of purpose, and the purpose of these companies is profit, easy to follow.
- jeroenhd 1y agoGoogle has actively developed an entire UI framework for mobile applications that compiles directly into HTML+WASM. They want the browser to be competent, because a competent browser can attract money iOS users would otherwise spend on App Store fees. I don't see how it would be "relatively straightforward" to make web browsers competitive if Chrome barely manages to keep up. There's a _lot_ of money going into making Chrome an alternative to the Android/iOS/macOS/Windows SDK, to the point where modern GUI applications have thrown out native controls and just render everything to a browser window instead.
- xiphias2 1y agoMaybe you are right, but sone things I really dislike are: - Getting rid of native SQLite in Chrome (Firefox was forced to follow), with the main reason is that ,,there are no 2 different implementations, all browsers use the same''. - While there is file system implementation, there's no mmap, so there is no fast app start (just have SQLite with mmap, nothing fancy). - No file system persistency guarantee, the OS can just wipe out the data - All the persistent page APIs are just super hard to use compared to simple HTML/javascript/css as they are in a different process and need communication...it's overcomplicated instead of embracing a simple page as an app as an option as well. You are right that WASM is a great improvement, and file system API is slowly coming back (still I'm not sure about mmap API which is crucial for fast app startup), but I'm talking about what was possible 10 years ago then reversed.
- streptomycin 1y ago> Getting rid of native SQLite in Chrome (Firefox was forced to follow), with the main reason is that ,,there are no 2 different implementations, all browsers use the same''. You have that backwards, it was Mozilla arguing against WebSQL (and never implementing it in Firefox in the first place) and Google was arguing for it. I agree with your point about file system persistence, that is probably the biggest limitation in web apps compared to native apps today. However again it was Google arguing in favor of the File System Access API (letting web apps read/write normal files) and Mozilla/Apple arguing against it and only supporting a neutered version (fake hidden files that the browser can delete whenever it wants).
- xiphias2 1y agoGreat, thanks for correcting me on the details
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]