[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why are we so at the mercy of Google and Moz...
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Ask HN: Why are we so at the mercy of Google and Mozilla for web
browsers?
I hear what seems many a valid complaint about Google's conflicts
of interest in managing Google Chrome and how it has down-stream
effects on Mozilla and other web browsers. What exactly is keeping
developers from making a fully featured open source web browser not
at the mercy of Google or the browser's developers?
Author : mattwilsonn888
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-01-18 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
| samwillis wrote:
| Whenever this question is asked Apple is left out, please
| remember that _all_ browsers on iOS are effectively Safari.
|
| In my market (mostly in the UK), 54% of transactions happen on a
| iOS device. Nearly 60% of transactions are using the Apple Webkit
| engine when you also count Safari on MacOS.
|
| Apple absolutely dominates browser engines, I cannot understand
| why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with
| Safari then test in Firefox/Chrome. Seems completely backwards to
| do your development mostly with Chrome.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I don't know any mac users that use Safari willingly anymore
| acdha wrote:
| You might want to look at the stats for whatever sites you
| work on. For the Mac users of public sites I work on Safari
| is roughly tied with Chrome with Firefox about 1/5th of
| either one.
| samwillis wrote:
| I do, not only for testing as I described but it gives me in
| _significantly_ more battery time (I believe about 10%).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Yes, the power savings and heat reduction are significant
| to a large enough degree that one has to wonder why Chrome
| and Firefox are so much worse in that way.
| jbc1 wrote:
| It's my primary browser because of battery life, tab bar and
| url bar being the same bar, and it's reader mode. I've tried
| a lot of chrome extensions and don't like any of them near as
| much as safari's built in one.
| cglong wrote:
| My mom does, but she's getting more and more frustrated with
| website incompatibilities. I think she knows the onus isn't
| on Apple, but she still thinks they need to invest more to
| keep up.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I do. Because for me Safari is a significantly better browser
| than the alternatives.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hmmm, every time I have used Safari I ended up frantically
| looking for a chrome icon. I would absolutely love it if
| Safari didn't suck.
|
| I just left an org where everyone used Macs (many
| thousands). Never saw anyone use Safari (except for one
| project manager expert beginner).
| dmitriid wrote:
| > every time I have used Safari I ended up frantically
| looking for a chrome icon
|
| No idea what you do in Safari that makes you go to
| Chrome.
|
| Well. I open the unbearable Google Cloud Console in
| Chrome. It's marginally faster there. And because I only
| keep one Google login in Chrome, since none of Google's
| properties seem to be able to figure out how to work with
| multiple Goigle accounts consistently.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their
| initial development with safari then test in Firefox/Chrome
|
| Probably because Safari's dev tools are notoriously worse than
| what Chrome and Firefox offers.
| dhosek wrote:
| Perhaps, but I still prefer to develop with Safari then test
| with FF/Chrome. I'll admit that I'm not necessarily doing
| cutting-edge JS stuff, but the Safari tools are good enough
| for my needs.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > Apple absolutely dominates browser engines
|
| Where?
|
| > In my market (mostly in the UK)
|
| Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a bunch
| of islands. Unless you are building super localised products,
| the world is a big place with a lot of people who don't use
| iOS.
|
| In case you didn't know.
| samwillis wrote:
| >> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines
|
| >Where?
|
| >> In my market (mostly in the UK)
|
| >Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a
| bunch of islands. Unless you are building super localised
| products, the world is a big place with a lot of people who
| don't use iOS.
|
| You have purposely quoted my comment out of order, implying
| that I'm unaware of how geography and market effect browser
| usage, when that's literally my point and Safari does
| dominate in some areas.
|
| >In case you didn't know.
|
| Is that tone really necessary?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 1. I am judged by how it behaves on Chrome.
|
| 2. Safari devtools are a lot worse than Chrome.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are absolute
| dogshit. God have mercy on your soul if you try to use the dev
| tools for Safari on the phone and/or a cross-platform web-based
| app on the phone. It crashes more often than not and locks up
| like crazy. I do everything in my power to avoid using Safari
| except at the last stage of testing.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are
| absolute dogshit.
|
| Which is really sad because Safari used to have near-best-in-
| class dev tools 10-12 years ago.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Apple absolutely dominates browser engines
|
| Actually, it doesn't. Look at the "usage relative" chart:
|
| https://caniuse.com/?search=localStorage
|
| Safari is the distant second option.
| samwillis wrote:
| These are my own metrics, which are most important to me.
| However I believe they are mostly representative of the UK
| consumer e-commerce market.
|
| Obviously if I was building something like an
| enterprise/business SASS web app that was mostly used on
| desktop it would be a different story and Chrome would
| probably dominate.
|
| My point is people regularly forget about Apple WebKit (due
| to iOS) in these sorts of discussions.
|
| When it comes to deciding how to test your site and choosing
| which to use as your "primary" browser while developing, I
| beleve you should use the one the majority of _your_
| customers are using. For us (and allot of people) that 's
| Safari but use your own (not global average) metrics.
| dathinab wrote:
| Because for anything beyond basic website Safari is a buggy
| mess, and requires a Mac and maybe had less good dev tooling.
| acdha wrote:
| This is hyperbole: if you are developing against web
| standards, most things work compatibly in all browsers now.
| In my experience, it's a bit more likely that you'll find a
| problem with Safari than Chrome or Firefox but not enormously
| so; the worst I've found are typically cases where someone
| only developed in Chrome and ended up relying on the non-
| standard API they started with rather than the final standard
| version.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Because for anything beyond basic website Safari is a buggy
| mess
|
| As a person who uses Safari as the main browser, I call
| bullshit.
| judge2020 wrote:
| IMO it seems like "all browsers on iOS are Safari" isn't that
| big of a deal because 'browsers' on iOS still get to throw all
| their own features and sync services into their browser app.
| It'd be like saying you wish you didn't have to use Windows'
| window APIs to create windows or wished you could avoid UIKit
| to do anything on iOS.
| samwillis wrote:
| This is conflating "Browser Chrome/UI" and "Browser Rendering
| Engine", from a developers/business (and a web standards)
| perspective the rendering engine is what matters. From that
| perspective all bowsers "engines" on iOS are Safari/Webkit.
| judge2020 wrote:
| From a purely business standpoint, the UI really is all
| that matters. Users don't choose firefox over Chrome just
| because FF has CSS cascade layers[0] (for example), they
| choose it because they think the sync/PW manager is better
| for them, or they might like the look of it more compared
| to alternatives.
|
| 0: https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-layers
| debaserab2 wrote:
| No, they choose Chrome because it doesn't crash and
| pretty much works everywhere, which has everything to do
| with the underlying tech.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere,
| and Safari doesn't crash (although it only works on
| Darwin); that doesn't sound like a differentiator.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere
|
| Hell, it works more "everywhere" than Chromium (let alone
| Chrome) does.
| samwillis wrote:
| That might well be why a user chooses it, even on iOS.
| But from my perspective as a business owner and
| developer, on iOS Chrome is Safari no matter what. When I
| test my site for use on iOS, I test in Safari. Which
| variant they use is irrelevant.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I quite like Safari as an end user, but I do tend to do most of
| my development/manual testing on Chrome first because I just
| plain don't understand Safari's dev tools. If I could just
| attach Chrome's debugger, I'd happily use Safari more for dev.
| em-bee wrote:
| browsers have taken the place of operating systems.
|
| why are we at the mercy of windows and mac os? alternative
| operating systems exist, just like alternative operating systems
| exist. but their marketshare is small.
| valgor wrote:
| Just looking at Firefox's docs[0]: "The clone can take from 40
| minutes to two hours (depending on your connection) and the
| repository should be less than 5GB (~ 20GB after the build)."
|
| It would take some time (to say the least) to even start building
| a new browser capable of what Firefox can do given that size.
|
| [0] https://firefox-source-
| docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...
| elldoubleyew wrote:
| Maintaining compatibility in web apps is a problem thats mostly
| been irradiated since MS finally dropped IE. In terms of
| architectural decisions you are going to end up very closely tied
| to Googles design decisions if you want to maintain full
| compatibility going forward.
|
| Theres really no winning here, FF already has to follow in
| Chromes footsteps because of how dominant they are in the market.
| They have all the decision making power on "what the web
| supports".
| melissalobos wrote:
| > What exactly is keeping developers from making a fully featured
| ... web browser ... ?
|
| I think the biggest issue is the complexity and scope of work. If
| you want a web browser, I can make you one over the weekend, it
| just will only work with a tiny subset of pages. To fully handle
| every website is so hard even Mozilla gave up on their rewrite of
| their engine, Servo. If it was easy, they probably would have
| finished.
|
| If you are suggesting, "Why don't we all pay a bunch of
| progammers to make the world's best browser that is everything I
| want?", you can try, but everyone has different ideals about what
| a browser should be.
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| While servo shares an ecosystem with Firefox it is far more
| independent than chromium is so I would suggest it is the most
| likely emerging alternative browser engine and browsers built on
| it could become roughly as different from firefox as safari is to
| chrome.
|
| It's not like other areas are so different, the number of
| compilers that are keeping up with LLVM and GCC has dwindled to
| the point that I can't name one without checking if it is EoL.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| The complexity equivalent to regulatory capture. I once got
| banned from /r/firefox for implying intent on googles behalf
| here. Apparently that is a conspiracy theory.
|
| In the end there are however clear incentives and profiteers of
| the development. Google has an incentive to keep the web complex
| enough to the point where they are the monopoly. Same goes for
| governments and complexity of security mechanisms.
|
| How ever we got here, now google is the internet and security is
| achieved by things like TLS. Its inefficiencies that are
| profitable for existing power structures.
|
| Which also makes it a lucky coincidence that mozilla is behaving
| as user -unfriendly as they do.
| dathinab wrote:
| Google doesn't need to bother with intentionally adding
| complexity. That's happening by itself just fine.
|
| They just need to not aggressively fight complexity.
|
| And calling TLS a inefficiency that is profitable for existing
| power structures.
|
| Or implying that Mozillas user unfriendlyness is a lucky
| coincidence.
|
| Sounds quite a lot like conspiracy theories to be honest.
|
| I mean I wouldn't even call most of the recent moves Mozilla
| did user unfriendly. Depending on the user they target they
| weren't. They just made the mistake to forget that many of
| their "simple" users are there due to their "tech enthusiast"
| users... A mistake easy to do is you mainly look at statistics.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Increasing complexity has these effects intent or not. I
| think the description of complexity capture still fits. Its a
| situation that is beneficial for google so they are a
| unlikely source for a fix here. And like others in the thread
| pointed out, the entry hurdle is too large for new
| competition. The only way out is with an alternative without
| the complexity.
|
| I am going to stick with the TLS part though. The more
| complexity you add in crypto the less safe it becomes. Adding
| unnecessary complexity weakens the entire solution. And the
| current "is" situation is certificate authorities and man in
| the middle attacks. Not to mention overblown implementation
| you have to patch till the end of time.
|
| edit: I think its also not a surprise that the question boils
| down to complexity. I would argue its the big open question
| of our time. We keep building till the negative consequences
| can no longer be dealt with through technology alone.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I would imagine it's regulatory capture by accident - Chrome
| constantly gets requests from developers (which includes big
| corporations) to add features, so I imagine saying 'no'
| requires a lot of user research to back up why users/developers
| actually don't want a feature.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Embrace
|
| Extend
|
| Extinguish
| kroltan wrote:
| 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.
| jasode wrote:
| _> 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
|
| 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.
| sp332 wrote:
| Gecko is just relatively unfriendly to embed in an app.
| That's one reason Mozilla is working on Servo.
| sb057 wrote:
| Mozilla axed the Servo team and the project is dead in the
| water as far as anyone can tell.
| duped wrote:
| Mozilla laid off the Servo team over a year ago, and it was
| never more friendly to embed
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Servo is finished. A debugger tool, Replay.io, featured
| here, that I use, is a Firefox/Gecko fork. Which is nice.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| This is bigger than some think. There were a lot more Gecko
| browsers back when you didn't have to buy into
| XUL/XULRunner or fork Firefox to use it. RIP Camino and
| K-Meleon.
| easrng wrote:
| There's still Tor browser which is a hardened Firefox fork.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > 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.
| swills wrote:
| You're not using open source code to watch Widevine.
| debugnik wrote:
| 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.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > 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)
| JALTU wrote:
| 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.
| ozten wrote:
| 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
| codegeek wrote:
| 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.
| agentultra wrote:
| The standards. Google (and the others) have introduced so many
| that implementing a conforming browser from scratch is basically
| impossible.
| rambojazz wrote:
| Did you try making one? Did you try paying somebody else to do
| one?
| 1_player wrote:
| We are at the mercy of Google. Mozilla is a non-entity at this
| point, getting a fat paycheck from GOOG and spending it on inane
| initiatives.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| There's also Apple developing WebKit on iOS and macOS, but they
| are more "follower" than "innovator."
| cronix wrote:
| They're also obstructionist and don't implement standards
| because they could harm the app store, like PWA.
| dmitriid wrote:
| There's no such thing as "PWA". There's half a dozen to a
| dozen disparate APIs, and every PWA proponent has their own
| list of what they consider PWA support.
|
| However, Safari has had support for basically everything
| you need for a PWA except, thank god, notifications.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| For how many websites use notifications unnecessarily...
| I have a hard time feeling sorry for anyone complaining
| about how they can only do notifications from an app
| (which Apple could review).
| bserge wrote:
| rob_c wrote:
| Mozilla, lol. been a while since I've seen that installed except
| for debugging a nasty bug in Chrome
| skinnymuch wrote:
| A few thoughts.
|
| I responded to a nested comment elsewhere saying I have seen one
| Firefox fork in 2021. Replay.io. A neat web debugger featured
| here.
|
| I was mildly surprised Microsoft went with Chromium. Not forking
| Gecko or some mix of stuff that are not Blink. Or even Blink
| itself. I may be incorrect here, and maybe the separation of
| engine and browser is not as big as I'm thinking, but every major
| Chromium based browser including Edge are forks of Chromium, not
| just Blink. I don't know how big of a difference that is.
|
| I wonder what could have been if Microsoft had moved on from
| Trident Edge earlier. Say internally two years earlier than our
| timeline. If they still would have gone the Chromium route. With
| more time, they could've ironed out enough issues like Netflix
| videos and Firefox. Microsoft may have had enough of being the
| butt of jokes, especially, by people in tech and geek circles,
| and wouldn't want to try anything remotely outside the norm (aka
| Chromium). Putting aside XUL extensions, the other dismissal by
| people is Firefox still having far fewer extensions than
| Chromium. Even with all three major browsers/engines using web
| extension api now. Msft may have not wanted to deal with the PR
| of that either.
|
| It would be really nice if Gecko and its future had Microsoft
| too. I'm sure some would say they'd rather the behemoth that is
| Microsoft not be allied and working on Gecko/Firefox. Yet It has
| to be better than the current situation. Unless Microsoft forks
| Blink and has their own engine in the future.
|
| Apple never putting any effort into the Windows Safari app, no
| less, an Android version is also a bummer.
|
| The final bummer: Firefox and Mozilla getting so much crap from
| tech and geek communities. I never looked up how they spend their
| money, but being so cynically against Firefox's every minor
| possible misstep is not helping.
|
| This comment may appear to be an apologist for Microsoft, Apple,
| Mozilla. It's not that. Firefox continues to lose market share.
| Safari is sticking to its 2.5 OSes (if iOS and iPadOS are 1.5)
| and i believe have a better chance of losing ground unless
| something like their web extension library quickly grows or is
| able to use most Chromium extensions. All this to say. My focus
| is on Chromium not having a 90%+ market share on the three
| desktop browsers and 95%+ on Android.
|
| And yes Apple not allowing competing browser engines on iOS is
| lame.
| easrng wrote:
| Tor Browser is also a Firefox fork.
| gtk40 wrote:
| Apple's Safari also uses a distinct rendering engine, Webkit.
| Chrome is based on Blink which was forked from Webkit and the two
| are quite different now, including in terms of supported
| features.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Why are we at the mercy of ...
|
| We aren't at anyone's mercy.
|
| Nobody is forcing us to use browsers from google or Mozilla.
|
| We are all free to implement our own UA. The specs are all open
| standards.
|
| What stops us from writing browsers is the sheer volume of time
| and effort required - hundreds of thousands of hours of highly
| skilled work. That is all.
|
| In the absence of such an effort, we would be left high and dry,
| with no way to experience the web.
|
| Fortunately, that isn't the case, because some others have done
| the work and allow us to use their browsers.
|
| For that, we might feel grateful.
|
| We might also be wary, and try to be aware of any adverse
| consequences of using someone else's thing. That's common sense,
| but it is still not a case of being at someone's mercy. That
| situation loomed when one company sought to control the standards
| for the web as well as the implementation, but what we have today
| is different to that.
| tzs wrote:
| The specs are open standards, but do the specs specific enough
| to actually do something that would work in practice?
|
| By "work in practice" I mean handle most sites that people
| actually visit and display them almost identically to the way
| Chrome and Firefox do. If your new browser doesn't do the same
| thing as Chrome and Firefox on those sites, the users are going
| to perceive it as your browser sucking.
|
| If Chrome and Firefox deviate from the spec in some way, you
| will have to match that deviation.
|
| If there is something not covered in the spec but that browser
| have to deal with (such as handling malformed HTML, which a lot
| of sites have), you will have to match what Chrome and Firefox
| do there.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| This feels like saying that you're not forced to be subject to
| the laws of your country, because you could always go find an
| unclaimed island and create your own country. At some point the
| practical impediments are such that yes, we are at their mercy.
| And no, Google at least does not deserve any gratitude for
| creating a more efficient ad delivery machine (what, you think
| they provide a browser out of the goodness of their hearts?).
| wombatmobile wrote:
| You're not stuck in some evil country. You have Mozilla. If
| you want to improve it, you can submit code to it. Or start a
| new browser project by rounding up a dozen friends who feel
| the same way you do and going for it. If you're not a
| software engineer, you can be an evangelist who inspires
| software engineers. What is stopping you from working towards
| your own ideals?
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Too much barriers to entry, not enough incentives.
|
| Building a Chrome competing browser from scratch is probably as
| hard as building a production ready GUI OS, maybe harder.
|
| It's hard to get money from it, look at Brave.
| [deleted]
| YATA0 wrote:
| Because writing operating systems is difficult.
| blunte wrote:
| It takes a huge, lengthy effort to make a browser that is close
| enough to standards compliance and performant enough that people
| would be happy using it.
|
| Even if you do all those things, there's little guarantee that
| your efforts would be noticed by many people, since you would
| need to do a LOT of marketing (especially to get your browser
| installed by default in MS/macOS worlds).
|
| The costs are just not worth the risk-adjusted rewards.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| The web browser went from being a way to browse hyperlinked
| documents to a virtual machine used for application development.
| The scope for both has ballooned to the point where you would
| need a large team and some kind of feature to attract enough
| users to make it worth building something new.
| irrational wrote:
| Shouldn't the title be "Why are we so at the mercy of Google for
| web browsers?" since Google is the one that financially pays for
| Mozilla to develop Firefox? If Google were to pull their funding,
| Firefox would cease to exist.
|
| Or maybe it should really be "Why are we so at the mercy of
| Google and Apple for web browsers?" Since Safari is really the
| only other mainstream browser that is not entirely under Google's
| thumb.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| There's a huge barrier to entry if you start from scratch. You
| can fork an existing browser of course, but what would you change
| if you could so?
|
| It seems difficult for a browser to differentiate itself these
| days, as the existing ones have had the time to build out fairly
| complete feature sets, and they can just copy each other if there
| is some big new idea.
| powerslacker wrote:
| Chrome has such a market dominance that it effectively determines
| what 'fully featured' means. Regardless of what the specs say, if
| something works a certain way in Chrome the layman's expectation
| is that it _should_ work the same way in every other browser.
|
| > What keeps developers from building an open source alternative?
|
| Well I can't speak for all software developers but I can tell you
| that for me the juice to squeeze ratio isn't in a good place. I
| already have a job and it takes up most of my time. The open
| source movement has turned out to be unsustainable in my eyes
| since its ideological roots are easily subverted by the project
| sponsors. Meanwhile commercial closed source software is only
| viable if you can find paying customers. Virtually no one is
| willing to shell out for a web browser since there are highly
| useful 'free' alternatives. Certainly I find it troubling that
| virtually all the data in the world is being collected, collated,
| and sold. Most folks don't seem to care enough about the privacy
| concerns to open up their wallets though. Google has effectively
| 'won' the browser wars barring a government solution. So why
| should I or any other software engineer enter into a David v.
| Goliath fight for virtually no pay or appreciation when I could
| go work on the next big web app and make a small fortune instead?
| chasil wrote:
| RedHat still offers Konqueror (Safari's father, and Chrome's
| grandfather) in their repositories. I think that would likely be
| a better base to revive a community browser.
|
| After some discussion of suckless.org last week, I decided to
| load "surf," the suckless webkit browser, on OpenBSD.
|
| The URL appears to be specified only on the command line, not in
| the GUI (the Ctrl-G sequence in the manual page does not appear
| to work). I can't get it to accept a self-signed cert (easy in
| any other browser). No back/forward button in the default GUI,
| and I can't get them to come up.
|
| Browsers are hard, and they require a funded and dedicated
| organization to maintain them.
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| From time to time I use surf, but it isn't a fair example of
| what is hard. Suckless.org's philosophy means you may need to
| recompile for any configuration change and something like
| trusting a self-signed cert is often done via configuration.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Because we stomped on Microsoft for providing a web browser?
| gnu8 wrote:
| Microsoft's track record permanently disqualifies them from
| providing a web browser.
| webwanderings wrote:
| Recently started noticing that they (MS) shoved their mobile
| Edge browser into the Outlook app in iOS. It was consistently
| nagging to just activate (whenever any URL is clicked from an
| email). It was time to say goodby to the Outlook app.
|
| No disrespect to MS of course, but nobody needs another
| browser by force when one is already installed natively.
| gnu8 wrote:
| If you have to twist people's arms to get them to use
| something it means they don't fucking want it. I am
| surprised that Microsoft hasn't stooped down to sending out
| junk mail on paper begging people to use Edge.
| axegon_ wrote:
| The simple answer is, browsers are brutally hard. Browsers have
| to support an almost infinite amount of instructions, whether
| it's html, css, js and now wasm, not to mention the insane
| amounts of apis, protocols and so on. I mean just open the
| developer tools and think of the insane amount of work that would
| have to go into developing something like this. Even Microsoft
| with thousands of developers at their disposal and finances to
| double them with a snap of a finger, figured that it's not worth
| developing a browser engine in-house. That alone speaks volumes.
| db48x wrote:
| Have you started such a project yourself? Have you joined one
| that already exists, such as Nyxt?
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Nyxt is using existing web engines, so it's not really a
| solution
| duped wrote:
| It makes sense once you accept that a browser engine is roughly
| equivalent in scale and goals of the userland for a modern
| desktop OS.
| vidanay wrote:
| Possibly more.
| endisneigh wrote:
| The answer to this question is the same answer to: Why did Chrome
| displace Firefox?
| guidovranken wrote:
| Developing a modern feature-rich browser is a gargantuan task and
| you need many skilled (expensive) developers to work on it;
| easily millions of USD yearly in salaries alone. Some donations
| here and there won't cut it, you basically need FAANG money to do
| it. Additionally, at least the last time I checked, Mozilla has
| made it impossible to donate to Firefox development; donations go
| to their activism branch, not browser dev [1]. In 2020 they also
| fired 25% of their work force [2]. They'll probably sunset the
| product altogether within a few years and that leaves us with an
| ever-greater market share of Chrome and derivatives, and from
| here on out it's hard to conceive of a viable strategy to develop
| an independent browser. Maybe a government or EU could do it, but
| that comes with its own set of problems.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
|
| [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2020/08/firef...
| mwattsun wrote:
| See: How come an internet browser is millions of code lines?
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-come-an-internet-browser-is-millio...
| travisporter wrote:
| Quoted from Lam Luu above (in case you don't have quora login):
|
| Let's do some accounting. A (quasi) modern browser must:
|
| Parse 4 different languages: HTTP, HTML, javascript, and CSS
|
| Encrypt and decrypt SSL (multiple versions of SSL, in fact).
|
| Deal with network.
|
| Act as first and most important defender of user's security.
|
| Deal with graphics (e.g. win32, Xorg, etc.)
|
| Layout HTML and CSS.
|
| Interpret Javascript.
|
| Deal with local storage.
|
| The above list is just the bare minimum. A regular modern
| browser also:
|
| Has plug-in systems (more difficult to design than most people
| think).
|
| Stores history and favorites. Syncs them across different
| devices, too.
|
| Supports multiple tabs at the same time. "Incognito" mode.
|
| Stores passwords.
|
| Provides GPS, webcam, and microphone support (HTML5).
|
| Stores and recovers session in case of crashing.
|
| Checks for upgrade and installs itself as needed.
|
| Do all of the above fast fast fast.
|
| I mean, any of the above items (in both list) would require at
| least tens of thousands of line of code to do right. Yes, even
| network programming. Effective and fault-tolerant handling of
| network is very very hard.
|
| And this is just the bird-eye level of looking. Each item can
| be split into smaller items, each of which is major in their
| own right. For example, HTTP has multiple versions, and a web
| browser has to deal with as many as possible. Javascript is,
| well, no comment. HTML is a *** mess, to put it mildly. SSL has
| multiple versions, each of which has its own bugs to contend
| with.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I did not need a quora login to read that.
|
| What could be the difference? Location?
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| Quora blocks you after you view X amount of questions,
| unless you signup/login.
|
| I just block cookies on Quora and it works.
| nsgi wrote:
| Possibly A/B tests or referrer
| vidanay wrote:
| As a developer, I will never work on two things: Life
| critical software (medical devices, etc) and a web browser.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| If medical devices are like avionics, life critical
| software is actually pretty boring. And it is probably a
| good thing.
|
| I definitely didn't have the feeling that "if I get that
| wrong, someone will die". Yes, it is definitely true that
| people may die, but responsibility is so diluted that if
| feels so foreign. You are given specifications that are
| extremely detailed, you implement them, all the fancy stuff
| is banned. You freeze the version, then someone reads the
| specs, write the tests, pass the tests, weeks later, they
| discover a problem in the specs, update the specs, update
| the code, update the tests, freeze, more testing, etc...
| Refactoring? Don't even think about it. Continuous
| integration? Sure, but that won't update your documentation
| signed by 15 different people that is necessary for
| certification. The process is so mind numbing and tedious
| that the fact that there are lives on the line is the only
| motivation. And even with that, many people simply don't
| give a fuck (and it is as scary as is sounds).
|
| When the software is finally in production, if there is a
| problem, it passed through so many hands that no one and
| everyone is responsible at the same time.
| ska wrote:
| medical devices, at least, can be really rewarding work.
| Tade0 wrote:
| They're definitely more fun than the regular stuff,
| because you're dealing with the messy reality of how the
| human body works.
| [deleted]
| floxy wrote:
| I wonder how many lines of code were in the QNX 1.44MB demo
| disk, which was a bootable floppy that included a javascript
| enabled browser, hardware drivers for video, networking,
| windowed graphics, etc.
|
| http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
| Yoric wrote:
| As a side-note, the web has grown several orders of magnitude
| more complicated since then. I'm willing to be that every
| single codec is more complicated than the JS VM they used to
| ship. JavaScript JITs are scary beasts, too, themselves
| several orders of magnitude larger than a simple JS
| interpreter, etc.
|
| Even support for Unicode is so complicated it's scary.
| notriddle wrote:
| Also, web browsers from that era were very insecure. The
| "You Are an Idiot" Trojan was from that era.
|
| Web browsers with the same featureset, but developed to
| modern security standards, would be nigh impregnable.
| Unfortunately, the market has a certain level of tolerance
| for holes, and that tolerance level isn't zero, so the
| extra "budget" gained by sandboxing, fuzzing, ASLR, and
| safe C++ practices, gets invested into new features instead
| of left on the table.
| Isamu wrote:
| Because we were at the mercy of NCSA Mosaic, Netscape launched as
| a Mosaic killer. Then as Microsoft awoke in alarm because they
| were at the mercy of Netscape they launched Internet Explorer,
| effectively killing Netscape which spun out Firefox in response.
| Google became alarmed by the prospect of being at the mercy of
| Microsoft and so launched Chrome.
| tmcw wrote:
| What everyone else has said about why there are so few new
| cleanroom browsers. If you're looking for one of the few examples
| that isn't based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit, it's Flow.
| https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
| foxfluff wrote:
| The web is too complex, and also a moving target. You don't just
| write a browser and be done with it.
|
| Are you prepared to devote your entire life to it? Why not?
| Shadonototra wrote:
| We are not at the mercy of Mozilla
|
| It's Chrome/Chromium-variants vs Safari
|
| Firefox lost the war many years ago
|
| Opera was the best browser imo, i wish it took off, nowadays it's
| just a chromium variant; wich is sad
| kome wrote:
| We should re-focus the web on html+css and server side stuff and
| less on JS and other client side crap.
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