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122 comments

  • The problem with Web Standards is that they're so complete, broad and complex that it's very hard as an independent team to get started writing a browser.

    You'd have so little daily active users compared to the titans products (Chromium, Gecko, WebKit) that even if you made something super good, it would still be hard to guarantee website compatibility without faking the user-agents.

    There's also a lot of complexity involved in writing a sandbox for every instance of a website (tabs or iframe) and sharing information between multiple process. I don't know how they do it in Chrome, but in Firefox they have a whole specification language for that which compiles to C++.

    You also have to recreate the DevTools and other tooling for developers to adopt your browser and for you to debug any issues with your DOM renderer...

    I love how much the web has to offer nowadays with technologies like WebRTC, WebSocket, Blobs, GamePad API, modern CSS3 but it has also the effect of locking us down into a tiny ecosystem.

    I really their should be legislation on what companies can do with their browser because they've become such an important piece of the internet so they should serve public good.

    I don't know how to make it happen and I don't even know if it's a good idea when you consider the governance issues it would bring for open-source project.

    I'm really passionate about this technology !

  • Unfortunately, there are only 3 companies developing browsers right now: Google, Apple and Mozilla.

    Apple's browsers are only available on Apple platforms. In fact, if you're on iOS you have no choice, you have to use Safari. Even browsers labelled as "Chrome" or "Firefox" are actually Safari under the hood on iOS. But, on any non Apple platform, you can't use Safari.

    Google is an ad company, so they don't want to allow ad blockers on their browser. So, it's a matter of time before every kind of ad blocking is disabled for Chrome users.

    Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google, so there's a limit as to what they can do without the funding getting cut off. They seem to be trying to find a way forward without Google, but the result, if anything is as bad as Google if not worse:

    "investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term;"

    https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/

    All these other browser people like are basically reskinned versions of Chrome or Firefox. They have a handful of people working on them. To actually develop a modern browser you need a big team. A modern browser basically has to be an OS capable of running everything from a 3d game engine, to a word processor, to a full featured debugger.

    It looks like it's only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads, because the only two companies that make multi-platform browsers depend on ads for their revenue, and both of them will have enormous expenses because they're obsessed with stupid projects like AI.

  • Vivaldi on Linux and Windows is still good in my experience, and so far uBlock Origin for manifest v2 still works. I hope they keep v2 support forever, forking completely if they must.

  • It's a good thing I stayed loyal to Firefox. Mainly due to my dislike of change lol, but I was forced to use Chrome and it felt ominous with its owner being Google.

122 comments