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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#41

Post by moz23 »

Jaepa wrote: post #32
jstewartmobile wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read again. I doubted Mozilla Corp's "independence" in the first sentence. "not terribly open" in the last paragraph was in reference to the WHAT-WG group, which is "[m]ostly Google and Mozilla guys". From the posts in that group, those guys seem more like co-workers than competitors. For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating thing , it isn't hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-…

Would you rather have people in standards groups to act more like competitors instead of coworkers? Cause that seems like a really bad idea. As for: > For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating thing, it isn't hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy > edit: And apparently I have to have "hits" to my name to state that getting 85% of your revenue from Google puts your independen…

Citations for "cutting how much they were going to pay"?

Mozilla revenue is up, they're making a LOT of profit, and the Yahoo deal was supposed to be 5 years so they're not likely to be losing money by switching to Google: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-revenue-jump-fuels-its-fir...

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#42

Post by skrebbel »

manigandham wrote: post #37
lucaspiller wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a third major independent option: Microsoft Edge. I assume (like me) a lot web of developers aren’t using Windows, but we can at least help people out by making sure our applications work fine on those browsers. Since IE 9, with a polyfill, most things just work unless you need some very recent HTML5 APIs. Microsoft provides free VMs for testing different browsers here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/…

Except Edge doesnt even support basic things like Server-Sent Events: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... They also haven't actually replaced IE11 which still has plenty of usage out in the wild. MS had a good start but they continue to stumble in their efforts today. Firefox has done much better with 1/1000th of the resources which should say something.

To be fair, SSE never got much adoption to begin with. Their web socket support is top notch.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#43

Post by tombert »

hossbeast wrote: post #28
tombert wrote: post #16

About three years ago, I decided that I was going to build my own browser from scratch, and I thought it would be really easy to implement as long as I strictly followed the web standards. Within a few minutes, I got stuck with the fact that I could not get any performance out of even a simple attempt at a CSS engine. After about three days of mucking with that, I gave up on the project, and gained a lot more respect…

You had a running css engine in a few minutes?

Heh, bad wording; I should say that I had performance problems within a few minutes.

I did eventually get something that kind of worked, but that took about a day, and still suffered performance issues, probably because I had no idea what the hell I was doing (and still don't, really)

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#44

Post by erikbye »

mercurial wrote: post #30
jopsen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mozillia research is sort of doing it with gecko. But yeah, from scratch is hard... Google didn't even do that, they started from webkit.

With Gecko ? It's their original engine. You probably mean Servo (the experimental Rust engine).

I guess it's not wrong to call it their original engine, just remember it's a two-decades-old development that started at Netscape.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#45

Post by diminish »

steve19 wrote: post #6
cknight wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched back to Firefox 57 about a decade after abandoning it for Opera. I remember the advocacy movement around Firefox 1.0 which I was quite involved in. I thought (and still think) it was great. I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone ask…

Firefox on Android is so frustrating. Things like no swipe down to refresh, despite all other apps implementating that pattern. On my phone, scrolling by swiping is slow, it scrolls such a short distance. Meaning going down a long NH page takes many swipes. All other Android browsers seem to get it right. Fonts also seem "off". It's these small things that make the experience frustrating. I truly want to use it, but…

..Swipe down to refresh intervenes with google maps or canvas bad interactive content on firefox focus. I just opened a ticket.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#46

Post by erikbye »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #31
sverhagen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it just released for Android and iOS? (I get that that might not be what you meant...)

The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.

> The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons)

Which is why viewport values like maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable do not work on iOS10+, no matter the browser.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#47

Post by Vinnl »

nrhk wrote: post #20
baddox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.

Well you could also fork Chromium I guess.

Except that that doesn't really broaden the ecosystem, unfortunately.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#48

Post by Vinnl »

userbinator wrote: post #5
Santosh83 wrote: post #2

A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a…

...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps" and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused sites out there (including this one.) What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up wit…

The thing is that that, in turn, is somewhat of a reaction to people using native apps instead of the web, creating lock-in for other ecosystems.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#49

Post by Sylos »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #31
sverhagen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it just released for Android and iOS? (I get that that might not be what you meant...)

The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.

Yes, the Android-version is also just a Blink wrapper. It's almost impossible for Microsoft to port Trident/EdgeHTML to other operating systems, because it's so deeply integrated into Windows.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#50

Post by Vinnl »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #29
jopsen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know first hand that Mozilla is a highly competent organization, but it not an organization capable of keeping a nefarious secret :) Leadership at Mozilla have already shown themselves willing to break with Google. And I doubt it's any secret that they've been looking for alternative revenue sources. If you want to question Mozillas independence please bring something more substantive than baseless speculation.

It is no secret that for at least the past decade, the majority of Mozilla's revenue has been from search partnerships. In what bizzaro world can you derive the majority of your revenue from a thing while simultaneously declaring independence from it?

Apparently, this one, as they were doing it. What helps think about it is that the 'dependence' was a business transaction: Google paid Mozilla, and got something in return. Much like a startup being dependent on a single large customer yet still wanting to diversify.
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