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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#121

Post by amelius »

adrianN wrote: post #89
rlv-dan wrote: post #40

This begs the question: Is it healthy that one of the most important technologies today (web) is also very complicated (=expensive) and thus effectively limiting number of players.

All of the most important technologies today are very complicated. Anything that has to do with computers, cars, airplanes, trains, almost every industrial process. Being complicated is basically one of the prerequisites for being "high" tech.

I think parent meant a different kind of "complicated". More like "overcomplicated".

If we want to move forward as a society, we better structure our tech in the simplest possible way. The difference with cars, airplanes, etc is that in a capitalistic world, an overcomplicated browser spec actually helps big players to keep their monopoly. That's what's wrong here.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#122

Post by [deleted] »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #81
pcwalton wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are exactly four major engines, each of which has a flagship browser: Blink/Chrome, WebKit/Safari, Gecko/Firefox, and EdgeHTML/Edge.

Wouldn't introduction of Servo make it five? Gecko is not going away yet, IIRC it's used in some browsers, like Pale Moon. https://www.palemoon.org/

[deleted]

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#123

Post by fastball »

nasso wrote: post #97
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…

I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on t…

As far as I can tell, anything Javascript heavy performs significantly worse on Quantum than on Chrome.

The benchmarks I've looked at seem to indicate that this shouldn't be the case, but I'm thinking maybe Google has put in some "real life application" optimizations for certain configurations that can't be measured easily with benchmarks? Maybe they've learned some lessons from Angular? Just spitballin' here.

Kinda like how Apple managed for a long time to make everything a lot more "buttery" than the competition, even though they usually pushed hardware with specs that aren't at the tippy top.

Additionally, I think whatever version of flash is bundled with Chrome is less CPU-inflaming than the actual current version of flash, as flash sites seem to perform worse on Quantum as well, and Quantum relies are your system-installed flash.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#124

Post by vkw111 »

jensv wrote: post #3

Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

What does she do? Warming a chair? Give orders?

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#125

Post by adventured »

baddox wrote: post #12
userbinator wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

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

Amazon and Facebook could both launch entirely new browsers. Spotlight it constantly on Amazon.com or across Facebook's properties as with Chrome on Google.com.

Facebook already has far more cash and profit than they know what to do with. $38 billion currently, rapidly climbing. They'll add ~$20 billion to that in 2018. They could do a new browser just for kicks if they wanted to, and they have the vast global reach to generate some uptake.

Whether either could claw meaningful share away from Chrome is an entirely different question.

Samsung, Tencent and Alibaba all have the resources to launch entirely new browsers if it made sense.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#126

Post by krapp »

captainmuon wrote: post #113
krapp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between static web documents and web apps isn't the set of HTML they use, it's just that the latter are designed to deeply integrate javascript (and/or, to futureproof this comment, WebAssembly) into their UI, rather than do all of the logic on the server between requests. The only way to ship a browser that doesn't render "web apps" would be to simply not support scripting of any kind. That would perm…

There is a subset of web pages that only use a subset of features - Hacker News is an example, but better examples would be Wikipedia, many news sites, documentation of all kinds, and so on. You have basically static HTML, and use JavaScript for 1) progressive enhancement and decoration (what used to be called "DHTML"), 2) ads, and 3) more and more for client side rendering. You can't do much about 3 right now, but I…

>I would view it as a guideline or a best practice, rather than a restriction. >I would definitely offer scripting, but just not all features.

That's a restriction. If site authors have to abide by that or else not have their content render in your browser, you're restricting their freedom to publish the content they want or make their own decisions about what code they choose to write.

But if you still have a "backup engine" that will run it anyway, then what's the point?

>I don't think this is hostile to developers at all, unless AMP is already hostile.

I would think Chrome was hostile if it gave preference to AMP over standard HTML. Those aren't decisions that browsers should make.

>Why can ads inject arbitrary javascript into my website?!

Because that's what the site authors decided to publish. Like it or not, that's the way the web is intended to work - you request a URL, you get back whatever the server decides that URL points to. Changing that dynamic would change the web at a fundamental level.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#127

Post by roca »

markpapadakis wrote: post #117
roca wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now. Comparisons with the past are meaningless because browsers are far more complex (and perform…

I never worked on a browser, though I did implement the HTML5 spec, twice, and I wrote a JS engine(compiler, runtime). I know that it was a lot easier because I could count on infromation and other advances that were available to me, and anyone else really, at the time, the kind of resources and information I probably wouildn't have had access to it("whats javascript?") 20+ years earlier. Browsers have evolved - beca…

Which part of the HTML5 spec, though? A parser? Or the whole thing, including DOM APIs and all the features like media elements and so on?

Even an HTML5 parser is harder than it looks to implement to the level needed for a browser. You have to build a proper DOM, you have to be secure against all kinds of fuzzing, you have to implement off-main-thread parsing and speculative readahead for performance, you have integrate it correctly the HTML5 event loop for document.write() etc, you have to support innerHTML and so on.

Likewise building a JS engine is impressive, but I do not believe a Web-compatible competitive-performance JS engine can be built by any single person.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#128

Post by qznc »

rtpg wrote: post #22

I feel like there's a golden opportunity here to have things like Firefox be broken up into more independent parts. We've already seen this in the JS engine space, though it's still pretty hard to integrate alternate JS engines into browsers. Having more and more of the app broken up makes it _much_ easier for contributors to come in and for work to be shared. We don't all need to write our own implementations of CSS…

The CSS engine just got replaced with a Rust implementation. Isn't that a sign that it is quite modular already?

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#129

Post by rwmj »

adventured wrote: post #125
baddox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Amazon and Facebook could both launch entirely new browsers. Spotlight it constantly on Amazon.com or across Facebook's properties as with Chrome on Google.com. Facebook already has far more cash and profit than they know what to do with. $38 billion currently, rapidly climbing. They'll add ~$20 billion to that in 2018. They could do a new browser just for kicks if they wanted to, and they have the vast global reach…

Alibaba already have their own browser of a sort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser). As I understand it, it's some kind of thin mobile browser which renders on the server side.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#130

Post by ksec »

Vinnl wrote: post #48
userbinator wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

Sorry if I sounded like a Hardcore Apple Fans, but if there is anything Steve Jobs taught us that lifted Apple from near Bankrupt to the World most valuable company, is that User experience matters.

Native Apps provided better UX, easier access on the Home Screen, and is generally 10x faster. What the web responded, or in your words a reaction to people using Native Apps, were to put more Ads, Creepy Ads, more JS tacking, more JS that many had no idea what they were doing, web notification pops up every time you visit a page, mandatory cookies notification, and all sort of other things that makes people no longer wants to consume anything on the Web anymore.

I will have to admit, even without those problem it will be a hard battle against Native Apps, but not only are they not improving the web, they are making it worst.

A Steve Jobs phase constantly pops up in my head when i see this, "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." It is true for the majority of the web as well.

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