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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#131

Post by bartread »

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.

That's true as far as it goes, but there are plenty of other reasons it's become so prevalent.

From a vendor's perspective:

- Web apps often have a reduced support burden relative to equivalent desktop apps because you have easier solutions for complete control over deployments: environments, live versions of software in play (often only one).

- Subscription payment models are convenient for vendors: they can help smooth out revenue but, critically, can also increase lifetime value of customers.

From the customer's perspective:

- One less software system to deploy, manage, and support,

- Managing backups is (should be!) taken care of for you,

- Lower on premise hardware costs,

- Your stuff is available from anywhere you have access to a browser,

- Can enable frictionless collaborative working.

With that said, it's arguable that a purely web-based SaaS model isn't necessarily a good fit:

- The problem of lock in is often worse. Even if you have options to export your data, is it in a format that makes it easy to import into a competing offering?

- Poor (or no) offline support, and unreliable operation with choppy connectivity.

- TCO can be higher, despite reduction in on premise support costs.

- Subscription payments can quickly mount up to death by a thousand cuts with respect to costs.

- Your data is not only offsite, but may not be stored in the same country or even on the same continent: a deal-breaker in some scenarios.

- Susceptibility to attack via DDoS, and other methods: at best service can be degraded or rendered unavailable, at worst your data can be compromised.

SaaS is like anything else: it can work really well (Office 365[1], GitHub, GMail), or it can be decidedly ropey (Google Docs), or anywhere in between.

[1] Within certain constraints - to me Office 365 still feels weak as a collaborative tool.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#132

Post by Sylos »

Endy wrote: post #72

Question: Is there actually a good Independent browser for Windows at this time? That is, not Firefox, not Chrome, not Chrome-Opera, not Vivaldi (alias Chrome-Opera-2), and also not based on Chromium, WebKit, Blink, Gecko, Trident, or any of the major bits of one of the corporate browsers? The closest that I can see is Pale Moon, but even they are just a "better" fork of Firefox.

You're asking for a completely new browser engine to be written. A browser with a completely new browser engine isn't going to be "good" for a long time, because most webpages will just be broken on it, until they've managed to implement some portion of the webstandards in a semi-decent way. The upfront-investment is ridiculous. Which is also why no one's done it since last millenium.

There's only one project, that I'm aware of, that's semi-seriously trying to write a new browser engine:

Mozilla is working on a completely new browser engine, called Servo, and they've been working on that since 2013 and it's still miles away from actually being usable for every-day-browsing.

It is good in other ways, really good performance and security, but if you prefer Pale Moon over Firefox, that's probably not even what you're looking for either.

Officially, it's a research project, some components from it have just recently been included into Firefox, and yeah, it's not even necessarily going to be turned into a complete browser.

Mr. pcwalton (who also replied to you) is one of the core-devs on Servo, so if you have questions about Servo, he's probably more qualified to answer those than I am.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#133

Post by jstewartmobile »

scrollaway wrote: post #119
jstewartmobile wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is super, super simple. When 80%+ of your revenue depends on a search engine, and you still have payroll to make, you are by definition dependent upon it, regardless of which one it happens to be at the time. The article title is "Maintaining an Independent Browser is Expensive". I'm just calling it out. From the tone of the replies, kicked off by a guy in the analytics industry who went so far as to google me for…

> From the tone of the replies, kicked off by a guy in the analytics industry who went so far as to google me for a comment, Upton Sinclair is screaming from the grave Good lord, get a hold of yourself. I work in the gaming industry (easy mistake to make, right?) and you seem to have read "hints" as "hits" and made up a whole scenario from that... I didn't Google you (nor would I care to), I just called out a complet…

You butchered my original comment to a point where I could only assume malice. As for "hints", my bad.

In 2017 they're going back to the 800lb gorilla of search and browsers for the bulk of their operating revenue, and I'm supposed to just accept that as "independence" and back off? There is a disconnect here that I'm obviously not going to bridge, so fine, they're independent! Go write their non-profit-for-profit chimera a check and "take back the web".

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#134

Post by markpapadakis »

roca wrote: post #127
markpapadakis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 integr…

The parser. Once for properly parsing HTML content, for a search engine, and the other for a framework used for saving pages (For an Instapaper like service). So it wasn't a big deal, but in both cases, a DOM was constructed and operations were executed against the DOM.

Nothing about that or the JS engine is impressive really. That was my point, more or less. Of course, there's a difference between building something that works, and something that works exceptionally works etc etc(all the stuff on top of that), but all told, I still don't think building a browser justifies assembling such a huge org, even if there is no reliance on third-party technologies.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#135

Post by manigandham »

skrebbel wrote: post #42
manigandham wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because Edge and IE11 exist, that's why. It's a fantastic standard that would make things much easier for many real-time apps. Even the dev tools in Edge are subpar compared to Chrome and Firefox.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#136

Post by fooker »

pcwalton wrote: post #62
staunch wrote: post #59

Mozilla does not need 1200 people to make Firefox. Mozilla has 1200 people because they blow all of their money irresponsibly, and that's apparently how many people you can hire with the bribes/revenue from Google it pays to maintain its monopoly. The chairwoman takes over $1M year? Why would an open source project need anyone who would be so unethical? This is like a city councilperson paying themselves $1M/year. It…

In that alternate reality, there would be no Rust and no Servo, which would mean there would be no Firefox Quantum (as well as no ripgrep, fd, exa, Parity, etc.)

Rust and Servo doesn't have much to do with Firefox 57/Quantum, it is still mostly Gecko inside.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#137

Post by chrismorgan »

tempestn wrote: post #38
mijowi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out FF nightly on Android. It has the new features. I use it and it's great

You're not going to install a nightly build on your friend's or mom's phone though. Your parent is already sold on FF; just waiting for Quantum to be released on Android before pushing it.

I can think of only one crash in the best part of a year of using Firefox Nightly exclusively on my phone. (Firefox Nightly on my laptop has been far more heavily used for a number of years and has had a handful of crashes and a few other issues, but still fewer crashes at least than I get the impression production Chrome has.)

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#138

Post by skrebbel »

manigandham wrote: post #135
skrebbel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because Edge and IE11 exist, that's why. It's a fantastic standard that would make things much easier for many real-time apps. Even the dev tools in Edge are subpar compared to Chrome and Firefox.

I'm not convinced. There's not-terribly-bad polyfills for SSE that go down to IE8 or so. Admittedly they don't support all details of SSE but they support a good chunk. I've used SSE pretty extensively in a number of projects and I can't say IE/Edge is why I stopped using it. It's just.. there's better options out there :-)

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#139

Post by rahkiin »

saagarjha wrote: post #73
techsupporter wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) So far, this is the only thing that really drives me bonkers about iOS and has for a long time. I'd love to be able to use an actual third-party browser with a third-party rendering engine, even if it meant having to install a particular signing certificate or some such. Doubly so for using browser-specific exte…

Besides the obvious benefits to Apple, I believe the reason behind this is because allowing JIT execution would open up a security risk.

Yes, because they would need to allow write-executable memory pages. Disallowing those closes the risk of executing non-verified code.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#140

Post by Jyaif »

ksec wrote: post #130
Vinnl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tac…

A couple of things about native iOS apps. These are all a result of Apple controlling the walled garden and wanting to increase its revenue:

-Apple limits what your app can do, e.g. apps can't spawn processes (FU Apple, this is bad for security/pricacy), can't do JIT compilation, can't download code, etc...

-Apple rejects apps that compete with their own.

-Apple removes apps that some governments want to have removed.

These are all things an open web avoids.

Now the fun thing is that nothing prevents Apple from turning the web into a walled garden since they don't allow any other rendering engine other than their own. The iOS ecosystem is really a beauty.

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