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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#201

Post by dblohm7 »

cdancette wrote: post #63
steve19 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing that annoys me the most is to change tab: on chrome / brave we can just swipe the top bar and change tab. On firefox, we need to first click on the tab button, and then find the right tab by looking at a huge list of tabs. I find it much less practical and that's what got me back to chrome.

All you need to do is go to your awesome bar and type "%" as the first character, then space, then start typing the string you're looking for.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#202

Post by kodablah »

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…

Agreed, I've been pounding the "embeddability" drum for FF for a while. I'd love to easily use pieces in my own projects.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#203

Post by gsnedders »

roca wrote: post #111
markpapadakis wrote: post #79

I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I’d be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ). Of course, it’s likely that I am t…

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…

> 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.

Scope differences make it incredibly hard.

Plenty of people on the Blink team work on things like Skia, which neither the WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of (because they just leverage OS-specific APIs), or on their HTTP/TLS stack (again, neither WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of), etc.

Gecko is somewhere in a middle-ground; they rely on third party libraries (including Skia—does that make that part of the Chrome team Blink/Gecko developers?) but not quite as much as WebKit and EdgeHTML do.

Core web stuff? The Blink team is larger, yes, but by how much is a hard question.

FWIW, I believe the Gecko team is nowadays larger than the EdgeHTML team, but they're certainly close in size. (And close to the size of the old Presto team, which admittedly had a scope closer to that of the Blink team.)

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#204

Post by gsnedders »

btrask wrote: post #152
roca wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like there's a tendency to put browser developers on a pedestal. Browsers are large and complicated, and no, a single person cannot write a browser competitive with Chrome from scratch. On the other hand, a single person can probably write a browser competitive with Dillo, if they are sufficiently motivated. Browser developers are just as competent and incompetent as other professional native programmers. Ther…

There's a huge amount of fairly boring work to write a DOM implementation (if you want half the APIs the web expects to work with the right semantics, you can't use an existing library), and layout is incredibly hard to get right (especially in a web compatible way). I think it's totally doable for a single person to do HTML + CSS2.1, with no scripting support, especially if you're happy to leverage existing libraries.

The big difference with most existing browser developers is the majority know a lot of the web platform inside out—but that's mostly a matter of having worked on an implementation for a long time and having to worry about edge-cases and interactions no web developer would ever think of. There's certainly a few who have achieved a huge amount for individual developers—but that's not a trait unique to the browser sphere.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#205

Post by cdancette »

dblohm7 wrote: post #201
cdancette wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that annoys me the most is to change tab: on chrome / brave we can just swipe the top bar and change tab. On firefox, we need to first click on the tab button, and then find the right tab by looking at a huge list of tabs. I find it much less practical and that's what got me back to chrome.

All you need to do is go to your awesome bar and type "%" as the first character, then space, then start typing the string you're looking for.

Yeah but on mobile it's annoying to type % .. it's so much faster to just swipe the address bar

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#206

Post by csallen »

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…

> 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

Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction on my part, but I'm against initiatives that resist technological progress, including those that rail against modern web applications.

Not only do these initiatives seem doomed to lose against the nearly unstoppable forward march of technology, but they are coming at the problem from the wrong direction. If it's too hard for independent efforts to succeed, we should not be fighting in vain to hold back progress. Instead we should be working on efforts to increase the abilities of independent contributors. We should be making it easier for anyone to build a modern browser. That's something that more technologists could actually get behind.

Further, while there's nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, let's not forget how far things have come. Many instances of modern web applications are certainly flawed, broken, misguided, overkill. But the web as a platform today is unfathomably better today than it was in the 90s. The applications built on top of it have massively empowered individuals and augmented our productivity. And I'm happy that I can build for the web instead of for Windows.

The fact that some websites do a poor job using the new tools available is a small price to pay.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#207

Post by gsnedders »

robin_reala wrote: post #105
gsnedders wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, arguably started at DigitalStyle.

Can you expand? I thought I had a good grasp of Mozilla’s history but this is the first time I’ve heard of them.

So my understanding is following Netscape's acquisition of DigitalStyle, the decision was made to replace Netscape's existing layout engine with something based on what DigitalStyle had in their editor (which, unlike Netscape's existing one, supported things like reflow), and it was this combination that was open-sourced. Notably, it was only really the layout engine that was replaced: the HTML parser and the JS VM survived unchanged, hence the name NGLayout for what became Gecko.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#208

Post by pcwalton »

fooker wrote: post #136
pcwalton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was present for the initial Quantum discussions. The entire idea behind Quantum was to integrate the most mature part of Research's work into Firefox on a short time frame. Without that impetus, it's pretty safe to say there wouldn't have been a Quantum.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#209

Post by digi_owl »

Yes it is, because what we keep referring to as a browser has, thanks to commercial pressure, become a OS in its own right.

And rather than stop and ask if this is in any way sensible, they keep pushing more stuff, like USB and Bluetooth, into it.

Whenever i run into a site that is either just giving me a blank page or a error when i have JS turned off, i wonder when the train jumped the rails. And i fear it may well go as far back as the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#210

Post by pcwalton »

greggman wrote: post #156
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'm curious, why does the web need multiple independent client implementations? Note I'm not trolling, I'm seriously asking the question. I think it's assumed to be true but not necessarily true. I'm probably wrong. As a counter example AFAIK there is no python standard that lots of teams make competing implementations. There is basically one python and a few incomplete copies but those copies have little to no say i…

How would Stylo have been possible in the world where Chromium was the only browser engine?

Chromium has not, and will not, accept Rust code in the tree.

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