Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#211

Post by Shorel » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

Sylos wrote: post #95

CapacitorSet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.

It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.

As if no other city or country in the world had any competent developer willing to work with them.

Frankly, whoever solves the remote work 'problem' will make a lot of money.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#212

Post by hungerstrike » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

Chrome does exactly what I want, the way I want it. Mozilla/Firefox OTOH has failed to respect me and my OS time and time again.

Honestly, I'd rather see Mozilla go away and stop making software completely because I don't like them, their politics, the way they turn people into ideologues who beg you to use their inferior product or the way they do just about anything.

If the pain of everybody using the same browser is real, people will get around to building a worthy competitor to Chrome. I suspect that the issue is a bit overblown though.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#213

Post by loup-vaillant » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #206

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…

> 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…

> I'm against initiatives that resist technological progress

I dispute the notion that the evolution of the web is at all progress. It has nice things, but so far the main effects are ever increasing bloat and centralisation. There are simpler ways to do this stuff, we're just too caught up in path dependence to see or invent possible alternatives.

> we should be working on efforts to increase the abilities of independent contributors

Unless you mean to make them less independent (say by providing common libraries and rendering engines), then the only way forward is to increase everyone's abilities. This is already an ongoing effort, just see how many programming languages and methodologies are popping up every year.

> the web as a platform today is unfathomably better today than it was in the 90s

The web wasn't even a platform the 90's, of course it's a better platform now. However, it only became a platform by accident. This reminds me of C++'s accidentally Turing complete templates, which later spawned template meta-programming madness.

If a platform was design from the ground up as a platform, it would all be much simpler, perhaps even more capable. But no, we had to piggy back on whatever the market favoured at the time.

---

Here's what I think: a web-ish platform written today wouln't need more than 0.1% of Firefox's 35 million lines of code, or about 30 thousand lines. Or maybe 10 times that amount, to account for optimisation and long tail functionalities —that's still under 1%.

This even has been done. The STEPS projects at http://vpri.org is only 20K lines, including the compiler collection and editing tools. It even runs at acceptable speeds on a laptop.

That would be progress. That would spur the independence of contributors. Too bad the market just isn't ready for this. It probably never will be.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#214

Post by Endy » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

Sylos wrote: post #132

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…

The major issue there is that "Mozilla is developing" means that whatever browser discussed after that really is only as independent as the current Firefox, which is basically not Firefox anymore. It's "looks like Chrome, works like Chrome, branded as Firefox". So yeah, for the moment I guess Pale Moon is the best out there for me.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#215

Post by jacksmith21006 » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 5:40 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #141

Sylos wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Firefox 57, they're now essentially equivalent in terms of the security architecture. There's a small architectural difference with how tabs are sandboxed against one another. That is, Chrome starts a new process for every tab, unless it's on the same domain as another tab. Firefox by default only uses as many processes for tabs as you have processor cores and then round-robins tabs across those. This achieves e…

I believe Chrome has for a while been using much the same model as Firefox has recently taken up, not a new process for each tab. AMO’s lack of malware problem is simply because it’s not so popular—making addons was, before WebExtensions, decidedly harder, and the browser’s not as popular as Chrome, so why bother targeting it when there are bigger fish you can catch more easily?

No Chrome sandboxing is still ahead of Firefox but FF is getting closer.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#216

Post by Endy » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 5:42 PM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #74

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.

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

That's fine that there are four "major" engines. I'm looking for a minor one anyway, whose dev does not need nor want to become part of a major flagship product, or who at least isn't tied to Mozilla or Google. The lack of real development in the browser field is kind of appalling.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#217

Post by hungerstrike » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

inapis wrote: post #157

Jyaif wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really disagree with your argument - > -Apple limits what your app can do, e.g. apps can't spawn processes (FU Apple, this is bad for security/pricacy), What's the issue with that? Why would I want some random no-name devleoper randomly spawning processes on my device killing my battery life? How is it exclusively better for privacy? What prevents them from executing privacy-invading code as the separate process? >…

> Why would I want some random no-name devleoper randomly spawning processes on my device killing my battery life?

Why do you want Apple to be in control of your device though? Wouldn't you rather be able to let an app do something that it needs to, when you need it to? Or, would you honestly prefer Apple to make all of your decisions for you?

If you really want Apple to be in control of your devices and not you, that's fine... but can you understand why other people might not want that?

Are there any Apple decisions that you disagree with?

Also, how about a replacement for the most important apps?

    - Contacts
    - Phone Dialer
    - Messages
    - Safari

Can you even uninstall those? Are other apps even allowed to receive phone calls or SMS text? (To replace Safari - I'd require that it never get launched from a hyperlink in an SMS text message.)

I'd like to replace these because Apple only gives you the most bare-bones features for them and they strong-arm you into using Apple Maps and Safari from them. I'm guessing you're fine with that though.

> [Apple is the] least likely to pull shenanigans or gotcha's on their users.

Pffft. Do you know the history of Apple? Their whole business model is a shenanigan on the users. I look forward to when their time is over.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#218

Post by dingaling » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 6:15 PM UTC

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…

Browsers like Dillo and Netsurf are also excellent for browsing Facebook, who maintain a remarkably functional HTML-only version at mbasic.Facebook.com

The big advantage of such browsers being the zero-risk of JavaScript doing sneaky things ( like keylogging )

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#219

Post by Sylos » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

JeremyNT wrote: post #154

jimnotgym wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android for 'just looking things up'. It's perfect for Wikipedia and IMDB (when someone points at the film you are watching and asks who the actor is). I only use another browser if I want up keep the page. No cookies, no bookmarks, no trackers

Sadly, Focus appears to just be another Chrome skin with some ui and privacy tweaks, and I think it's pretty telling that Mozilla did this rather than actually use FF mobile as the basis for this product. If you want to encourage browser diversity it doesn't really help. I use FF Mobile because I want competition and I do like the features Firefox offers, but the performance and UX on Android are definitely lacking r…

Just go into Private Browsing in Android Firefox and you have essentially the same thing as Firefox Focus, except with Gecko underneath it and all the usual amenities of a full-featured browser.

Focus is meant for average users, who don't necessarily understand what Private Browsing does.

Having it as an Android Webview wrapper is nice, because it makes the APK really small. This way, users don't have to have two full browser APKs installed.

And well, it's not like it sways webpage owners one way or the other much, to have users use Firefox when they have all trackers and as a result essentially also all ads blocked. They don't make revenue off of those users, so why should they worry about making their webpage work for those users?

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#220

Post by remir » Sun, Dec 03, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

hungerstrike wrote: post #217

inapis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really disagree with your argument - > -Apple limits what your app can do, e.g. apps can't spawn processes (FU Apple, this is bad for security/pricacy), What's the issue with that? Why would I want some random no-name devleoper randomly spawning processes on my device killing my battery life? How is it exclusively better for privacy? What prevents them from executing privacy-invading code as the separate process? >…

> Why would I want some random no-name devleoper randomly spawning processes on my device killing my battery life? Why do you want Apple to be in control of your device though? Wouldn't you rather be able to let an app do something that it needs to, when you need it to? Or, would you honestly prefer Apple to make all of your decisions for you? If you really want Apple to be in control of your devices and not you, tha…

To be honest, I kinda like Apple's "walled garden" approach on some level. No perfect, not ideal for power-users, but for the general non-techy person, I think it's great. I don't have to worry about my kids installing some app that pretend to be WhatsApp while it's clearly not.

But yeah, I would like to be able to change default apps in iOS. That would be great.