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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#241

Post by lucb1e »

feelin_googley wrote: post #228

Annual salaries from 2015 (reportable compensation from IRS Form 990): Mitchell Baker, Chair $977,382 + $45,530 Bob Lisborne, Director $92,000 Mark Surman, Exec. Dir./President $170,699 + $40,602 Jim Cook, Treasurer $934,526 + $45,530 Angela Plohman, Secretary/VP Operations $121,322 + $30,342 Christopher Lawrence, VP Learning $153,492 + $62,538 An-Me Chung, Dir. Partnerships 154,946 + $72,672 Daniel Sinker, Dir. Part…

Regarding the top salaries, I found this comment interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836919

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#242

Post by rlanday »

esrauch wrote: post #116
hennsen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever tried to hire someone requiring less than or up to max say 20k for such a job? I wonder which qualifications that are that you find only in people asking for >50 or even 100k/month. I am from Europe so i might miss something that’s different in US. But 20k USD would make for a very good living here. Ok you only can afford one house with that an no 1000sqm villa and no Ferrari... but i state you don’t…

20k USD/month is in the range that Google/FB/Microsoft pays for direct managers of ~10 person teams: basically that would be the level of credentials that you would be competing for in that pay area.

That’s low for a manager. Many individual contributors make more than that at large companies.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#243

Post by gardnr »

gsnedders wrote: post #68
chungy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way back when, there were versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 for non-Windows OSes such as HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Mac OS (Classic and X both). It is not unreasonable that they could do it again.

Note those releases were based on an entirely different codebase to the Windows version of IE.

When you say "entirely different" you mean they didn't even share the same rendering engine?

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#244

Post by roca »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #151
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…

> 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 with and implementing as many complex features as possible (and advocating for their use in new sites), making it harder over time for smaller efforts at creating independent browsers to produce anything useful. Yeah, it's enough to be infuriating. I've recently been thinki…

The alternative to a "living document" is "we have a bunch of updates and errata, and you're going to have to piece together the current version yourself from many sources".

If you really need an unchanging version, download some version and use that.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#245

Post by roca »

dangoor wrote: post #193
ksec wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started before it was called Firefox, and it was similar story. I abandoned Firefox last year to the Chrome Opera, So i have been bitting my fingers for years, Firefox was slow, and I knew Chrome was better, and I had waited. I used to force the usage of Firefox as the resident IT, with over 150 computer's default browser and later grew to 250. But every year since the introduction of Chrome, I have had more resist…

I understand that this is the view you had from the outside, but I think it's incorrect as someone who was at Mozilla for nearly 4 years. > It was pure luck they had a small group of people crazy enough to work on Rust, and Servo as an experiment which later turned into what we had today, Quantum. This is the crux of it. You see this as luck, but it wasn't luck at all! Someone had to say "we're going to fund this cra…

Quite so. You don't accidentally pay people to work a project for years, and I can assure everyone from first-hand knowledge that what has happened was one of the desired possible outcomes from the very beginning of Rust and Servo.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#246

Post by rlanday »

ThomPete wrote: post #222

So here is a question. If one was to undertake the challenge of building a new browser how would you go about doing it conceptually? What would at least convince a small group of technically advanced users to adopt it?

You would probably want to build a browser on top of Chromium, like Opera does (and also what Microsoft is doing on Android), and would want to try differentiating based on user-facing features. You could also build on top of Gecko, but this doesn’t seem to be as popular. Building on WebKit probably doesn’t make sense because its corporate backer (Apple) mostly only cares about supporting macOS and iOS. Eventually, if you become big enough that you think it’d be better to be independent, you can fork Chromium.

This is basically the approach Google took with Chrome: they built on top of WebKit (which itself was originally an Apple fork of KHTML), then forked it eventually.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#247

Post by roca »

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…

Python's a very good example of the problems you get into with a single implementation defining the platform (by fiat, or de facto), even if it's controlled by a completely benign and incorruptible entity.

The problem is that then bugs in your implementation become part of the de facto standard that defines your platform. Downstream code is very likely to depend on those bugs. You can't fix those bugs without breaking things. Your platform accumulates warts at a higher rate than it otherwise would. Any attempt to make major changes to the platform implementation becomes incredibly difficult because of the need to maintain bug-for-bug compatibility.

All these things have clearly happened to Python. It's one reason why despite massive efforts over a long time, there is no fully compatible Python JIT today.

If you follow Chromium development you will quite often see developers consider whether it's going to be safe to fix some bug in Chromium's behavior. Quite often part of the justification that it is safe is "Firefox doesn't have this bug, so major Web sites probably don't depend on it".

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#248

Post by rlanday »

Endy wrote: post #216
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.

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.

Do you think Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft aren’t doing any “real development”? Did you miss all the stuff about Firefox Quantum? Or Microsoft Edge being released for the first time only a few years ago?

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#249

Post by roca »

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…

iOS and Android mitigate some of the problems by cutting off backwards compatibility at some point. "Yeah, your app broke in the new iOS/Android ... fix it". Python's tried some of that, but because people can carry on supporting/using Python 2, the result has been a crippling fork.

Linux kernel devs spend a lot of energy trying to maintain compatibility with warts, and still break things once in a while. Also the Linux kernel interface, while complex, is nowhere near as complex as the platform-level API for iOS/Android/Web.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#250

Post by hungerstrike »

skinnymuch wrote: post #238
hungerstrike wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're saying Mozilla is turning people into idealogues without joking? Besides the fact that people independently choose to be active, half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. So is Safari on Mac. Not sure about Edge as I haven't used it.

Mozilla obviously doesn't turn people into what they are already. It just attracts that certain type of person. My poor choice of words doesn't change the fact that Mozilla annoys me, but thanks for the correction...

> half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat.

They don't have to when the top comment patronizes everybody by telling them what's "ideal". Gimme a break!

> Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome.

No it's not.

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