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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#271

Post by rlanday »

hennsen wrote: post #266
rlanday wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do they contribute that no one else could for this „low“ amount?

It’s not that “no one else” could do their job, but there’s not an unlimited supply of people who can meet the hiring bar at Google/Facebook/Microsoft, and there are a number of employers with deep pockets trying to hire them. Google in particular is known to offer people with competing offers a lot of money to keep them from going to other companies.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#272

Post by scrollaway »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #227
scrollaway wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bulk of Mozilla's revenue through 2019 is most likely going to come from Verizon. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-21/verizon-i... I'm not aware of a renewal of the Google financial partnership. Feel free to correct me if you find information that goes beyond 2011. There certainly could be a new deal with Google there but Mozilla is no…

Unlike Edge, Chrome, Opera, or Safari, which are obviously corporate assets, Mozilla is also part non-profit, and going by their PR, a defender of privacy and the open web. When money from search, which whittles away at privacy to deliver the right ads, or money from Verizon, who isn't a friend of privacy or the open web, is what keeps the lights on, don't you think that is just a little misleading to Joe Internet wh…

Did you read the links? It's not like Verizon wants to pay that money. I think you're confused about how incentives work...

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#273

Post by jstewartmobile »

scrollaway wrote: post #272
jstewartmobile wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Edge, Chrome, Opera, or Safari, which are obviously corporate assets, Mozilla is also part non-profit, and going by their PR, a defender of privacy and the open web. When money from search, which whittles away at privacy to deliver the right ads, or money from Verizon, who isn't a friend of privacy or the open web, is what keeps the lights on, don't you think that is just a little misleading to Joe Internet wh…

Did you read the links? It's not like Verizon wants to pay that money. I think you're confused about how incentives work...

Already read the first article. Didn't read the bloomberg article about the buyout provision, so my fault. Retracting the Verizon complaint.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#274

Post by metajack »

qznc wrote: post #128
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?

The CSS engine does not have a very modular boundary, because abstractions would kill the performance. It would not be very easy to use it in another browser.

However, lots of pieces of the CSS engine are modular and published as their own crates, like rust-cssparser, rust-selectors, etc.

Other Servo projects are more modular; WebRender in particular just has an IPC boundary with specific messages.

Servo layout would probably be more like CSS than WebRender in terms of modularity. So it's not perfect, but we're trying very hard!

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#275

Post by danblick »

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…

Yeah, "moving the web forward" sounds a lot like building barriers to entry. On the other hand, these browsers are open source software, so I'm not sure that's a great argument.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#276

Post by Endy »

rlanday wrote: post #248
Endy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Firefox Quantum, and just about everything to do with the browser since Firefox first introduced both their rapid release cycle and Australis, have left me cold. As far as the others, sure there's development - all in a negative direction away from simplicity and into a grotesque and bloated Web into one entirely built on corporate marketing ideas.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#277

Post by lucb1e »

Santosh83 wrote: post #146
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #84

How do Firefox and Chrome compare in respect of security?

tptacek mentioned a while back that while sandboxing for Firefox and Chrome are converging towards equivalence, there was still significant difference (in favour of Chrome) with regards to hardening measures.

I don't doubt that, but either browser is so secure that if you are afraid of being hacked through that, you're basically afraid of nation states. (Assuming you keep your browser up to date.) If they're interested in you, you'll have to take whole other security measures anyway. At that point I don't think using Chrome, Firefox or Edge makes a difference.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#278

Post by baddox »

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…

It’s true that we can look at most websites and generally agree on which ones are “light” (e.g. HN or Wikipedia) and which ones are “heavy” (e.g. Gmail or SoundCloud), but that doesn’t mean it would be easy to define a specification that would allow all and only light websites to be built.

An extremely light and content-focused spec like Gopher would exclude a lot of websites that we would consider light. Terms used to describe light subsets of web capabilities, like “DHTML,” do not appear to be well defined.

My initial attempt would be to exclude XHR/fetch, dynamic URL/history manipulation (window.history), and loading resources from other domains. But the latter would probably exclude things I don’t oppose (like CDNs) and things I don’t necessarily support but which would surely drastically impede adoption (like third party ads/analytics services).

Can you propose a better and more viable spec?

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#279

Post by baddox »

reificator wrote: post #145
captainmuon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think this is hostile to developers at all, unless AMP is already hostile. I think the prevailing opinion on Hacker News is exactly that.

My impression is that HN’s hostility toward AMP is caused less by the spec itself and more by Google’s leverage of its market power in search to incentivize AMP adoption, as well as its “web-breaking” behavior (like sending you to ugly and self-serving google.com/amp/whatever URLs).

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#280

Post by sjellis »

yipbun wrote: post #142
sjellis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation with Microsoft Edge is strange. Not only is Microsoft Edge not available for older versions of Windows, it is not supported on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, Windows 10 LTSB, or, most importantly, Windows Server editions. Virtual desktop hosting (VDI/terminal servers) has to be based on Windows Server (licensing requirement). This means that Edge can't actually be the only supported Microsoft browser for Wi…

This is pure speculation. Maybe they're doing something shady with edge that would get them in more trouble(or found out) if they put in enterprise systems, but they see the regular consumer market as easy targets who can't defend themselves. That might explain why they're pushing edge so hard.

To be honest, I think that it hurts Microsoft more than anyone else. It means that corporate desktops using VDI, and presumably Web kiosks, now have to use a third-party browser. In some cases, Edge literally can't be an organization-wide standard, and Internet Explorer is now frozen, so people will have to move away from it over time. For example, every VDI Windows desktop provided by AWS Workspaces is actually pre-loaded with Firefox.
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