Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 310 posts

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#181

Post by kevincox »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #175

I wrote my own browser a few years back and it was quite challenging/fun trying to figure out how to do basic browser things. You can check it out here: https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries Since then, I’ve been using Opera, then Vivaldi, and now Firefox, taking notes of how certain things are done. Lately, I’ve been thinking about using Servo as my base insead of Electron and doing a whole rewrite.

This article is talking about a browser engine, now a UI. Creating an independent UI is considerable less work (although it still takes considerable effort do to a good job of course).

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#182

Post by tfha »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #171
greggman wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As soon as the binaries start betraying their user, there needs to be an alternative. Open source goes a long way to prevent the people in defacto control from adding things like requiring unnecessary accounts, naggers, ads, telemetry, backdoors, excessive bloat, etc. But sometimes the maintainers can't be reasoned with beyond a tolerable point and a lot of software and people already rely on it heavily. If the thing…

And in fact, a viable competitor alone is often enough to stop abusive behavior from the market leader. If the market leader knows that they will quickly use market share if they start abusing the users, they will not abuse the users.

So a competitor like Linux or Firefox is helpful even if market share never gets very high.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#183

Post by amelius »

madeofpalk wrote: post #173
amelius wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a difficult question for which there are probably many answers, so here's my attempt at it. One first insight: we don't need the "semantic web" because Machine Learning can recover semantics. (This is also how Google's webcrawler views the web, so why not apply it to browsers too? People mix up semantics and formatting too often for the "semantic web" to be a useful concept). Another thing to realize is that o…

> Personally, I long for a world where formatting a document or showing a video on a computer screen is not considered "high tech". And this might be the way towards it. Okay so here's the thing. Web pages do a lot more than just 'formatting a document' or showing a video. Any serious talk about the web platform has to acknowledge the that that it's an 'application platform' that is more than just an .rtf file.

Yes, but do you consider launching an app "high tech"? If yes, then that must change, otherwise we'll never reach a higher level of enlightenment.

So what I wanted to say is that the "high tech" is currently not as much in the functionality, as it is in the software engineering effort to reach that functionality.

Also, the paragraph after the sentence that you quoted addresses web-apps, if that's what you are concerned about.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#184

Post by tfha »

verroq wrote: post #174
greggman wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think there is a need, however market forces will ensure that competition exists. If the incumbent starts to betray the user alternatives will automatically arise.

That's optimistic and naive. See Intel/AMD. The problem there is that the cost of attacking the incumbent is billions of dollars, and generally you see no ROI at all until you've spent multiple billion.

Market forces can ensure that competition will exist as long as barriers to entry are kept low enough that people can afford to compete. The larger the barriers are, the more aggressively an incumbent can be abusive without needing to fear competition.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#185

Post by ehllo »

verroq wrote: post #174
greggman wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think there is a need, however market forces will ensure that competition exists. If the incumbent starts to betray the user alternatives will automatically arise.

But the use of an alternative is only possible, if the alternative is on/near the same level of usablity as the product that is market leader. If it's not the case, than most users won't switch and there is also the factor of the "mental burden" to switch to a product you're not used to and stay in the "preferred loop".

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#186

Post by Mountain_Skies »

adventured wrote: post #125
baddox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.

Amazon and Facebook could both launch entirely new browsers. Spotlight it constantly on Amazon.com or across Facebook's properties as with Chrome on Google.com. Facebook already has far more cash and profit than they know what to do with. $38 billion currently, rapidly climbing. They'll add ~$20 billion to that in 2018. They could do a new browser just for kicks if they wanted to, and they have the vast global reach…

Amazon sort of has their own browser called Silk. It's based on Chromium so it's not a built from the ground up endeavor but has been customized on their Fire devices to 'enhance' the browsing experience in a way that seems to benefit Amazon.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#187

Post by NetOpWibby »

kevincox wrote: post #181
NetOpWibby wrote: post #175

I wrote my own browser a few years back and it was quite challenging/fun trying to figure out how to do basic browser things. You can check it out here: https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries Since then, I’ve been using Opera, then Vivaldi, and now Firefox, taking notes of how certain things are done. Lately, I’ve been thinking about using Servo as my base insead of Electron and doing a whole rewrite.

This article is talking about a browser engine, now a UI. Creating an independent UI is considerable less work (although it still takes considerable effort do to a good job of course).

Ah yeah, that's true. I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#188

Post by jrs95 »

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…

Well we have 4. That's more competition than we have in a lot of other software platforms.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#190

Post by tree_of_item »

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.

I don't see how a subset of HTML could be hostile. AMP is not Google Search.
Post reply on HN