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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#71

Post by matt4077 »

staunch wrote: post #59

Mozilla does not need 1200 people to make Firefox. Mozilla has 1200 people because they blow all of their money irresponsibly, and that's apparently how many people you can hire with the bribes/revenue from Google it pays to maintain its monopoly. The chairwoman takes over $1M year? Why would an open source project need anyone who would be so unethical? This is like a city councilperson paying themselves $1M/year. It…

You're confusing "non-profit" with "volunteer work". Mozilla is, organizationally, no different than a for-profit venture, only with the mandate that all revenue is to be reinvested.

As such, they compete with all other software companies for talent. Sure, maybe working on an open source browser brings you satisfaction. But they could do so at Google, and get paid accordingly. I'm quite sure the compensation package for a Googler supervising 1200 programmers far exceeds $1 million.

As for how many people it takes to create and maintain a competitive browser, I'll take their experience over your wild guess. Remember that MS Excel Installer Team of 32 people? Yeah–big consumer software products are a beast, even if not targeting 5 operating systems.

And when Google comes around and is willing to give you $XXX million annually to set the default search engine to the one you would choose anyway, should they just turn down the money and go with bing out of spite?

Yeah, Mozilla has had its failures. It still seems terribly unfair to shit on them like this, considering all the good they have done, and are now doing again.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#72

Post by Endy »

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.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#73

Post by saagarjha »

techsupporter wrote: post #70
kitsunesoba wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.

> (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) So far, this is the only thing that really drives me bonkers about iOS and has for a long time. I'd love to be able to use an actual third-party browser with a third-party rendering engine, even if it meant having to install a particular signing certificate or some such. Doubly so for using browser-specific exte…

Besides the obvious benefits to Apple, I believe the reason behind this is because allowing JIT execution would open up a security risk.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#74

Post by pcwalton »

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.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#75

Post by ggvhbbhh »

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…

Can you stop “talking” “in” “quotes”?

It’s extremely annoying.

Either own up to what you say, or don’t say anything.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#76

Post by captainmuon »

baddox wrote: post #12
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…

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

I would first target a subset of HTML, for example static documents instead of web apps. You would have a specification like AMP which restricts what elements you can use. If a document used the full spec, I would fallback to another engine (e.g. WebKit). You could have full documents in iframes inside limited documents (but cross-frame scripting might be hard to get right in that case).

Also, I would try to make it as modular as possible. E.g. layout engine, css engine, js engine etc. as libraries, use the system codecs instead of bundling own codecs, and so on.

And it would help to have an extensive test suite, which you could take from other browsers.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#77

Post by linopolus »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #31
sverhagen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it just released for Android and iOS? (I get that that might not be what you meant...)

The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.

> Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons

Not entirely true: Every browser developer is free to use whatever engine they like on iOS. Mozilla could use Gecko, Google could use Blink. They just don’t do it, because what’s not allowed is JITs (because security), thus 3rd-party JS-engines would always be slow.

So the reason everybody uses WebKit on iOS is not that they are forbidden own engines, but only JITs, so Apples is faster.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#78

Post by captainmuon »

techsupporter wrote: post #70
kitsunesoba wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.

> (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) So far, this is the only thing that really drives me bonkers about iOS and has for a long time. I'd love to be able to use an actual third-party browser with a third-party rendering engine, even if it meant having to install a particular signing certificate or some such. Doubly so for using browser-specific exte…

I wish someone would just port Firefox mobile to iOS. You don't have to put it on the app store (which is impossible). Just zip up the xcode project, let me swap in my developer key, and run it on my phone. The protections against JIT and so on are enforced by policy, not by technology.

I understand it would be a lot of effort for little gain. But if more developers would offer their stuff as self-signable "xcode projects" (maybe even just a .dylib and some wrapper source), it would be really cool.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#79

Post by markpapadakis »

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 too naive or clueless.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#80

Post by CapacitorSet »

jensv wrote: post #3

Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

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.
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