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Comment by moxious | Hacker News Reader

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moxious·

So what's the plan to sustain the existence of the fork?

Browsers are very complex and expensive to keep cutting edge.

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Maybe we need a stable browser without surprises. Less cutting edge. Maybe.

Like Konqueror? It isn't going that well. The web is evolving fast, and for good reasons.

Could you please expand those 'good reasons'? I honestly don't see them. I see a world in 2017 where my instant messenger lacks functions I had in ICQ in 2000 (p2p file sharing, for example); I see video conferencing struggle to work which I had in 2007 (p2p skype); I see my browser spying on me and coming with baked in backdoors.

The only one of those that is about the web is the sites spying on you. And JS has been evolving better sandboxes, not worse.

Erm... no. The trouble with video calls is that it's webrtc these days and melting CPUs with their inefficiency. The messenger apps are built on electron, and a unicorns with rainbows IRC client can eat 4GB of memory (yes, I'm talking about Slack). Everything is forced through HTTP. Those were only examples though.

Actually a big part of the problem is hinted in your examples: feature creep from native programs into the browser.

I think it would be an interesting, more private, and safer online world if browsers only displayed HTML and a minimum of JS rather than being entire operating systems, and anything like media playing and high interactivity occurred in native programs.

Don't stable and cutting-edge go hand-in-hand for browsers as the most "compatible" browsers must properly implement the latest web standards?

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