Comment by packet_nerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by packet_nerd | Hacker News Reader

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I keep seeing this come up, that it's practically impossible to write a brand new browser. This got me thinking, what would it take to make a better browser?

A browser is something that 1 out of every 2 people on earth [1] use frequently. That's a lot of people! All developers in the world use a browser. Lots of them really believe in open software. Some are 10x developers. A certain percentage are literal geniuses. Exactly one is the smartest developer alive today. I get that it's hard, but smart people mobilized at global scale hard?

Starting from scratch today developers would have better tools, modern languages, and a hindsight view of what worked and what didn't in previous browsers to work with. Wouldn't that make it somewhat easier?

Say the average person loads 10 websites per day, and a less optimized browser requires 100ms more to load each page. That's 415 million hours wasted per year. Say the average person makes $4 an hour, that's 1.6 billion dollars wasted!

If every browser user donated 50 cents, that would be 2 billion dollars. Would that be enough? There are 50 people worth more than 17 billion [2], would one of them bankrolling a new browser be enough? What would it take?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/richest-people-world-billion...

I welcome your attitude, bring it on and I'll be more than supportive of it. But still, I'm maintaining that you can't work against the likes of WHATWG and W3C churning out specs, when they are subverted and financially dependent on Google.

In other words, we're toast ;( But hey, that might be exactly the kind of situation that motivates developers after all.

With my project [1], I'm attempting something less ambitious: I'm trying to re-establish SGML as an authoring format (HTML is based on SGML, and SGML is the only standard that can tackle HTML), to at least bring back a rational authoring and long-term storage format for content that matters and that you'd like to be able to read in a couple of decades still without an ad company or even a failed, over-complicated all-in-one document and app format of the 2010's getting in your way.

[1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html

IMO writing a better browser is not that hard. The trick is to just focus on reader view.

When you can click the reader button, it makes every website better. Reader view defeats modal dialogs and dickbars. Reader view renders faster than AMP, because it skips web fonts. Reader view always scrolls and zooms without jank.

Build a better browser by embracing the web as it was meant to be: the best document publishing platform. Let the other guys build the world's worst application platform with clippy and toast and the rest.

> What would it take?

All the developers in the world combined can not solve a legal problem. You can't implement technologies like Widevine without a license, and if they simply won't give you one [0], you're dead in the water.

[0]: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

What would it take to reverse engineer Widevine?

I don't know much about the law, but wouldn't reverse engineering Widevine be illegal, as it is protected by DRM?

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