Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

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> I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you’re trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible

Of course it's faster than developing a browser from scratch, or working with a browser startup on integration etc. but that isn't the question. The question is whether it's even feasible to develop a browser with publicly available information (HTML 5 specs including SVG and MathML, but which one/version? tens of CSS specs and growing as we speak [1], hefty ECMAScript specs, http2+http3/quic, A/V codecs, multiple font formats, etc. etc.). As a glimpse into browser development, yesterday we learned [2] that even a RegExp engine for JavaScript poses a challenge, with specs being "fitted to match reality" eg Chrome behaviour. Honestly, with these results of creating almost a browser monopoly and driving browser development out of existence (Opera, MS), and now even Moz beginning to integrate Chrome code, I don't understand why the clowns at WHATWG and W3C even bother writing specs; they just can't stop it seems. Never has a standardization effort failed so miserably and went so totally out of control, and it'll be a huge problem for generations to come. Talking about almost all human communications (in law, education, politics, medicine, science, culture, personal docs) being held hostage by an ad company; even stone age humans had more liberties in cultural expression.

[1]: https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960

Edit: big congrats to the Flow developers!

More than Google, the bigger culprit here is scope creep. The web should have been split into multiple interoperating protocols so that each protocol by itself could be manageable enough for multiple applications and a rich ecosystem. Instead everything including the kitchen sink is shoe-horned into the browser so it becomes impossible for anyone except the largest companies to come up with competitive alternatives and they will slowly stop bothering and start cartelizing around Chromium, one way or another, because no corp except for Mozilla solely depends on their browser, so they will all be happy enough to re-skin Chromium and be done with it. And Mozilla is facing an increasingly Sisyphean task ahead.

> they will slowly stop bothering and start cartelizing around Chromium, one way or another, because no corp except for Mozilla solely depends on their browser

I'd say Apple falls into that category (although they don't solely depend on their browser, it is a major part of their ecosystem) - the day they stop maintaining Safari and just ship Chrome (or a skinned Chromium) on iOS and macOS is the day I stop using the Apple ecosystem.

Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn’t worth it. MSFT has a 1.4T market cap, GOOG (Alphabet) has 964B.

> Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn’t worth it. MSFT has a 1.4T market cap,

To be fair, Apple has (or had on the 10th of June) a market cap of 1.5T and they maintain Safari and Webkit (which GOOG forked to create Blink).

and Webkit was forked from KHTML. blah blah blah.

Sure, but I wasn't suggesting that Webkit is an original work of art - the discussion wasn't about the history of rendering engines and browsers - it was about which companies _today_ are willing to maintain their own rendering engines and browsers instead of just skinning Chromium.

- Apple has Safari which uses Webkit (which was forked from KHTML as you noted)

- Mozilla has Firefox which uses Gecko (originally from Netscape)

- Google has Chrome which uses Blink (forked from Webkit)

- Microsoft has Edge which uses Blink

- Opera has Opera which uses Blink

... The only two major players currently maintaining a non-Chromium and Blink based browser are Firefox (mentioned by the OP) and Apple (mentioned by myself).

I was simply trying to provide some additional context about the history of Chrome, perhaps I should've also included the context about the history of Safari.

But anyways... blah blah blah

> to maintain their own rendering engines and browsers instead of just skinning Chromium.

If just rendering engine (but not a browser) then Sciter will qualify I think too. And it is not derived from any others.

i wonder alot why the web wasnt just a bytecode interpreter instead of a doc format

if you wanted to publish a document, just ship some bytecode to render a document

want an interactive application? just use a bytecode library that renders controls and textfields etc

browsers then would become much simpler, and pages would just render themselves, meaning super old sites needing "quirksmode" would even be a problem....

i wonder why this never happened... what am i missing...

I suspect it was to do with ease of publishing content, which when the Web began was mostly text. If the web itself was also text then it becomes a simple matter to write documents in your editor and push it (with a little markup). Converting text content into bytecode describing layout would need a dedicated program instead of using any old text editor.

I don't think the creators of the web ever imagined how it would take off and the kind of scope-creep that would happen even in their wildest dreams. And now we're stuck with the existing formats because doing anything else will likely break billions of old websites out there.

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