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Comment by surround | Hacker News Reader

How come entire operating systems are able to be developed on community-supported efforts (like Debian) but browsers can only be developed by monoliths like Google and Apple (and Mozilla, which has ~750 employees and makes most of its money from Google)?

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In practice, many of the components used in desktop Linux distributions are developed by an IBM subsidiary called "Red Hat" which has 12,000 employees. Systemd, GNOME, PulseAudio, X and Wayland, all of these are primarily maintained by Red Hat employees operating under various shell organizations.

Most of these were developed and created when "Red Hat" had no ownership by IBM.

Chrome is based on WebKit, which itself is descended from KHTML. That was essentially a little widget for formatting help pages in KDE and only had a handful of developers. In fact, it was chosen as the basis for WebKit because it was minimalistic clean code.

KHTML spend all of its life as a full browser engine, namely for KDE Konqueror browser. The KHTML predecessor khtmlw was a simple widget rendering lib.

Blink (Chrome's renderer) is based on webkit. A browser has many components.

The only general purpose, open source operating system that can now compete with the commercial giants, Linux, is now mainly driven by corporate backed contributors. If all corporate backed efforts were to stop overnight, I doubt it could keep up with MacOS/Windows/Android with just community contributions.

The entire hardware/software industry is controlled by giants. Disrupting this can no longer be done by a group of hackers as it was possible in the late 80s and early 90s.

What's there to "keep up with"? UI-wise, desktop operating systems have been pretty much stagnant for a decade, and software-compatibility-wise, people already weren't expecting Linux to run all their newfangled commercial software.

Drivers and security would be my guess.

First Debian is a distro composed of several third party software. The closest equivalent to browsers in scope in Xorg and that has gone in maintaince for being unmaintainable. Web browsers could be simplified if designed differently(internal architecture). We browser are monolithic programs but with stuff like nodejs, gjs, web view, pwa, etc. , Parts of browser must really become system library (that has some stability) and daemon that run on login. Aka the solution to the bloated web is modularisation of certain components.

Interesting idea, but what would be the advantage of having, for instance, the javascript engine running as a system daemon? This reminds me of Windows Script Host, which was some similar idea but didn't make it. What we see instead are JITs or VMs such as the JVM, node or any other language (such as raku or julia) which just work standalone, in the same way as a browser does.

Is engine prob is better of a s a system lib. The Daemon are for stuff like service workers from pwa, they are already boardline apps(notifications for example). The biggest advantage of the system lib style is you can effectively share with native program. It also standard cross platform. A not so bloated nodejs and electron setup.

I agree with the system library, and this should be standard. A system library and a system daemon are two different concepts, thought. HTML engines as shared libraries were common in the past (thinking of KHTML or mshtml.dll) and still are (thinking of Qt WebEngine or WebKitGtk). They are not that popular any more because devs want to have 100% control about the concrete engine version and quirks, so they prefer shipping their own engine, as with Electron. I feel that there is a strong rejection against Electron-like application development/shipping.

Isn't that Brave's niche?

Brave is chromium-based.

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