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Comment by leidenfrost | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but I think that's the problem with our approach to browsers. People want the shortest route to deliver an open source chrome that's not chrome. And Chrome won. That's it. Even Firefox, an amazing feat of engineering by itself, couldn't even grasp the userbase that Chrome has.

The if-else nightmare logic it's exactly what drives developers away and a surefire way to kill a project before it's even born.

Since the success of Ubuntu as a distro, people started to think of the FOSS ecosystem as a competitor to commercial software but gratis. And IMHO that's a wrong approach to Open Source.

We should go back to the roots, forget about competing, focus on what's the best not for the end users but on what's fun for the FOSS developers, and bring back the hobby on open source projects. Maybe someday, this project will become huge. Maybe not. Dunno.

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This. And I just hope that the license doesn't kill this project - there is a reason why Linux (GPL) is still here while Konqueror/KHTML (MIT) is nowhere to be seen, or worse, was (ab)used by Google to get us to this mess.

KHTML is LGPL not MIT, as is WebKit (which was made by Apple, not Google - Google forked WebKit to make Blink, also LGPL).

Thank you, it is LGPL - I remembered wrong. No difference though; Blink is open source, but Chrome is not.

Almost all of Chrome is open source. You're confusing it with Safari, where the engine is open source but the browser UI isn't.

It depends what we're after. Almost all of the code in LoC percent terms might be open-source, which helps people who want to launch derivative browsers or learn from the code. But on the other hand, almost all of the Chrome instances running today are proprietary builds with mystery special sauce added (I'm guessing desktop Linux users are the only significant userbase to run vanilla Chromium), which doesn't help us on privacy, neutrality, etc...

Almost. There is no confusion, rest assured. They are both proprietary, but one of them likes to act as if it was open source (see also: Android), and clearly it hides well.

Android as far as I know uses a source-drop model. For both WebKit and Chromium, all code reviews are as far as I know done publicly.

AOSP is open source, but Android itself is far from it - just ask Huawei. More and more code is in proprietary bits of Google code. And Chromium is not Chrome, most people use Chrome builds which are proprietary.

Sure, I was merely thinking out loud (bad move it seems from the children comments) how to solve the "need billions, got maybe millions" issue, and since I can't get stable diffusion out of my mind, as everyone recently, I just saw it as a possible light at the end of the tunnel: why not let the machine implement the specification.

I am all for going back at the roots, but at the root of all the roots is the enduser: the machine must do something useful, otherwise it's a niche postmodernist art contraption (not that there's anything wrong with that).

I think the "if-else nightmare logic" caused some non-friendly answers over there but I get your idea.

I don't entirely agree with the end user being the root of all, at least in FOSS. While they shouldn't be alienated, the focus should be on having a good approach to the project, one that is friendly with the idea of having to code after a full time job, like most open source developers do.

Keep in mind that this isn't a job, nobody will fire you and most complains by end users can be ignored with no consequences. If the project is not fun and engaging, then what's the incentive to keep going?

My point was that a machine is always intended to make some useful work, and even as a sole developer of a private project, that project still has one enduser, the developer itself, since the existence of the project is to achieve meaningful computation one way or another, even if that computation is performed only in the test suite, hence the enduser as root. However, as a project organizer, sure, you want to strive for welcoming others, making it easy to embark, 1-cli command to setup, interesting to engage and persevere in development, and so forth.

> We should go back to the roots, forget about competing, focus on what's the best not for the end users but on what's fun for the FOSS developers, and bring back the hobby on open source projects.

I prefer Blender's approach of heavily prioritizing users over developers [0]. It's been a huge success.

[0] https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg?t=1612

Firefox was more popular before Chrome existed. It was winning ground from MSIE. Chrome ate marketshare from both, and Safari took the mobile share (Mozilla Mobile / Fennec, while in development before release of iPhone never got popular).

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