Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

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They pretty much all re-implement OpenGL since they needed WebGL/WebGL2 to work reliably across platforms, some of which don't even ship OpenGL at all. SPDY/QUIC/HTTP3 re-implement a lot of the OS level socket stuff in the browser. Hardware interfaces for USB, Bluetooth, and Serial are exposed to avoid needing device specific drivers for many things. It has the ability to be the compositor, window manager, and display server (see ChromiumOS/ChromeOS).

The browser certainly hasn't eaten all of the host OS yet and still depends on it for many low level things but at the same time browsers go far beyond what the OS provides and reimplement many things that 20 years ago would have had you laughed at for implying are part of the browser and not the OS.

But OpenGL is not part of the OS, or is it? (asking sincerely, no idea) I thought Vulcan is for Linux, Metal for Mac and Direct3D is for Windows.

Quic still relies on UDP, just like many other non-TCP protocols that are built by vendors for all sorts of applications.

OpenGL isn't really any different than Direct3D/Vulkan/Metal from the OS perspective. Shoot until recent times it was the only option on some platforms and if you wanted to use the GPU it was the only way on them.

QUIC uses UDP but not in a "it's relying on UDP" way as much as "layering UDP allowed it to go through middleware boxes" way. The developers of QUIC would have liked QUIC to not depend on UDP, and the protocol works fine that way, but then it wouldn't have went through home routers or corporate firewalls very well. Regardless a lot which used to be done in the OS TCP stack is now handled by the browser application. This is similar to how some other apps have used UDP but that doesn't take away from that fact.

I see. You're saying if they could build OS functions into the browser and not break compatibility with the outside world they would have done that, which means that they're vested in the idea that the browser is the new OS, or can minimize the OS to just the extremely basic no-value-add utilitarian functions. That makes sense why people are concerned or baffled. Thanks.

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