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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

As crazy as that sounds, IE had a better development team until IE6 basically killed off its competition. It was more stable than equivalent browsers, it had more features, I think it was even developed faster than competitors.

Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.

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Kind of sounds like EA Sports Madden.

OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. The "problem" is that the browser projects are organised as big monoliths with limited internal competition for the components. Although it isn't really a problem yet. Chrome works fine, and switching web browsers isn't hard to do.

But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.

> OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine.

I said browser complexity, not OS complexity.

What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software.

If a project is too complex for a single organisation, then break it up into 2-3 projects. That is how OSS software handles complex tasks. Someone could do a real LLVM-style browser project then we don't have to use javascript which'd catapult us all into the 21st century.

> What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software.

This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.

> This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.

You can try to close the door on that stable, but the horse that escaped has died of old age it's happened so long ago.

Says who? This sounds more like preaching than anything else.

Blame the OS vendors (Microsoft has 70% of the blame, Apple 25% and even Linux distro share a 5% amongst themselves).

They killed[1] cross platform apps and they made software updates hard, so everyone just flocked to the web.

[1] Not through a single blow, death by a million cuts.

>They killed[1] cross platform apps

No they didn't! Extremely lazy devs deciding that they should just be able to deploy javascript and html anywhere and using Electron "killed" native apps. Why would anyone ever invest even 1% more into a native app when you can just hire intern javascript kiddies, pay them terribly, oversee them with one or two expensive javascript bros, and all your users will blame the slowdown on the operating system and Microsoft as they always have?

Native apps cost far more than just 1% over web apps.

I'd argue each native version costs about as much as an web app.

The real shame was Gtk and Qt not getting the support they deserve.

>This is where everything has gone screwy

I, on the other hand, find that "browser as OS" is one of the best things that has happened in recent software history. I can run Photopea anywhere, on any platform that has a decent browser. Absolutely magic!

The web was invented in 1989, became a public project in 1991, and JavaScript support for it appeared in 1995, Java Applets the same year, with Flash and ActiveX following in 1996. So it was a static document model for ~6 years, and an app platform for ~27 years.

PDFs and work documents also were infected with scripting languages in the 90’s. It was just a weird time.

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