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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 24 2020, @06:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the Safari?-Brave?-Opera? dept.

Software developer Drew DeVault has written a post at his blog about the reckless, infinite scope of today's web browsers. His conclusion is that, given decades of feature creep, it is now impossible to build a new web browser due to the obscene complexity of the web.

I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.

It is impossible to:

  • Implement the web correctly
  • Implement the web securely
  • Implement the web at all

Starting a bespoke browser engine with the intention of competing with Google or Mozilla is a fool's errand. The last serious attempt to make a new browser, Servo, has become one part incubator for Firefox refactoring, one part playground for bored Mozilla engineers to mess with technology no one wants, and zero parts viable modern web browser. But WebVR is cool, right? Right?

The consequences of this are obvious. Browsers are the most expensive piece of software a typical consumer computer runs. They're infamous for using all of your RAM, pinning CPU and I/O, draining your battery, etc. Web browsers are responsible for more than 8,000 CVEs.3

The browser duopoly of Firefox and Chrome/Chromium has clearly harmed the World-Wide Web. However, a closer look at the membership of the W3C committes also reveals representation by classic villains which, perhaps coincidentally, showed up around the time the problems noted by Drew began to grow.

Previously:
An Open Letter to Web Developers (2020)
Google Now Bans Some Linux Web Browsers from their Services (2019)
HTML is the Web (2019)
The Future of Browsers (2019)
One Year Since the W3C Sold Out the Web with EME (2018)


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday March 24 2020, @09:24PM (1 child)

    by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday March 24 2020, @09:24PM (#975208) Journal

    Most people who had Internet provider accounts had few MBs (usually 4..8, sometimes 10) for a magic "public_html" directory.

    Since then, things have changed. Comcast discontinued included personal web hosting nearly five years ago. (Source [dbstalk.com]) As for what replaces it, despite the IndieWeb project's steps for getting started [indieweb.org], I don't see people migrating to buying a domain name and leasing hosting service from a VPS provider en masse. Should, and how should, this be changed?

    Now if someone at work pisses me off and pushes me to make an "web application" but in the agreement requires only a "computer program" (I do FE simulations and optimization so programs are "read input file -> calculate -> write output file to view in postprocessor") I write it in Perl taking care to have at least two regular expressions per code block :D.

    What would you do with an agreement that can be satisfied either A. through a web application that runs on all major browsers, or B. through five native applications, one for each of Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, Android, and iOS/iPadOS?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @02:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @02:05AM (#975299)

    This is a purely attention DDoS, and not much can be done. Except educating community but if the only bond keeping the community is common consumption of ads, like in "social media" it just won't work.