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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: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @06:57AM (16 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @06:57AM (#974828)

    Safari isn't based on Firefox or Chrome, is it?

    I've been saying this whole web thing is just a fad. Soon we'll come to our senses and go back to Usenet and gopher. Then September will end.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @07:25AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @07:25AM (#974829)

    There's no Eternal September on the Dark Web. It's too scary there.

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 24 2020, @08:23AM (4 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday March 24 2020, @08:23AM (#974847) Journal

      So it's Eternal Halloween instead?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:42PM (3 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:42PM (#974990) Journal

        Despite efforts to "Microsoftize" the web, IE failed. Mighty Microsoft tried to build a new browser, Edge. But finally threw in the towel1 and used Chromium as the guts for Edge, while keeping the Edge "packaging", menus, configuration, etc.

        What became of Opera?

        1Contrary to Douglas Adams advice. [goodreads.com]

        --
        To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:07AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:07AM (#975261)

          Opera now makes predatory loans in third world nations.

        • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:08AM (1 child)

          by toddestan (4982) on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:08AM (#975682)

          Actually, I would argue that Microsoft succeeded. They had over 90% marketshare in browsers for years, and there were no shortage of websites that were IE only.

          The problem is that Microsoft got complacent. One of the ways they won is they had a better browser than Netscape, but once they on top they completely stopped improving it. IE6 shipped with Windows XP and was the current version of Internet Explorer until IE7 shipped with Vista. That's over 5 years, which is an absolute eternity as browsers go. Considering IE wasn't all that great to begin with, that was more than enough time for some competition to crop up. By the time they started actually trying to improve IE, it was too late. Of course, that their efforts were also hamstrung with having to maintain compatibility with older versions of their browser which was intentionally designed to not be quite compatible just added to the hilarity. Creating a new skin around it (Edge) didn't help either, especially when it was made a Windows 10 exclusive. Convincing people to switch back to a Microsoft browser would be challenging enough, and if it involves a new operating system you can pretty much forget about it.

          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:03PM

            by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:03PM (#975864) Journal

            I would argue that Microsoft succeeded.

            Succeeded by failing?

            there were no shortage of websites that were IE only. [ . . . ] they won is they had a better browser than Netscape

            In typical fashion, Microsoft created something that was addicitively sweet for developers. A browser that made it easy to build rich powerful web sites and web applications -- that only ran on Windows. Which was their monopolistic goal. In order to "Microsoftize" the internet, they also created IIS (which did not come to dominate) and Front Page (what ever happened to that?).

            It took frustratingly long, but once Firefox appeared, on all platforms, it was clear to the non Microsoft fanboys that we had an IE killer. (eventually) It was now possible to build cross platform web applications. Although for an entire decade IE was the bane of web developers everywhere. Tools like (but not only) jQuery appeared to make life much easier on the browser front end.

            Microsoft had appeared to win. That's why they never made any more improvements to IE 6.

            All of a sudden, one day Firefox had more than 50 % market share. That and only that is why there ever was an IE 7. Which was still a major pain for developers.

            As IE 8, 9, etc became more and more standards compliant it showed the error of the short term thinking folks who had written their entire application to run on IE 6 only. That was now obviously dead end. I had chosen to go with web standards from the start, and in hindsight that was an excellent choice. The only real drawback to that was . . . IE 6. It had to be tested to ensure there were no snags. But other browsers universally worked great. And jQuery largely abstracted away the problem of IE 6.

            Television commercials for IE 11 openly admitted (jokingly) how bad IE had been.

            Edge was an admission of IE's failure. And that was a failure from the start . . . just not obvious to most people. Like the government printing free money for itself! Or a company laying off more batches of people every time it needs a boost in its stock price! A winning tragedy strategy.

            The fact that Edge finally got Chromium's guts is the biggest admission of this monopolist Ballmer/Gates era failure.

            --
            To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by gtomorrow on Tuesday March 24 2020, @11:16AM (5 children)

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Tuesday March 24 2020, @11:16AM (#974901)

    IIRC, Safari was based on KHTML, which Apple forked into WebKit, with which Google created Chrome/Chromium and later forked into...oh, the name escapes me!...ah, yes, Blink.

    Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday March 24 2020, @01:17PM

      by Freeman (732) on Tuesday March 24 2020, @01:17PM (#974949) Journal

      At this point, they're essentially two separate beasts.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:49PM (3 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:49PM (#974993) Journal

      As I point out here [soylentnews.org] . . .

      First comes the Navigator.
      Then comes the Explorer.
      Then comes the Konqueror.

      First there was Netscape Navigator. (Well, actually Mosaic, but we'll go with commercial web browsers here.)

      Then Internet Exploiter Exploder Explorer.

      Then back in the day of KDE 3 there was the Konqueror browser.

      Apple took the guts of Konqueror and made Safari. Safari and Konquerer code bases diverged (or so I understood it to be, corrections welcome). Eventually these were merged into a common code base WebKit.

      WebKit became the basis of Chromium, Chrome, Edge and probably others. IE is dead. So this now leaves us with only Mozilla (from the ashes of Netscape Navigator) and WebKit (as several different browsers). Mozilla's engine is no doubt the basis of several other browsers as well.

      --
      To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:01PM (#974963)

    I'm up, I already check usenet regularly.

    So who is going to create alt.soylentnews?

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:51PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 24 2020, @02:51PM (#974995) Journal

    I've been saying this whole web thing is just a fad.

    Do you mean "the internet"?

    Bill Gates, is that you?

    (pssssst . . . nobody mention that we've all upgrade way beyond 640K.)

    --
    To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @08:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @08:28PM (#975178)

      Oh, come on now, you're just joking. You surely know that the internet was around long before that whole "world wide web" thing was invented, right?

      ... right?

      Next you'll be saying things like you don't know how to churn butter or you never learned how to drive a mule train. (god I'm so old)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @11:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @11:17PM (#975248)

    Fanboi logic.

    No one cares about your shitty walled garden.

    Blink and Gecko are the only two that matter.