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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) by Pino P on Tuesday March 24 2020, @09:31PM (1 child)

    by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday March 24 2020, @09:31PM (#975211) Journal

    What I know about VNC sounds like it would impose accessibility problems. How does VNC accommodate speech- or Braille-based access to documents? Deliberately making things inaccessible to users with disabilities could open a company to a discrimination claim. Or how does VNC accommodate viewers in rural or otherwise remote areas who might be behind tight monthly data transfer quotas?

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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday March 25 2020, @08:40PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Wednesday March 25 2020, @08:40PM (#975594)

    Well, I wasn't being entirely serious.

    The point being that at present we all pay to download software (scripts) we don't want, to run on our computers using our power and cpus and memory. If the rendering were all done server side, the sender would be paying that price, and we would only get the pixels they want to send.

    It would be entirely up to the website operator to provide accessible services - and in fact it could make accessible clients simpler, as it would be up to the server to provide the appropriate voice-overs and/or pop ups. As for data transfer quotas, I suspect modern scripts send far more data that a well compressed screen image.

    Of course, it will never happen, as it imposes costs and obligations on website purveyors, and pushes their resource requirements higher. They prefer to parasitize our computers instead.

    But, if one were building an alternative web, it could be an approach. Clients become very, very simple compared to a modern browser. The downside is you can't block scripts and adverts as they are all rendered on the server. An AI on the client might be able to identify screen regions to blank out. I am sure there are other good reasons why it wouldn't work, but at the moment, I can see a lot of advantages.