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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)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:03PM
Succeeded by failing?
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.
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