Because it’s super complicated and a thousand moving parts are involved. You have to parse HTML, draw everything correctly, do JavaScript, Canvases, WASM, Websockets, HTTP 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, SPDY, support 10 different image formats, 5 audio, 5 video formats, allow videoconferencing, write a plug-in system. Handle Bookmarks, History, File downloads, uploads, … … …
The standards alone are thousands of pages. You gotta read them all, understand them and program everything. Which takes years for a team of developers. And you also want it secure or your users get in all sorts of trouble. A browser is the number 1 way to get malware on your computer. And all these experts take a decent salary. Multiply that (hourly) wage with multiple people and several years and you’ll end up with an expensive product.
Don’t forget the fully fledged remote desktop thats built in, WebVR (which is being replaced with Web XR), Web Bluetooth, Web USB (aka Web Serial), the API’s for notifications, ambient light sensors, an entire transactional database (indexed DB), the language translation API, the Gamepad API (videogame controllers), hardware passkeys (yubikey), speech to text, text-to-speech, webGL, webGPU, webworkers, service workers, an entire suite of cryptography tools, GPS location, battery, vibration, FileSystem API, picture-in-picture API, WebRTC, WebSensors, etc.
And then, on top of all that, building a miniture OS-kernel so that tasks can be sandboxed scheduled/executed and prevent 1 tab from crashing everything or hogging resources.
Makes sense, thanks.
You’re welcome. I think people underestimate what’s inside of a browser. I mean that piece of software does lots of things. And you can pretty much do most things with just some online services inside of the browser. Do office work, watch TV, do image editing, play games… Sure it needs some web application but also lots of interfaces that need to be provided by the browser.
And despite all that, if you don’t bend over to emulate Chrome’s quirks a ton of sites still won’t work properly and users won’t use your browser because the other one is more “compatible”. And you might still have to fake your user agent to be Chrome or Firefox so sites will even give you the fancy HTML instead of giving you the mobile or “limited” version meant for IE and older browsers.
I hate the fact that the only viable choice is between Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium or Firefox.
There is Safari, which uses a different rendering engine, but yeah, there’s basically 3 browsers. Chromium, Safari, and Firefox.
I don’t use Safari and never have, so I can’t speak to its compatibility or quirks for the user or for developers.
It’s pretty great. Compared with Firefox on both Mac and PC…I like them all.
There are a decent amount of third party browsers. Many of them, to make things easier, encapsulate a chromium engine, but there is still the entirety of the user interface, options, customizability and additional browsing enhancements that make the experience vastly different and that’s really what most people are looking for. Give some other ones a try now and then, you might surprise yourself and find something that really does just what you want the way you like. It happens.
Currently using LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on android (both Firefox / gecko based) and I am happy with them :)
Very nice. Across my various devices I use maybe 5 or so browsers for various purposes.
Which one is the most unusual browser that you use and for what?
Eh, I don’t really think any are particularly unusual. Although I have tried some over the years.
I use Firefox on all my PCs which are all various distros of Linux, as well as Chromium for some things. I have a few sites setup as their own webapps using Electron, so essentially also chromium. I just installed Vivaldi recently to try for some things I need to test, haven’t started using it yet. I also try out different ones now and then.
Safari on my iOS devices as well as Aloha, OperaGX, occasionally Firefox but their iOS implementation is really sad. Some others now and then, but that’s mainly it at the moment. There were some I stopped using for one reason or another. Long ago I used Brave for a little while until I read about their agreements with some ad companies so that’s out. I really like Phoenix browser except it’s got some issues. Osiris, Puma, Dolphin, ugh so many that come and go if I need something temporarily.
Heheh, we’re in the same situation as 15 years ago when I learned webdevelopment and had to handle lots of Internet Explorer quirks. And there were many. And IE was the dominant browser. Now it’s a different one but a similar situation. I think it got substantially better, though.
Yeah, every browser being chrome sucks, but it’s also so much better than being forced to focus any website development around IE compatibility.
They’re basically as complex as operating systems these days.
You need to implement several huge standards in order to get relatively simple modern sites to load
Fun fact: chromium has about 1.5 million more lines of code than the Linux kernel (about 32mil vs about 30.5mil), not including whitespace/docs/etc.
Not only do you have to support an insane amount of standards, you need to do it fast. Firefox and Chromium are optimized so much for speed, and nobody will use your web browser if it’s slow or uses up tons of ram.
Or has no support for any addons
uses up tons of ram
In my experience, Chrome is a RAM hog. I use FF. Are other browsers even worse with RAM use than Chrome?
I imagine the Chromium devs have put a lot of work into reducing memory usage. Work that’ll have to be replicated by whichever small team is working on this hypothetical browser.
You can take a quick look at the W3C standard. Primarily at the page length.
Over the years browsers have accumulated too many features. If it was just plain HTML and CSS rendering it wouldn’t be so bad.
I agree with others who have said that browsers are basically operating systems now.
Browsers are literally the best attempt at the everything app.
Theres already been a lot of good answers on this. But a goody oldie article on making a browser is covered in Matt Brubeck’s 2014 article, Let’s Build A Browser Engine.
If you want to see how one of the most minimal source code for a terminal based browser that is still in use today, I recommend downloading the source code for the Links Browser. Note that this site is very old and doesn’t even use http. But the source code can still be had here.
Browser software is super interesting, but there’s a lot even for a bare minimum setup like Links, so that’s more or less why most people don’t develop new ones from scratch anymore. Though there are a few exceptions like Servo, and Surf but they are pretty buggy tbh. Hope that helps and sparks your interest.
If only non-animated content could be rendered using something other than HTML/CSS.
I mean, most web content such as news or blogs are static text plus images. We could use a much simpler format with a really low entry point for more competition.
We can use apps for the complicated and dynamic content. I’m really generalizing but it’s out of frustration from how shitty the web has become and how it’s controlled by so few mega corporations.
There are other formats. For example markdown is widely used in the web. It’s biggest problem is the lack of standardization though.
Lots of people do use gemini, but I think it’s past the point where, if were ever going to catch on, it would have.
Personally, I think it’s mostly OK, but went too far with simplifying the gmi spec; it’s too simple. And some things that need to be possible for success, aren’t, and never can be. I think it’s too flawed to have ever caught on.
The obscene amount of copyright protection BS and ads and tracking probably doesn’t help. The average website, in my eyes, is massively bloated and over engineered for the content they actually deliver.
There are a lot of things that they have to do, and they have to do them right with extremely little tolerance for error.
The Web has become the de facto method of accessing the internet for almost everything. Most people think of it as the internet.
A lot of people do critical stuff through web browsers, so if something on a website breaks because of the browser, it’s a huge problem.
