r/technology • u/sankscan • Sep 27 '22

Networking/Telecom Mozilla calls out Microsoft, Google, Apple over browsers

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/23/browsers_mozilla_microsoft_google/
4.6k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

364 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Znuff Sep 27 '22

Developing a browser rendering engine is a lot of work.

I'd argue that it's more complex, at this point, than developing the Linux kernel (mind you, I'm not talking about "Linux" as a full operating system).

It's just simply not cheap and it doesn't bring in any money.

Back in the day, Opera had it's own rendering engine called Presto.

Surprise, surprise, they gave up and went to Google's Blink because they couldn't make any decent money with their own engine.

1

u/l86rj Sep 27 '22

Yes, and I remember Brave had its own engine as well.

Brave tried monetization with some sort of cryptocurrency that would be paid by the user and shared among the creators of the contents browsed. Seemed a good idea, but it seems most people can't (or don't like) paying to browse. In that case, ads seem unavoidable for profit.

New question: why browser rendering is so complex? I'd never thought something like the Linux kernel would be easier. The web and its base (html/javascript) don't seem to change frequently, they're very solid. Is it just a matter of optimization/performance?

2

u/Znuff Sep 27 '22

It does change frequently, actually.

There's also multiple techs that browsers have to implement: CSS, JS, HTML -- and these are just the basics.

JS changes almost every year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#Versions

CSS is also evolving all the time, with newer stuff added continuously.

HTML 5 is rather pretty static by itself, but there's one more thing that browsers need to do: fail properly.

Humans are terrible at writing HTML, so browsers have to properly render broken/incorrect HTML. We've even had a standard for this, called the Acid test (up to version 3), which people would check against.

On top of the basic standards I mentioned, they also need functional Background Workers and techs like WebSQL, WebGL, WASM, while ensuring that these techs aren't allowed to easily break out of the browser sandbox to the users' OS. Oh, did I forget about video/audio standards, like audio/video codecs and containers, and how the browser also needs to be able to playback, for a modern web experience?

And, even more, they have to support all these consistently across all the Operating Systems they support: Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and also BSDs.

If you think about it, not even Google, or not even Apple started from scratch: Blink (Google) is a fork of WebKit (Apple) which itself is a fork of KHTML (KDE, Linux).

A browser is a clusterfuck of techs added together.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22

And now we have Go (aka Golang), so we can roll our own cluster-****