What's the issue with current browser engines?
I've seen in various threads that the current browser engines aren't good, such as gecko and blink. The question is why? Why do we need a new one, and what's stopping a new one being made? Is it just the fact that they're a lot of work to make?
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Theres nothing stopping a new engine from being made. People wanna say its too hard or whatever but there are budding projects people are working on from the ground up. See Servo, Ladybird and Flow for non-Chrome/Firefox browsers. It's absolutely possible no matter what these naysayers say.
While it is true that anyone could. A modern browser engine is complex AF and about on par with an OS.
I really want there to be more competition. I’m happy to see more people talking about how bad google is and switching back to FF
What are the biggest reasons for the complexity? What would we be giving up if browsers were simpler?
I remember back in the 90s when it was mostly text and hyperlinks (and animated gifs). Now, we have a lot of nice features of course, javascript and what not, but which of these features are the heaviest for browser complexity?
JS. Take a look at the list of APIs involved.
ExecutiveChimp said look at the APIs. In the dark ages; yeah a browser was simpler when all it had to do was render html 1.0.
But mosaic 1.0 does not functionally run on today’s web.
All the things that modern browsers do; and how they run and interact with your computer; how many zero days have MS Apple and Google patched in the last year?
security Week says there were 7 zero days as of the end of November: and I didn’t bother to look at all the other patches.
So yeah. Hard
Well, like an OS there are people doing entire ones from scratch like Haiku, Harmony and Serenity. It's a herculean task but its not impossible.
I'm hoping that Ladybird and Servo start forcing competition against Mozilla and Google.
Yes please. I also love React that Win2k look makes me so happy.
1: I don’t know of any from scratch browsers.
2: I’d be happy to toss a guilder to anyone putting together a serious project
Servo and Ladybird are the two most serious ones right now. Andreas Kling, the lead dev from Ladybird regularly streams his progress and posts about new sites working. It's been pretty cool watching it over the years get better. iirc their current goal is to get discord completely working in browser on Ladybird.
Love React to. I hope one day I can use it in place of Windows.
I want you to be right. Do any of these have production-ready browsers I can try? Nobody’s saying it’s impossible for someone to start a repo and push some initial commits. But is there even an MVP?
Ladybird got like at least 250k in funding last year by Shopify. The project refuses to release binaries so you'd have to build it yourself. So far the team has completed a JS engine from scratch and hit a 100/100 on the acid3 test.
Servo's earlier in development but its got some preliminary stuff. They have a few full time devs. The project is written in rust so its getting a lot of hobbyist support too. Their main project is getting CSS compatibility.
Flow is a closed-source browser by some company. Their browser is in beta right now but as evident by this paragraph I don't know much about its project.
Idk how to check commit numbers on mobile but I'd say all 3 are in the thousands minimum.