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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> Andreas Kling Mar 30 > There's still a long way to go before it's usable for daily browsing. For example we need to improve support for flexbox, grid and table layouts. Performance also needs work. > Our JavaScript engine is decently mature, test262 score tracked here: https://libjs.dev/test262/

In a few years when they have achieved feature parity with Chromium or at least Safari we can discuss this again, but for now it's not ready for real life use.

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Hahaha, I don't think a project as monumental as a browser deserves such dismissiveness. Let's not forget that Mozilla's full rust browser has not achieved (and never will) feature parity with safari or chrome either, and they invested far more man power and time into it.

The lone effort of a handful of developers that got equally far is worthy of a mention as a "new browser" even if it's not fit for human consumption yet.

Yeah I remember the first Mozilla builds in the early 2000s. They were awful. Everything crashed constantly. It was such a memory hog. fast forward twenty years and I use it on a daily basis, and I'm so happy I'm not forced to use Chrome (not to mention some abominations from the past like IE with ActiveX - and at some point such setups were mandatory in order to access some services).

Ah yes, the Mozilla Milestones of what came to be known as SeaMonkey. If the competition was flawless I'd agree. However, Netscape and MSIE also crashed constantly. Opera might've been the most stable, also in the sense it was the first to have proper session management and recovery (plus it had unique features like MDI long before tabs were a thing). It took ages till Firefox once again had certain features Netscape used to have (like sharing profile over network which Netscape could with LDAP). But such was abstracted on filesystem level in the Microsoft world. An OS or browser needs a reasonable unique selling point, standards compatibility, and stability and security. Feature-wise one can slack, as long as these aspects are strong enough.

I don’t think they’re dismissing it - that’s the point they’re making. And the other response here furthers it. Nobody is going to invest 20 years at this point until there’s a more compelling reason to do so.

So until then, why moan about the things people are doing to innovate in the space even though they’re using an off the shelf core.

I'm not dismissing their effort, on the contrary! It's commendable, but they're still way off, and would probably need years of work. A fully fledged browser is a monumental undertaking.

Mozilla.. basically they're lingering on due to Google's fear of having the only browser available and the scrutiny associated. Ideally Firefox should be funded by public funds ( like thr EU donating money to FOSS projects they use like VLC, 7 Zip, etc.). But if a browser company at it for a long time can barely survive while also having a browser that's not "fully featured"... and Microsoft, with their infinite pockets, also abandoned theirs... what hope is there for anyone succeeding at it? And make no mistake, for any browser to succeed it would need the full feature set of Chromium.

Keep raising that bar

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