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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

It's not really a wake up call - at any time they could fork and go their own way.

Just right now, they prefer to not have to pay for 1000+ engineers to work on the codebase to keep up with the pace that Google manages.

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I'm not sure a lot of these browsers have the resources to fork Chromium and stay "profitable" or whatever their goal is. Microsoft probably could but they gave up on Edge when it was pretty feature complete so I'm guessing that they would really prefer not to maintain a browser by themselves. I'd bet that most of the other Chromium-based browsers would not be capable of financially maintaining a serious fork where some fundamental internal APIs have been changed.

Microsoft had a chance of winning back Browser war by announcing Blink fork with V2 and 100% backporting of all Google changes. But "Microsoft reported more than $10 billion in advertising revenue last year", so they were reluctant to get this easy win.

Yes, I was pretty disappointed when Microsoft announced they would transition to v3. They already do so much customization to completely de-Google Chromium and replace it with Microsoft equivalent functionality (and adding new features on top of that) - it would have been almost a no-op for them to maintain v2 compatibility.

I think Microsoft is increasingly getting into the ad business themselves, and so may have the same incentive as Google in terms of neutering adblockers.

I don't think it's a preference thing. I don't think Vivaldi, or Brave, or any other company whose main product is a browser, can have the income to pay 1000+ engineers to work on the codebase to keep up with the pace of Google.

Maybe it should at the very least be a wake up call to companies which can't afford the engineer-hours it takes to maintain a Chromium fork.

There's enough of them and I am sure non-affiliated as well, they could likely scrape together enough engineering 'power' to maintain their own sane fork of Chromium.

They don't need to keep pace feature-wise. I don't need a featureful browser, I want a browser that performs well.

>They don't need to keep pace feature-wise.

Last I looked into it; the problem wasnt with features. The Chrome code base is very dynamic and if you fall behind then it becomes very hard to pull upstream patches due to the pace at which things get refactored.

Mozilla (and Opera for that matter before) showed that one needed much smaller team to maintain a full-featured web engine. Plus a lot of Chromium complexity comes from the desire to make such big team manageable. So they split tightly coupled code into separated components worked on by different groups resulting in a lot of glue interfaces and wrapper classes.

Former Mozilla engineer here: The Firefox team isn't as small as you are implying, and they are always constrained by inadequate resources.

Out of curiosity, does Google really have that many engineers working on Chromium? According to Wikipedia, Mozilla has ~750 employees and only a subset of those are working on Firefox.

The repository gets 500 commits per day. Assume the average engineer manages about 1 commit per day. Thats about 500 engineers working on it... [very rough, but ballpark correct].

And remember some people might be working on experiments/research/ideas that never make it into the repo.

And there are lots of libraries in other repos that kinda only exist for Chromium that Google also works on - eg. the Skia graphics library.

But... on top of those engineers will be UX designers, managers, HR, finance, chefs, and all the other people who make an organisation work.

I think 1000 is a good guess - maybe even 2000.

Former Mozilla employee here: A subset, yes, but also a majority. And it isn't enough.

> keep up with the pace that Google manages.

Absent security issues, what's the value of the last N releases of Chrome? How far do you have to go to get something of value that changed?

Serious question, because I'm not on the cutting edge of browser technology. From a step away, it seems like it's been fairly stable.

> Absent security issues, what's the value of the last N releases of Chrome? How far do you have to go to get something of value that changed?

IMO something of value changes with every release. For example, in the most recent release (105) Chromium gained support for container queries and the :has() pseudo-class. Container queries allow web devs to change how styling is applied the contents of an element based on the size of the element itself. That's a major new tool for web developers & designers. 105 also supports the HTML Sanitizer API, which relieves the need to use libraries like DomPurify to protect against XSS attacks.

If you're interested in digging into what changes in each release, Chrome has a blog post series called New in Chrome[1] that summarizes changes. And to dive even further into changes, the Chrome Status[2] site allows you to filter platform feature changes by release milestone.

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/tags/new-in-chrome/ [2]: https://chromestatus.com/features#milestone%3D104

Former browser engineer here: Thank you for that second sentence. So many people forget that part!

They could fork and alter only this part of the code and likely manage pulling from upstream with very few people.

Even easier if there's a shared open source fork. My company did it with 2 people

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