History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today (2022) | Hacker News Reader

History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today (2022)

eylenburg.github.io

196 pointsphil294104 comments

Interesting synopsis and confirms something I've always felt: There was never really a plurality of web browsers, there was always one that held an outsized majority vs the rest and drove web development practice. The closest, perhaps, was a brief period before Chrome became dominate and IE was waning fast, where I believe Safari, Firefox, and Chrome held approximately the same market share vs IE, which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer, it was also before Chrome forked Webkit fully IIRC.

FWIW, I know having Chrome / Chromium as the overwhelming majority browser is not great, if for the sheer fact competition keeps everyone "honest" in a way, but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective. IE was truly both stagnant and terrible.

EDIT: that's not to say I approve the Chromium dominance, as a daily Firefox user especially, but I would be lying if I said, from a developer perspective, that Chromium hasn't been pretty good so far on balance. They do innovate. They do push new features. They do usually support the latest specs. Though again, I don't approve of it being so dominate, I'd prefer a plurality. Its a shame that Microsoft didn't use Firefox as its base for new Edge

Common story with platforms, isn't it? It's like a huge magnet drawing everyone to Windows or Intel.

I wonder how much is end user driven, and how much is intermediary driven though. Is it that the customers are only comfortable with one item in each category, or is it the middle men who prefer to sell things that are all connected by the same platform?

Psychology plays a big part, change and differences. Folk don't like change nor difference. You have to be willing to embrace it.

You can do this yourself. Watch your mind freakout and give yourself a panic attack if you were to drag an frequented used app; icon from your phone in to an obscure new location or app folder. Frequent bookmark to another folder or off the bookmark bar.

You get used to it but change is scary because its unknown and so unless you can adjust the user quickly and promptly they will reject whats given to them. Or innovate something whole and new thats never been done before.

Add the fact that major brands have user friendly in hand, trying to convince someone to install Linux with its clunky installer as an example; really throws them off edge.

Nowadays trying to get anyone to change really causes them to melt and its only going to get worse as we go on further through the rabbit hole of social media.

So why change when you already have something that just works, that your used to and friends with. Even if it backstabs you with updates, missing icons and leaks your data to the world. It's still feels like your old friend, cosy and comforting.

It's both.

The vast, vast bulk of computer users are more interested in the destination than the journey. They don't really want to have to care what browser or OS or app they're using... They want to manage their finances, or make art, or surf the web, etc.

When the destination is the point, small amounts of asymmetry tends to accrue more asymmetry because it's easier to solve problems if the help ecosystem is larger to address when the tool doesn't work the way the user wants it to.

Saying 'Chrome / Chromium [...] are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective' is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think.

edit: (over Firefox, sorry I wasn't clear)

> is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think.

Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, and how much work it took to overcome the inertia of a crappy browser[1] shipped by a monopolist that did not want you to use the web.

There are many legitimate reasons to grouse about Chrome, Google, Google owning Chrome, etc, but the problems surrounding it are, I feel, an order of magnitude smaller than what we had in the 00s.

[1] The delta between IE6 and Firefox 1.0 was incredible, and everyone working on the web despised the work required to make websites work on the former.

But... Firefox came out before Chrome. It's not like we had to use IE6 until Chrome came out. I started using Firefox as soon as it came out and have used it continuously ever since.

For an end user, Firefox was great. But the wide prevalence of IE meant that

* Sometimes sites worked only in IE or broke subtly in other browsers. The subtle breaking could be layout differences or functionality not available/working because the developers used IE specific technology/javascript

* Developers had to code for the lowest common denominator - IE. It really held back web applications

* Debugging any errors in IE was a royal pain

>> Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it,

As a web dev I hate ie6 as much as the next guy. I was in the fortunate position to simply drop ie6 support early (the phrase "use a modern browser" springs to mind.)

But it's worth pointing out that ie6 itself was great when it came out. It wasn't that ie6 was bad, it became bad because it got _old_.

IE brought us AJAX which transformed the web from being a read-only system (with a few forms) to an interactive platform, which is the root from which today's Web grows.

In its time IE6 was great. But a lack of competition caused it to stagnate. MS rested on their laurels.

MS themselves rallied hard against it after IE7 and later came out, but end-users refused to upgrade. They rebranded as Edge to get away from IE. The Trident engine was hard to work on though, and switching to the Blink engine has made Edge completely acceptable.

The problem isn't that one has big market share over the others, its that viable others exist. Basically, if a feature is implemented, it works pretty much the same in all browsers. These days the issue is not different behaviour [1] as much as the speed that new features spread at.

Safari has been the slowest here, although recent improvements there are welcome.

[1] yeah, yeah, there are some differences. But it's nothing like the work necessary to make a site work under IE6 and Firefox 1.

I mean, on balance, compared with the IE reigning years, Chromium is better than that, and its been mostly (again, from a developer perspective) a net positive in day to day developers lives that Chrome has not stagnated and new features ship.

That however, is not to say that its okay. There's other, broader issues than just developer experience to care about here, like what a Google dominated web means, because via Chrome, they can push a great deal around how the web actually works, which is a net loss to society. It can stifle other innovations. Things of that nature.

Good DX isn't the whole story

> which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer

Oh man, it depends on your definition of interesting. That was the time we had 3-5 engineers at reddit, and let me tell you, making reddit work for all the browsers was awful (and I barely had anything to do with it, it mostly fell on the other guys). It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html, because a bunch of people were still using it and it didn't support a lot of the stuff the other browsers did.

While the consolidation of browsers isn't great from a market perspective, it's been great for developers sanity. :)

Haha, I was interviewing for an internship in those years, and I remember asking the only webdev guy there if he thought he had the coolest job in the company (I sure thought that the web was better than Windows). The guy just looked at me like I was crazy.

Yes, dealing with IE (even IE 11, up until the last 2-3 years for me) was a pain back then, as it was circa 2020.

That said, it saw a lot of innovations broadly, web development was taken alot more seriously as a profession, and saw some interesting frameworks come out (Ember, Angular, and later React) and jQuery sure made life easier by that time.

I even have some fond memories of KnockoutJS. My most favorite, and probably most underrated framework in the history of web development, was SproutCore, which had legs at this time.

From a culture side (user?) it was the heyday of things like Delicious, Foursquare, Good Twitter (IMO) and blog rolls. Mobile web was rolling out in earnest. Alot of innovation was happening in this space.

> It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html

LOL. I too have been guilty of doing this. HTML, CSS, JS... you name it. "Fuck IE6"

> but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I've been using Firefox continuously since version 1 for both personal and development purposes. I've never felt like Firefox was not benevolent.

Over IE and its dominance. IE 6 and onward was genuinely not great. IE 11 being maybe the least worst of them all, but still really bad.

Chrome has managed, despite its dominance, not to become complacent, from a developer perspective. They add new features, propose new features, listen to developers and their feed back etc.

The chrome teams overwhelming influence on the web as a whole and other factors are very concerning, but from a pure developer experience perspective, Chrome is n't really all that bad. I'm talking about supporting standard APIs etc.

Microsoft was always of two minds about the Web, in a similar way to Apple's stance recently.

It's the universal runtime environment, so it stands the chance of commoditizing their platforms. There's no reason that you can't access the next killer web-app on a smart-fridge running HarmonyOS.

But they do recognize that they have to supply a servicable browser, because if they don't, people will pick up one from somewhere else.

So look where Edge (and Safari) focus their efforts-- begrudgingly matching the things they HAVE to match on Chrome, and adding on stuff like search and shopping tools or privacy gimmicks-- nothing that would make the web environment as a more free-standing platform that could displace native software.

I use Firefox for M365 access, since it assumes nothing from Windows, and doesn't try to suck everything in like Chrome. Edge for 365 can't figure out which of the 11 accounts it finds should be the one I'd like to use.

Add-On topic of what I think is the most important component of a web browser: A timeline of JavaScript Just-In-Time (JIT) engines.

https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html

sorry, last time I checked on March 2022, Google Chrome cannot negotiate for my ChaCha-only TLS website; instead try using a Safari, Brave, Firefox, Edge, Aloha, OnionBrowser, Orion, Links, or Lynx web broswer, to name a few).

Meanwhile it is an ongoing crazy ride just mapping the evolution of WASM (in my next planned blog).

https://web.archive.org/web/20230113174325/Https://egbert.ne...

Perhaps send them a pull request to fix it, and see what they say?

I can't really imagine why they wouldn't want to support it... I wonder if it was an oversight rather than a policy decision?

I merely configured the website server TLS protocol to my exacting specs (in cryptographic and network security theatre) and Chrome failed because its client "demands" the non-ChaCha variants despite my TLS server INSISTING "my way or the highway".

Beside, I am quite partial toward Firefox browser so there is little benefit for me to file a report to help Firefox's competitors.

Looking again, your server is rejecting their HELO message. You seem to be using a modern cipher yet requiring a legacy (http/1.1) protocol, which I suspect is the issue. Adding an advertisement for TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 to every TLS 1.3 handshake worldwide would add a lot of gigabytes of global bandwidth, for support of an awfully unusual configuration. Those 4 bytes in every http request globally probably isn't worth it just for you.

Take a look at this trace [1].

I think it's pretty clear the client is offering a bunch of things, including TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256, and your server just replies 'nah, goodbye'.

Perhaps your server doesn't like the ESNI extension?

[1]: https://pastebin.com/ffP4cPJi

Yes, corporation persons desperately want people to move to http/2 and http/3 for for-profit reasons. They're terrible protocols for human persons though. Phasing out http/1.1 support in chrome/etc means phasing out the ability to host a website that can be visited by someone you don't know without the continued permission from a third party TLS CA.

This guy is already using TLS. The site has already obtained a certificate from a CA. How does http/1.1 or http/2 have anything to do with it?

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 implementations do not allow you to connect to an IP/domain unless there is CA based TLS. HTTP/1.1 allows both HTTP and HTTPS to coexist. If for some reason the CA based TLS cert is revoked I can always just visit the http site over HTTP/1.1.

Your capture is asking for TLSv1.2. Not willing to support that.

Only TLSv1.3+

This actually sounds like a great way to hide from most of Google's influence; thanks!

edit: My main interest is whether or not this blocks Googlebot.

An accidental discovery on my part that came from strengthening my website.

It was never about maximizing my readership, just the ones that know what they are doing.

It's easy enough to block Googlebot... It obeys robots.txt and has a distinctive user agent...

It's still broken in Google Chrome 109 (the latest stable version) on Linux:

> egbert.net uses an unsupported protocol.

> ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

which is what I expected given that Google Chrome chose to ignore the server's "my options only or nothing".

I did a Wireshark capture. It's your server that sends back a TLS alert for handshake failure.

Now, Chrome certainly supports ChaCha20 and Poly1305, but it could be that your server is rejecting some other extensions in Chrome's Client Hello.

Doesn't work on edge. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

That’s a new development.

Only TLSv1.3 is server-supported, am surprised that Edge did a downgrade.

Your website is broken, not Chrome.

is it a chromium variant?

No, my website is not broken, just made not accessible to obsolete browsers.

Your browser is stuck on TLS v1.2, try something that supports TLS v1.3

JS for browsing is not needed at all and often it's a mistake. It may be ocassionally useful, but it's the least important thing.

(The fact that someone can process data and express self in many ways, even with JS - if he can't do it proper by other means - makes that mistake: that the others shall be forced to access data only the limited way some JS allow - but he could mind that the procesing in between may be not needed at all or disturbing and that there are many other ways to access data which dont't block each other or force as expecting JS does.)

It's a shame Opera didn't go to the open source route. Opera with Presto was a great browser.

It was tragic when they they switched from the Presto engine. I was an Opera user from the exact day they stopped charging for it, but they slowly stopped innovating in ways I found useful and when they ditched their engine I ditched them, reluctantly.

It’s very hard to make money from, you know, a freeware browser without earning them somewhere else, i.e., in targeted advertising.

I agree, it was a terrible business plan. I loved the browser though.

Their big business idea was embedding and customization; the Wii's browser was an Opera derivative, for example.

I suspect they were an inadvertent victim of the smartphone/cheap data revolution. Products like Opera Mini (was that the one that did a lot of the lifting server side) were rapidly obsolesced when we moved from spotty data and Blackberry scroll-wheels to touchscreens and 3G/4G

One cool option missing from this list is OffByOne. Very fast and lightweight, Peak HTML 3.2.

https://wiki.c2.com/?OffByOneWebBrowser

I develop a framework for building hyper-compatible Any Browser websites (applications include retro-computing audience) and I include it in my test suite.

I used this a lot on 9x and 2K. Loved it. Forgot about it until you made this post. Thanks m8!

Some of you may enjoy watching this too: Desktop Browsers Market Share over time (pie chart race) https://plotapi.com/explore/view/563abc04-f196-4992-aefe-973...

> This promising engine [Servo] was developed by Mozilla[...] Mozilla fired a quarter of their developers, which apparently included the whole Servo team. There have still been some commits to the code since then (presumably by hobbyists) but it is questionable if Servo will have a future.

Why do people keep framing the story this way? Servo's future is in Gecko.

always_has_been.jpg

The Servo repo was a testbed that allowed people to work on new, Rust-based browser components without anyone having to pass the type of code reviews that are necessary for a production Web browser that is by the way already continually shipping to millions of existing users.

This (far too common) meme of Servo as a somehow failed separate browser engine that was supposed to, I dunno, be swapped out at some indefinite point and retire the lizard or something is very weird.

They are probably referring specifically to Servo parallel layout.

I wrote a browser for Macs (System 7) in 1995-7 through a contract with James Gleick's Pipeline ISP [0], commercially available in the US. Don't see it listed, will reach out.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pipeline

Is the source code anywhere? Those of us resurrecting old Mac software might be able to dust it off and update it a bit.

This only briefly references Tasman which was the rendering engine from IE For Mac. It was in many respects better than trident - the big bit was it had a much lighter footprint which meant it became the engine used for mobile IE.

Curious what are the advantages of using expensive custom embedded browser engine like sciter / ultralight over system webview, or using system webview wrapper like https://github.com/webview/webview?

First graphical browser I used was Slipknot [0], which doesn’t appear to be listed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_(web_browser)

(Edit: I see it now, must have skipped over it before.)

Cool graph, but I think in cases where. Lot of your data ends up indistinguishable from zeros it's better to use something like a log scale. We all know Chrome is the biggest by far, but I have now well to tell how the usage of, say, Links has changed over time.

There is a large amount of HTML found on the web that only serves to wrap textual information and is therefore human readable without rendering. Basic text processing is enough. IMHO, HTML tables are where "rendering" becomes a must-have.

Others I know of: MMM (CAML Light with applets, '90s), Emacs/W3 (which Bill Perry claimed had the first CSS implementation), Abaco (Plan9)

Has anyone tried to make a browser using the MS Word engine? It would be horrible but also kinda neat.

What does it mean "WebKit peak 49% market share" in 2012. That doesn't pass the sniff test. AFAIK, Safari never had a big install based on Windows and MacOS+iOS certainly didn't account for 49% of web traffic in 2012

The page is about browser engines, not browsers. Chrome was still using WebKit in 2012. Chrome switched to Blink in 2013.

Chrome used WebKit until the Blink fork in 2013. That should make the numbers work. :)

What comes after Blink?

pours one out for Opera 12 (Presto)

"Gecko (Firefox). Down to 4% market share, mismanaged by Mozilla which prioritizes pushing its toxic politics over improving the browser."

Unlike the author, who clearly has no agenda or axe to grind.

I love Firefox the browser, but they keep throwing stuff at me that I have no interest in. After the Pocket debacle and the Mr. Robot thing I stopped paying attention, but I bet if I found out what colorways was or that new little pinned tab thing then I'd get upset too.

All that to say, I think a personal blog is a better place to grind axes than the start page of a hugely important software tool.

I'm ootl, Pocket debacle?

really out of the loop then, because it was like 5 years ago or so :) Firefox add a button to integrate a third party service (pocket) in the default install and i think it added it to your current pinned icon areas (where extension button go). It was also not implemented as a proper extension, so you couldn't actually remove support for it, but only the icon.

Later on Mozilla did buy pocket, so it was no longer third party.

Anyways, a lot of people got super mad with the way they went about it.

thank you!

Is the presence of Pocket pushing toxic politics, or is it the Mr. Robot extension?

I understand that people have complaints and want to hang onto others' past mistakes, but I fail to see how either of those (Pocket&Robot) can be classified as either toxic politics or axe grinding.

They're both monetization tactics that many people disliked. Which somehow resulted in people finding Mozilla untouchable, because apparently nobody else has problematic monetization attempts?

Right? Because that’s totally why Firefox’s market share has gone down and is not at all related to a billion dollar corporation ruthlessly and relentlessly pushing its competitor…

Mozilla had a lot of goodwill, particularly in the tech world. With the right strategy, they could have translated that into thousands of influential websites encouraging users to use Firefox.

Things like releasing features for firefox users first, because devs like firefox and it had better devtools, would have kept the firefox userbase afloat.

Instead the mozilla devtools have been allowed to fall behind, web apps are no longer developed firefox-first, and mozilla lost it's opportunity.

Mozilla is hopelessly mismanaged.

The entire Android app was overhauled a while back, dropping functionally and decreasing stability, and has since been pretty much ignored even though it is still missing features and is still painfully clunky and prone to crash. The developer tools on the desktop app were ahead of Chrome but have stagnated, and they're slow to adopt new standards, but they somehow find time to add things no one asked for like Colorways and a VPN.

I want Firefox to get its traction back, but it's hard to cheer for Mozilla or blame Google when I see them twiddling their thumbs like this.

I want Firefox to get its traction back, but it's hard to cheer for Mozilla or blame Google when I see them twiddling their thumbs like this.

I don't think this will happen. I think they will just fade away. They are completely dysfunctional now.

Some say it is due to the whole woke movement, and it may be, but really, I see it as due to politics.

By that I mean, politics is nothing but divisive, and if you introduce it into a company, as a corporate culture, you're going to regret it.

IMO, work is where you leave religion, and politics(the other religion) at home.

And Mozilla is paying the price for letting it in.

> due to the whole woke movement

yes, and forcing out there reasonable CEO for a purity test, long ago.. HELO BRAVE

"The entire Android app was overhauled a while back, dropping functionally and decreasing stability"

And yet it's the only mainstream browser for android that support, natively, ad-blocking. Using chrome on mobile is a joke.

Edge on android blocks ads.

Using Adblock plus...

Regardless of how much or how strongly Chrome may have been advertised, we can't forget that a lot of IE and Firefox users ultimately decided to try Chrome, then went ahead and actually installed Chrome, then actively used Chrome, and most importantly, decided to keep on using Chrome instead of the other browser(s).

All of that didn't just happen because of advertising. It happened become Chrome offered very compelling benefits over its competitors.

For many users, Chrome was faster, lighter, more secure, and offered a better all-around user experience than its competitors did. Even now, that's still largely the case.

Advertising alone can't make that happen.

Firefox didn't always work as well in an SSO corporate environment, where Chrome was able to shoe-in for IE.

From a sysadmin perspective, Firefox having its own cert store instead of relying on system store was an extra hurdle for corp IT people.

Then there is the fact that Chrome goes out of its way to integrate with Google's other properties which they market to corporations to replace Office.

So I'm saying, I believe FF would have done better if they tried harder to integrate with corporate environments without compromising on their capability and independence. Name recognition is a big thing.

"Regardless of how much or how strongly Chrome may have been advertised, we can't forget that a lot of IE and Firefox users ultimately decided to try Chrome"

Google for years installed Chrome using installers of other applications, like malware. I am talking of 10 years ago, that was common practice for google, on windows. So a lot of users found themselves using Chrome without even knowing they were using chrome.

> we can't forget that a lot of IE and Firefox users ultimately decided to try Chrome, then went ahead and actually installed Chrome, then actively used Chrome, and most importantly, decided to keep on using Chrome instead of the other browser(s).

I'm in this camp. I had used Firefox for 20 years, literally since it was just a zip file called Pheonix/Firebird.

I switched to a Chromium-based browser kicking and screaming, but it came down mostly to speed for me, and some website incompatibility (which I can't blame wholly on Firefox).

I'd obviously tried Chrome since day 1, and was impressed and checked back in from time to time, until I decided it was time to finally switch over. I still support Mozilla and Firefox and don't want to see less competition in browser engine space. As long as Google continues to fund it (mostly out of anti-competitive concerns I'd imagine) I don't see them going anywhere.

> Right? Because that’s totally why Firefox’s market share has gone down and is not at all related to a billion dollar corporation ruthlessly and relentlessly pushing its competitor…

The irony here is that the billion dollar corporation (Google is who OP is referring to) actually funds Firefox's development. We looked into this in one of our recent podcast episodes called "How Does Mozilla Make Money?": https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...

> pushing its toxic politics

While I wouldn't describe Mozilla leadership as that... I don't think you'll find many people who think Mozilla leadership have made good strategic decisions in the last 5 years.

It might be worth removing the word "toxic"; is it not clear that "Mozilla prioritizes pushing its [...] politics over improving the browser"?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Really surprised that FF is only 4% market share now: what did I miss? Never followed the browser wars, just used what I liked then (chrome -> opera -> FF for the past year or so..). Turns out I'm on the sinking ship...

> what did I miss?

You missed the pre-installed browser and applications bundled with your computer becoming good enough that ~nobody is going to www.firefox.com to download a browser on a fresh install. This isn't 2004, you no longer need to spend three hours downloading software to make a fresh install of Windows usable.

That, and a weak mobile app.

> Really surprised that FF is only 4% market share now: what did I miss?

The explosion of mobile.

> what did I miss

Mobile is eating the web. Mobile (Android - it's all Safari on iOs) Firefox is a bad experience.

Mobile Firefox is awesome to me. I use it everyday.

There are advantages on Android to using a Chromium-based browser unfortunately, cf. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

>Mobile is eating the web. Mobile (Android - it's all Safari on iOs) Firefox is a bad experience.

Allow me to second this!I have a not-so-small bookrmark collection (~600). When I discovered FF tags, I was ecstatic: assigning multiple tags to a single bookmark makes navigating the pile really good.

But, as soon as I discovered that neither iOS nor Android version of Firefox supports tags, I felt betrayed. Add to it the inability to export full FF profile (such peculiarities as about:config overrides, extension lists etc) and you end up with a very disgruntled user. So I ended up with trusting desktop Safari. Turns out it has _similar_ feature called bookmark description.

I still resent Chromium-based products, because UX is wrong to me. But FF is certainly mismanaged if not sabotaged and the upper level management will bury it. Or the time will make FF almost irrelevant.

Also, "Goanna (Pale Moon), a fork of an old version of Gecko. At 0% market share and always at risk of not catching up with the newest web standards that Google invents".

Google don't make web standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards

Ahahah... We have someone who thinks that the W3C/OWF has any real power. That's hilarious.

This is what actually happens: 1. Google (Who is a member of both W3C and OWF) announces a plan/ships a feature. 2. With 80% of the browser market, people use it or get excited by it. 3. The W3C/OWF ratifies the feature as a standard.

This is literally how 90% of web standards happen today.

No one in targeting US users are going to use a feature not supported by Safari/iOS

What is "OWF" here? Open Web Foundation? If so, that's such a weird choice to mention. It has approximately nothing to do with browser standards. It's not even as if it's a ceremonial figurehead or something. It just has absolutely no place in this discussion...

Being a member does not give anyone the authority to define a standard. One can propose and vote.

Take the recent example for instance, Web Standards Body W3C rejects Google’s ad targeting proposal[0]

Browser market share calculation is always dodgy[1].

[0] https://tittlepress.com/tech/2238586/

[1] https://www.sitepoint.com/how-browser-market-share-is-calcul...

Obligatory reference to the inverse relationship between Firefox market share and the Mozilla Foundation's chair's compensation [1].

It is sad to see Firefox become so irrelevant. As much as people blame Google for this (and it is true Google relentlessly pushed Chrome) but people forget just how innovative Chrome was and how Firefox didn't respond to these issues.

I remember when Chrome launched and it was revolutionary how it was one-process-per-tab (technically, it's site isolation not tab isolation but let's not get lost in the sauce). No longer could an errant website take down your entire browser (mostly). I kept wondering why Firefox didn't copy this. It took them years. What were they doing?

Now I appreciate Mozilla bringing Rust into existence (not without problems and early design mistakes [2]) but the initial goal seemed to be rewriting the browser in a memory-safe language and that never seem to eventuate..

[1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

[2]: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity...

Wow I didn't know that! Looks like it's $3 million now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash.

That's so disappointing that I don't think I can ever look at Mozilla or Firefox the same way again. As a software engineer, I would not work at an organization with such a huge discrepancy in pay. It almost makes me feel better about a lifetime of failure, so I guess I should be grateful.

It's just looking more and more every day like wealth inequality is the great problem of our time, effectively halting progress beyond a certain point.

> An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash.

Only if you think you could re-implement Twitter in a weekend.

> An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash.

It honestly couldn't be. Not one that is on par with Chromium.

I can't imagine how much Chrome "costs" if you add up all the engineering man-hours that have gone into that browser. I wouldn't be surprised if it exceeded (exceeds?) $3 million a month at times.

Everything from V8 to pretty much full standards compliance (and beyond). Web browseres are an immensely complex beast.

> I remember when Chrome launched and it was revolutionary how it was one-process-per-tab (technically, it's site isolation not tab isolation but let's not get lost in the sauce). No longer could an errant website take down your entire browser (mostly)

I still used Opera 12 in 2016 when I finally searched for an alternative. Not only did websites crash(upside down bird) way more often in Chrome (multiple times a week in Chrome vs. once every two weeks in Opera), but every time a crashed tab took the entire browser with it! It's one of those times where you question reality. Everyone says one thing, your experience says something else!

It literally took years for that feature to materialise. Now™ if a tab crashes, the browser stays. Since I'm a Vivaldi user now I couldn't even tell if that's more Vivaldi's or Chrome's doing.

I also remember, opening a new tab in Opera 12 was without delay. You gave the command and it was just there. On Chrome, with a !EIGHT!YEAR!newer! CPU it took 3 to 4 seconds! I figured it must be the 4MB JPG background image I chose. Sure enough, it was the image. Without it, it was still 1/2 seconds to open a new tab, though. Only now, with an even newer CPU, it feels on par with Opera 12.

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