Ask HN: Story behind every browser is just a customized skin over Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Story behind every browser is just a customized skin over Chrome

How do you deal with the struggle of losing functionalities over every updates?

What do you feel when you want some fresh air and install a new browser, but feels the same. Even the setting menu is as empty as Chrome.

What are those unique functions that you miss so much?

For example I remember that Vivaldi Mobile in 2020 can save the whold webpage locally. I use that to store html books to read them offline. But now this function just disappeared from the menu.

View on HN

The browser has become like a powerplant. Huge, complicated, and relied upon all day by everyone. It isn't really practical to write a new browser from scratch or support one. They're just too enormously complicated at this point. They are literally the engines for a huge portion of all of the software run in the world.

So naturally it's going to coalesce and standardize around 1 or 2 options. And this is what has happened with Chrome and Safari.

That's not to say that no one can make a better browser or that they shouldn't try, just that its a huge undertaking against a well-entrenched technology and those are very difficult to pull off.

To answer your question about functionality, the browser today is capable of being a full desktop app. It can do anything a desktop app can do. So what you're really looking for is not a replacement browser but a web app that saves pages as HTML, etc. It actually makes more sense from a development standpoint -- and ultimately benefits users -- to have the functionality come from apps and not the browser itself.

> What do you feel when you want some fresh air and install a new browser, but feels the same

If the developers didn't do that, then you'd have more than a few users complaining that it's not like browser x so it sucks.

As for functions that disappear, I wonder if those are functions that the devs discovered (via telemetry or some other magic) that a majority of users didn't take advantage of. Why maintain them when most people don't use them?

Waiting for Ladybird.

Was just about to comment this myself. Thinking of helping, too, just don't know how to get started.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com