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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

I hope this is true. I don't know how to maintain a web browser, hopefully those that do are willing to do the work to keep it running.

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Does a web browser need maintenance beyond security fixes?

To display increasingly prevalent chrome-only web apps, they need new features. Static html style websites should work with old browsers.

I tried viewing Notion and self-hosted Mattermost using SeaMonkey last week. Nothing was displayed at all. Trac pages still worked though. So yeah, a web browser needs more than security fixes.

Start blaming the sites for using new Chrome(ium)-exclusive features when they're not otherwise necessary. The fact that many sites which decide to update and then offer zero or often negative value to the user, while requiring a newer browser, should be proof that Google is doing an embrace-extend-extinguish on web standards, and web developers who get sucked into their propaganda are making it harder for alternative browsers.

There are new web features being adopted by browsers other than Chrome all the time.

They're essentially being forced to by Google.

They may be adopted by browsers other than Chrome, but were they invented by other browsers?

I wonder how much of that is user agent related?

I mean, security fixes are still maintenance on their own, and on an attack surface as wide as “the entire Internet”, it’s a non-trivial one.

But also… what people want to do on their devices evolves. Web developers want to be able to support that. So they rely on browser developers to constantly support new features. One can bemoan this state of the world as much as they’d like(*), but at a certain point it’s just sticking one’s head in the sand.

(*) I style myself mostly a native platforms developer, and I’d love it if the web wasn’t the de-facto cross-platform architecture of choice. But alas.

They can either spend their efforts at trying to catch up with Google and their constant anticompetitive churn, or propaganda (for lack of a better term) against web developers trendchasing that churn.

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