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Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

Rubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).

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The original Edge had to switch over to Chromium because it was hard to build a compliant accessible browser from scratch and this is Microsoft we are talking about.

> ...this is Microsoft we are talking about.

Exactly!

More seriously, it not just about building a compliant web browser engine, it is about tracking the dominant browser engine which introduces their own "standards" along the way too.

Microsoft could have easily continued to invest in maintaining their browser engine, but it would have to be comparable to what Google is doing, and yet they'd always be perceived as "behind" due to non-dominant position they have.

I'd say strategically they do not want to invest in tech that's not winning (in marketshare), so when they are not dominant, they'll instead adopt and extend (not just web browsers, look at WSL too).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

> one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up

> build a compliant accessible browser from scratch

Which is not something even Google ever succeeded. They had a significant head start due to Webkit being open source.

The didn't had to, MS Browser team was incompetent from the beginning of internet

Oh the memories. Took them forever to introduce something as simple as tabs that virtually all other competitors had since years.

File explorer was the same, only recently it got tabs.

We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed.

Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.

> We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good.

Specifically what are you talking about here? Chrome is c++ I thought?

Chrome was invented in 2008. Abseil[1] didn't exist publicly until 2017, derived partly from Chromium.

HarfBuzz wasn't ported to C++ until 2010. I don't know the entire constellation of libs Chrome would use if it was designed in C++ today, but I bet a lot of them didn't exist before Chrome or were even created partly as a downstream byproduct of Chromium.

In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.

[1]: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp

[2]: https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central

I think you've come from an npm world because c++ still doesn't have a great library ecosystem if thats what you mean.

> In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.

Yeah, this is all web development stuff.... Doesn't apply to c++

A browser isn't drawing its content using OS frameworks, so A11Y is a major undertaking. Much more so because A11Y for web content specifically is a bit of a different beast than native widgets, and the amount of stuff you have on the web these days means that you have to pay a lot more attention to performance.

Okay, since it might’ve been confusing from my comment: I meant mobile apps, not Chrome or browser. Mobile frameworks abstract all of this.

This is plain wrong. For a browser, a11y doesn't just get handled by the OS automatically. In general, claiming a11y is easy or will be done by someone else is bordering on evil.

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