Because it’s super complicated and a thousand moving parts are involved. You have to parse HTML, draw everything correctly, do JavaScript, Canvases, WASM, Websockets, HTTP 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, SPDY, support 10 different image formats, 5 audio, 5 video formats, allow videoconferencing, write a plug-in system. Handle Bookmarks, History, File downloads, uploads, … … …
The standards alone are thousands of pages. You gotta read them all, understand them and program everything. Which takes years for a team of developers. And you also want it secure or your users get in all sorts of trouble. A browser is the number 1 way to get malware on your computer. And all these experts take a decent salary. Multiply that (hourly) wage with multiple people and several years and you’ll end up with an expensive product.
Don’t forget the fully fledged remote desktop thats built in, WebVR (which is being replaced with Web XR), Web Bluetooth, Web USB (aka Web Serial), the API’s for notifications, ambient light sensors, an entire transactional database (indexed DB), the language translation API, the Gamepad API (videogame controllers), hardware passkeys (yubikey), speech to text, text-to-speech, webGL, webGPU, webworkers, service workers, an entire suite of cryptography tools, GPS location, battery, vibration, FileSystem API, picture-in-picture API, WebRTC, WebSensors, etc.
And then, on top of all that, building a miniture OS-kernel so that tasks can be sandboxed scheduled/executed and prevent 1 tab from crashing everything or hogging resources.
Makes sense, thanks.
You’re welcome. I think people underestimate what’s inside of a browser. I mean that piece of software does lots of things. And you can pretty much do most things with just some online services inside of the browser. Do office work, watch TV, do image editing, play games… Sure it needs some web application but also lots of interfaces that need to be provided by the browser.
And despite all that, if you don’t bend over to emulate Chrome’s quirks a ton of sites still won’t work properly and users won’t use your browser because the other one is more “compatible”. And you might still have to fake your user agent to be Chrome or Firefox so sites will even give you the fancy HTML instead of giving you the mobile or “limited” version meant for IE and older browsers.
I hate the fact that the only viable choice is between Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium or Firefox.
There is Safari, which uses a different rendering engine, but yeah, there’s basically 3 browsers. Chromium, Safari, and Firefox.
I don’t use Safari and never have, so I can’t speak to its compatibility or quirks for the user or for developers.
It’s pretty great. Compared with Firefox on both Mac and PC…I like them all.
Safari is behind on a ton of features from what i know i would not use safari even if i had the option.
It’s known as the new Internet Explorer in web development circles. And just like IE, it’s exclusive to an operating system so you have to figure out a way to get macOS to even test it out. On iOS it’s the only browser engine even available, and when the EU stuff finally comes through, it’s still an IE situation because defaults and OS integration. You can’t ignore iOS for any serious web jobs.
I’ve been out of web development for a little while now, but the bugs were very IE-esque.
At least they finally just implemented WebPush, at long last.
Wasn’t Safari available for Windows at some point? I swear I remember it being installed on my school laptop like 10 years ago.
According to the Safari (web browser) wikipedia article: «Between 2007 and 2012, Apple maintained a Windows version, but abandoned it due to low market share», so yes.
Safari still has the best power management and speed in most cases. I mainly use safari but swap back and forth with Vivaldi on a daily basis.
There are a decent amount of third party browsers. Many of them, to make things easier, encapsulate a chromium engine, but there is still the entirety of the user interface, options, customizability and additional browsing enhancements that make the experience vastly different and that’s really what most people are looking for. Give some other ones a try now and then, you might surprise yourself and find something that really does just what you want the way you like. It happens.
Currently using LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on android (both Firefox / gecko based) and I am happy with them :)
Very nice. Across my various devices I use maybe 5 or so browsers for various purposes.
Which one is the most unusual browser that you use and for what?
Eh, I don’t really think any are particularly unusual. Although I have tried some over the years.
I use Firefox on all my PCs which are all various distros of Linux, as well as Chromium for some things. I have a few sites setup as their own webapps using Electron, so essentially also chromium. I just installed Vivaldi recently to try for some things I need to test, haven’t started using it yet. I also try out different ones now and then.
Safari on my iOS devices as well as Aloha, OperaGX, occasionally Firefox but their iOS implementation is really sad. Some others now and then, but that’s mainly it at the moment. There were some I stopped using for one reason or another. Long ago I used Brave for a little while until I read about their agreements with some ad companies so that’s out. I really like Phoenix browser except it’s got some issues. Osiris, Puma, Dolphin, ugh so many that come and go if I need something temporarily.
There is also Gnome Web (ex Epyphany), a browser that also uses the Webkit engine (as far as i know it’s the only ‘clone’ of Safari cause of this). It’s made for Linux (and Unix in general), though i heard somewhere they will make a windows version too. So we can broaden the choice to Chromium, Firefox or Safari.
Oh right, I forgot. And KDE has the Falkon browser.
It does suck ass that every browser is Chrome. But on the upside almost every website works in almost every browser.
Heheh, we’re in the same situation as 15 years ago when I learned webdevelopment and had to handle lots of Internet Explorer quirks. And there were many. And IE was the dominant browser. Now it’s a different one but a similar situation. I think it got substantially better, though.
Yeah, every browser being chrome sucks, but it’s also so much better than being forced to focus any website development around IE compatibility.
Browsers are literally the best attempt at the everything app.
There’s already been a lot of good answers on this. But a goody oldie article on making a browser is covered in Matt Brubeck’s 2014 article, Let’s Build A Browser Engine.
If you want to see one of the most minimal source code for a terminal based browser that is still in use today, I recommend downloading the source code for the Links Browser. Note that this site is very old and doesn’t even use https. But the source code can still be had here.
Browser software is super interesting, but there’s a lot even for a bare minimum setup like Links, so that’s more or less why most people don’t develop new ones from scratch anymore. Though there are a few exceptions like Servo, and Surf but they are pretty buggy tbh. Hope that helps and sparks your interest.
EDIT: Also of interest is Tali Garsiel’s article, How Browsers Work. This is probably one of the best in depth articles on the subject.
Surf is just a wrapper around WebKit, which is developed by Apple and used in Safari. Surf isn’t a from-scratch browser implementation.
Oh, I honestly didn’t remember that, and just put that in as an afterthought. Should have double checked myself. Thanks for the clarification.
Well anyways. I love this subject enough to admit when I’m wrong. And also, in researching the subject more, I found that there is the Ladybird Browser which is apparently not based on Chromium nor Firefox. I have not played around with it, but it’s nice to see people still putting in effort to make a new browser engine.
I also found this article where the author makes a browser based off of Matt Brubeck’s aforementioned article. Very interesting stuff.
Not only do you have to support an insane amount of standards, you need to do it fast. Firefox and Chromium are optimized so much for speed, and nobody will use your web browser if it’s slow or uses up tons of ram.
Or has no support for any addons
Chrome is in its way to that!
uses up tons of ram
In my experience, Chrome is a RAM hog. I use FF. Are other browsers even worse with RAM use than Chrome?
It’s the websites that requires all the memory, the browser can’t magically take less memory than what a website demands.
Well, they actually can, but it is not magic, it might not work everywhere, but it indeed involves going against website demands. There is reader view in firefox (that parses a page and gives text and images), there’s ublock-origin that alone blocks so much adds and tracking that webpages load faster, there is ‘‘i dont care about cookies’’ (that automatically selects the cookie options on your chosen option), etc, stuff that could be implemented in the browser as options for the user just like privacy settings.
magically? no. but, i’m pretty sure there are ways, especially if you have a thousand tabs open. which of course you do.
About a decade ago, I heard from a Chrome developer that their statistics showed that over 90% of users never used the multiple tabs feature. I was shocked at the time, but I’d be even more shocked now.
That said, users do seem to fall into two categories: single tab or a gazillion tabs, with no in between.
Me with my youtube page, then my page with tumblr, twitter and skindeep all in my personal desktop seem very organized and all, until I switch to my university desktop and oh my god why do I still have this article open I’ve done that presentation LAST SEMESTER oh god I have 30 tabs in just this window and I have 5 more windows with fuck knows how many other tabs!!! Then my third desktop is my torrenting one with some search pages open so that I can just refresh the search for a new episode of whatever series/anime I’m watching now, totaling 1 tab in one single window
I somehow fit perfectly in both extremes and the middle ground lol
No, but it can take more than the website demands.
For example, browsers these days pre-load links before you click on them. If I remember correctly (and if it’s still implemented like this), Firefox by default would only do a DNS lookup and TLS handshake, to keep memory+power usage and security concerns low, whereas Chrome optimized more for being as fast as possible, and already downloaded the first webpage files.
I imagine the Chromium devs have put a lot of work into reducing memory usage. Work that’ll have to be replicated by whichever small team is working on this hypothetical browser.
What other browsers? The Firefox forks as well as Safari and those using WebKit aren’t worse, but the rest are just rebranded Chromes.
They’re basically as complex as operating systems these days.
You need to implement several huge standards in order to get relatively simple modern sites to load
Fun fact: chromium has about 1.5 million more lines of code than the Linux kernel (about 32mil vs about 30.5mil), not including whitespace/docs/etc.
It is however also worth noting that lines of code is a not great metric for complexity
But yes, as a casual comparison it’s interesting
IIRC, even KDE and their whole suite of apps are dwarfed by the LOC count of browser (forgot if it is firefox or chromium)
Over the years browsers have accumulated too many features. If it was just plain HTML and CSS rendering it wouldn’t be so bad.
I agree with others who have said that browsers are basically operating systems now.
The fact that I can go to one website and have a pretty much parity perfect and functioning photoshop for free, go to another and play online multiplayer games and then just go to a social webpage, forums and so much more in the same place is mind blowing when you think of how different these things are and how it all works flawlessly in the same program
Just try to match a bare minimum of features.
You can take a quick look at the W3C standard. Primarily at the page length.
Because you don’t make money on making one, you make money on how it alters the view on how people see the Internet.
Under Microsoft, the Internet was made janky enough to encourage more than the basic web use require third party plug-ins that didn’t always work or a computer program running in Windows.
Under Google, the Internet is more standardized across platforms, but Google can shape how the Internet works for it’s own profit.
There are a lot of things that they have to do, and they have to do them right with extremely little tolerance for error.
The Web has become the de facto method of accessing the internet for almost everything. Most people think of it as the internet.
A lot of people do critical stuff through web browsers, so if something on a website breaks because of the browser, it’s a huge problem.
If only non-animated content could be rendered using something other than HTML/CSS.
I mean, most web content such as news or blogs are static text plus images. We could use a much simpler format with a really low entry point for more competition.
We can use apps for the complicated and dynamic content. I’m really generalizing but it’s out of frustration from how shitty the web has become and how it’s controlled by so few mega corporations.
There are other formats. For example markdown is widely used in the web. It’s biggest problem is the lack of standardization though.
Lots of people do use gemini, but I think it’s past the point where, if were ever going to catch on, it would have.
Personally, I think it’s mostly OK, but went too far with simplifying the gmi spec; it’s too simple. And some things that need to be possible for success, aren’t, and never can be. I think it’s too flawed to have ever caught on.
Wish at least Lemmy and Mastodon (the whole fediverse) were possible to see in Gemini browsers at least (i’m using Lagrange in case anyone wants to try), we are already immune to the technical and commercial obstacles of mainstream web, and are just text and image.
That’s exactly what I mean. The FediVerse in general can work fine without JavaScript, CSS, or any cruft, but Gemini is even too simple for that to be an enjoyable experience. IMO.
The obscene amount of copyright protection BS and ads and tracking probably doesn’t help. The average website, in my eyes, is massively bloated and over engineered for the content they actually deliver.
Many reasons on many levels. One of them: Browser developers and the companies behind them benefit from a system where we have basically 2 options that reliably work. They have a stronger interest in keeping this expensive, rather than making it easy and cheap. So making sure other people can also develop a different browser is not on the agenda of anyone relevant.
ACID
