this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Where else do you expect them to get the money needed to maintain a web browser?
Well, how did they do it in 90s-2010s? Genuinely asking. What's changed that they can no longer do this.
Web standards have grown dramatically more complex since then. (To me, this raises a question in and of itself, I think it would be good to try and develop standards intentionally easy to maintain to avoid embrace-extend style dominance from individual companies).
You now have HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC. You have newer and newer layers of security, and you have multiple platforms (Apple, Windows, desktop, phone) to develop for. It's a mountain that has grown out of what was once just a unique type of slightly marked up text file.
Well, on the standards front, they tried
google just kept shifting the goalposts and forcing everyone to follow.
On the technology front, you could maintain these things with a very small team of developers whose total salary is but a small percentage of the CEO's current pay.
I entirely agree with you about Google perpetually shifting the goalposts, which increases complexity and works to their advantage. I would say I think of the standards and technology as being, in many ways, integrally related.
I think the idea though, is that it has indeed grown so vast that you need, effectively, teams of teams to keep up. There are browsers done with small teams of developers, but the fruits of those, imo, are not super promising.
Opera: moved to Chromium.
Vivaldi: also on Chromium.
Midori: moved to Chromium.
Falkon: Developed by the KDE team. Perhaps the closest example to what you are thinking of. It's functional but lags well behind modern web standards.
Netsurf: Remarkable and inspiring small browser written from scratch, but well behind anything like a modern browsing experience.
Dillo: Amazing for what it is, breathing life into old laptops from the 90s, part of the incredible software ecosystem that makes Linux so remarkable, so capable of doing more with less. It's a web browser under a megabyte. Amazing for what it is, but can barely do more than browse text and display images with decent formatting.
Otter: An attempt to keep the Old Opera going, but well behind modern standards. Also probably pretty close to what you are suggesting.
Pale Moon: Interesting old fork of pre-quantum Firefox but again well behind modern web standards.
All of the examples have either moved to Chromium to keep up, or are well behind the curve of being modern browsers. If Firefox had the compromised functionality of Otter it might shed what modest market share it still has, not to mention get pilloried in comment sections here at Lemmy by aspiring conspiracy theorists.
I do love all of these projects and everything they stand for (well, the non-chromium ones at least) but the evidence out there suggests it's hard to do.
There's ladybird too, but I hear you.
Oh shoot, that's actually the best example of all, and, in fact a great counterpoint to all of those examples above. If Ladybird does it and can sustain it, then Mozilla really has no excuses.
Netscape, which was essentially the predecessor to Mozilla, was a well funded VC-backed startup. That’s how they did it.
and only now the investors are asking for their return? Or the investors aren't re-investing and that's the problem?
@tetris11 @GnuLinuxDude
Netscape exited to AOL in 1998. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has since then been a successful venture capitalist who loves cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump.
oh dear
@tetris11 @GnuLinuxDude
Mozilla Corporation -- which makes Firefox -- is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit.
A nonprofit can't generate a lot of business income unrelated to its mission. Firefox used to generate a lot of income, so it had to be spun off into a taxable entity called Mozilla Corporation.
The corporation doesn't have investors in the usual sense.
Christ that's a messy inheritance model. Hopefully Firefox will be spun off to, and will have to focus solely on the browser.
The web got WAY more complicated, at the time all websites were mostly just static.
Either peasants step up or corpos will take over...
Ball is in our court folks
Not really, corpos take over any centralized effort. Look at wikipedia, funded by donations and has enough saved up to run for the next century, now they spend all that donation money on thinking up ways to ask for even more donations.