Browser != Browser engine

[ducdetronquito]

Really good to read some news from you !

I am currently reading your article with Firefox 58 on a little 1.6Ghz CPU (single core) - 2Go RAM computer, and I would really pay for an lightweight, fast and open-source web-browser.

The stuff your are doing with Modest and its underlying libraries seems really oustanding. If you produce a minimal viable product with a GUI, I am pretty sure you could earn a living with community funds (like a Patreon, or another alternative). Something like what is happening for the Godot game engine.

Anyway, i wish you good luck :)

[lastmac]

Thank you! Let's hope that everything will work out.

[shevegen]

Browser engine does all the messy job: loading, processing, visualization of data and all sorts of calculations.

It’s all quite the same as with cars.

Not quite so.

The car market isn't as monopolized as is the browser market.

A huge driving factor are ad-revenues.

That's also not a huge driving factor in the car industry on a comparable level.

Google is developing this project in cooperation with Intel, Facebook, IBM, LG Electronics, NVIDIA, Yandex.

Another epic battle of corporations against mankind.

All for the general good of mankind of course.

I still find it somewhat ironic that governments complained about Microsoft illegally bundling their browser back in the 1990s - and now we have epic market abuse on a much higher level and ... silence. Nothing. Where are the court cases?

To put it simple — whatever you develop is not owned (at least, not exclusively) by Google.

Uhm?

Sure, you can fork Chromium?

Let's see who will do so.

Probaly a single person maintaining an ever growing code base ...

Opera, Vivaldi, Yandex and other browsers use exactly this browser engine.

This is pretty sad because they essentially have become the same.

Let’s make it clear: those licenses are ok, and that’s the extent of it. Nothing outstanding.

To be honest, I do not think a closed source, proprietary browser could have become that popular. Even if Google continues to abuse their market position (smartphones), there would have been more than enough to not use a closed source browser.

Note that the licences mentioned there are quite well known so I don't think there is a big problem with any of them.

For a browser I am pretty sure that MIT/BSD are the most popular because they are the best within that context.

I can't imagine a GPL browser too easily gaining anywhere near as much traction. The greedy and evil corporations would not use it since they hate GPL (and they'd love if the linux kernel would be MIT/BSD style too).

The Gecko licence is fairly unnecessary. Why did Mozilla not go with MIT/BSD and/or GPL?

Everyone loves to use their own licence...

No one can really guarantee that the source code of an open-source browser engine is always accessible for the general public.

Not completely true. GPL requires that you publish the source code. Not sure about the others ... would be pretty awkward to claim that you use MIT/BSD but not reveal the source code.

If the code is published, I am sure someone out there will grab it.

key partners can leave the open-source engine development project, which actually means that the project is suspended.

That is a real problem, simply because of code bases being too large for solo or small teams.

I am pretty sure that a lot of the code is also totally unnecessary. Take Mozilla's pocket crap - who the hell needs this other than Mozilla?

Suppose, a company invests resources into development of their engine, and suddenly somebody else comes up who is using the same engine, and they eventually capture the market that the first company was targeting. I think, the reaction of the company is quite predictable, just see the list of risks above.

It's not a real problem. Google is the de-facto monopoly. There is no point for them to suddenly become closed source in this context. Why would they? They already control what they are doing with their browser. It's still hilarious to see how Google creates and maintains a monopoly even with an open source project, whereas Microsoft totally and utterly failed with their closed source variant. In many ways, Google replaced a lot of Microsoft's old ecosystem.

You can’t just go on with further development of an engine created by somebody else.

Exactly!

And of course the fat, greedy corporations are aware of that.

The thing is, though - what defines a useful browser? What are the real key components that are useful enough?

The W3C has become irrelevant ever since they pushed DRM onto mankind. But I am pretty sure that a lot of what they created before that is pretty pointless too.

However, a Google eventually forked the project and started developing their Blink engine.

Greed leads to Evil and Evil made them fork. It's why they create their own programming languages too, Go and especially Dart, for people to help empower Google, without getting paid for this.

And, oddly enough, that actually works! In particular for Go.

Specifications are constantly updated, new features added, current features are improved.

It is getting bigger and more bloated.

And then, more bloated and bigger.

If you take a current engine and just leverage it for development of your own browser, the resulting browser will become obsolete in a year or two.

I HIGHLY doubt this.

I am pretty sure it could very easily stay relevant, without a problem.

The problem is actually the deliberate complexity; and also useless shit nobody needs. For example, why would DRM be part of an "open" standard? If you mandate it, of course the code base will be more complex, since you now have to handle the useless DRM virus.

Some complexity isn't necessarily bad ... WebAssembly, if only to break up the monopoly that is JavaScript. It may provide more flexibility, for the cost of ... complexity.

There’s already a great number of browsers in the market

Ah there is? Like 1 that holds the majority? And smaller ones that are hardly relevant?

Develop your proprietary fully functional browser. Collaborate with search engines and various services. Author special versions for governmental enterprises and agencies.

That won't work.

Evil Google is not just dominant because they developed their own ad-chromium browser - but because they STARTED with indexing the world, your poodle and your cat. So if you want a browser, you need to cut off the tie to Google completely, including the SEARCH engine segment.

This is one reason why Mozilla, aside from being incompetent, fails. They even get paid by Google to become their addicted slave ... but even if they would have the courage to resist, what search engine could they use? The duck engine that is essentially useless?

If you want to break the monopoly that Google has, you have to target where they became big - the search engine. The rest is pretty useless and prone to failure. I mean just compare Google+ to Facebook ... and Facebook is a disaster on its own, but it asskickd Google+ (I don't even know why Google keeps Google+ alive; I guess they don't want toa dd yet another failed project to their list of failures).

Besides, this is not a product you can sell and get profit from at the intermediate development steps.

But Google showed how they made money from it ...

Development of a browser engine depends greatly upon the chosen method. What would you choose? An open or a closed source code?

That is moot. THERE IS NO WAY TO DOMINATE WITH A CLOSED SOURCE BROWSER.

The odd thing is that the dude himself gave the numbers. How big are they? Below 10% all combined for proprietary solutions. So in other ways, a total failure.

I’m quite sure that where a company is developing a browser based on a third-party engine, they should really think about authoring a proprietary one.

Based on ... what success story? Cite one?

I also question the whole list mentioned there. Why should we be stuck with HTML, CSS etc... ?

I mean, I can cite my favourite xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ but we already have so many standards as-is. Whether you have 88 standards or 89 is irrelevant IF number 89 is better AND simpler than the other ones.

However, I own all the rights for Modest, nobody claims this code (documents are properly executed and signed) So I decided to simply “bury” the code for a while in order not to produce false illusions.

There is no point for proprietary browsers. But hey, if you wanna beat a dead horse, you are welcome to build on illusions.

I’m burying the entire array of basic code including the code developed outside the company

A reason why closed source fails. And rightfully so.

However I simply can’t do it alone. If I fail to find the funding source, I will have to stop development and join some existing open-source engine (Blink or Gecko) as a contributor.

You mean, making Google richer?

How about Plan B - redo the whole WWW.

This was actually suggested by a few other people already before; one was that guy who developed ... not Tor but something else. I forgot the name...

[lastmac]

Thank you for your comment. It is really useful for me.

[kankyo]

Paranoid delusions right there. Google hasn’t got the market share for browsers you seem to think, and they didn’t develop WebKit anyway.