
Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive - jonchang
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-browser-is.html
======
Santosh83
A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple
independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a
handful major ones.

Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as
currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which
_you_ can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family
to use it too, unless there's a deal-breaker reason they can't. Your vote
(usage) counts, so use it!

~~~
userbinator
...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like
Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps"
and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused
sites out there (including this one.)

What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the
whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up with and
implementing as many complex features as possible (and advocating for their
use in new sites), making it harder over time for smaller efforts at creating
independent browsers to produce anything useful.

~~~
baddox
I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task
seems almost impossible.

~~~
adventured
Amazon and Facebook could both launch entirely new browsers. Spotlight it
constantly on Amazon.com or across Facebook's properties as with Chrome on
Google.com.

Facebook already has far more cash and profit than they know what to do with.
$38 billion currently, rapidly climbing. They'll add ~$20 billion to that in
2018. They could do a new browser just for kicks if they wanted to, and they
have the vast global reach to generate some uptake.

Whether either could claw meaningful share away from Chrome is an entirely
different question.

Samsung, Tencent and Alibaba all have the resources to launch entirely new
browsers if it made sense.

~~~
rwmj
Alibaba already have their own browser of a sort
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser)).
As I understand it, it's some kind of thin mobile browser which renders on the
server side.

~~~
kinlan
There are multiple versions of UC browser. My understanding of it is:

\- uc mobile on Android now uses the blink engine, it used to use Webkit. \-
uc mini ( I think that's the name) has server renderer but it's "uc engine" is
a derivative of gecko (not checked recently)

------
zimbatm
My hope with HTML5 was that complexity would be _removed_ in the standard;
reduce the platform to smaller generic components. Instead we have this ever-
expanding feature set, a constant stream of new standards that have to be
implemented. It's death by complexity.

This plays in the hands of Google; each new feature is another opportunity to
fingerprint the user. If things continue like that, a new platform will have
to emerge to replace the web.

------
tombert
About three years ago, I decided that I was going to build my own browser from
scratch, and I thought it would be really easy to implement as long as I
strictly followed the web standards.

Within a few minutes, I got stuck with the fact that I could not get any
performance out of even a simple attempt at a CSS engine.

After about three days of mucking with that, I gave up on the project, and
gained a lot more respect for Mozilla.

~~~
hossbeast
You had a running css engine in a few minutes?

~~~
tombert
Heh, bad wording; I should say that I had performance problems within a few
minutes.

I did eventually get something that kind of worked, but that took about a day,
and still suffered performance issues, probably because I had no idea what the
hell I was doing (and still don't, really)

~~~
nnethercote
You had a running CSS engine within a day?

~~~
tombert
Yeah, a really crappy one that parsed a CSS file using Bison, and could change
text colors, background colors, and position things based on pixels (no em or
%).

I never got around to implementing class support, but I did allow targeting an
element via ID.

I did this in C++ for some reason, and used Xerces to parse the XML, and I
used Allegro to render everything. If I were to try and make this now, I
probably would not use a rendering system designed for games, but I was naive
back then.

I'll have to look to see if I can find the old files on my NAS; if I can I'll
put it on Github.

~~~
tvararu
These kind of high-level overviews of prototype implementations are very
useful, thank you for sharing.

------
jensv
Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson
Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she
got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that
pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

~~~
CapacitorSet
I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are
more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live
(Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.

~~~
Sylos
It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon
Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.

~~~
hennsen
Has anyone ever tried to hire someone requiring less than or up to max say 20k
for such a job? I wonder which qualifications that are that you find only in
people asking for >50 or even 100k/month.

I am from Europe so i might miss something that’s different in US. But 20k USD
would make for a very good living here. Ok you only can afford one house with
that an no 1000sqm villa and no Ferrari... but i state you don’t need either.

~~~
esrauch
20k USD/month is in the range that Google/FB/Microsoft pays for direct
managers of ~10 person teams: basically that would be the level of credentials
that you would be competing for in that pay area.

~~~
rlanday
That’s low for a manager. Many individual contributors make more than that at
large companies.

~~~
hennsen
What do they contribute that no one else could for this „low“ amount?

~~~
rlanday
It’s not that “no one else” could do their job, but there’s not an unlimited
supply of people who can meet the hiring bar at Google/Facebook/Microsoft, and
there are a number of employers with deep pockets trying to hire them. Google
in particular is known to offer people with competing offers a lot of money to
keep them from going to other companies.

~~~
hennsen
If there are other people who are able to do the job, but not meet the hiring
bar, what does that tell us about the bar?

~~~
rlanday
Did I say that?

No interview process is perfect, but here's what would happen if e.g. Google
attempted to use your strategy of "make the interviews easier and pay people
less":

Many candidates would interview at both Google and Facebook (as well as other
companies). The smartest, hardest-working candidates are all able to figure
out how to game the interview process and get really good at solving
algorithms problems on a whiteboard. Many of them get offers from both
Facebook and Google. They all choose to work at Facebook because Google's only
offering half as much money.

The candidates who are less smart and/or too lazy to study for their
interviews get rejected from Facebook, but get an offer from Google since
Google's decided that interviews are stupid anyway. They all take the Google
offer since they got rejected from Facebook.

Now Google ends up with a pool of employees selected on the basis of being not
smart enough and/or too lazy to get a job at Facebook. Do you see the problem
here?

~~~
hennsen
Haha.

You question that you said „It’s not that “no one else” could do their job,
but there’s not an unlimited supply of people who can meet the hiring bar“ Or
what?

I didn’t propose a concrete strategy. I just doubt the things have to be as
they are and pose a lot of questions why they are as they are.

Then you build exactly one fictional scenario that would make things maybe(not
necessarily - there are options... maybe there is a number of smart people who
don’t want to learn for artificial interview scenarios, maybe they don’t have
some university degree) go bad for one employer and imply the conclusion
everything has to be and stay as it is.

Do you see the problem here?

~~~
rlanday
I don't understand your point of view. You work in tech, right? Do you _want_
tech companies to pay their employees less?

~~~
hennsen
We talk about the question if managers have to be that expensive.

And I’m open to a yes if there are valid points and my questions about it
answered.

We don’t talk about what I want to get paid.

You’re steering away from the topic, right after questioning something that
you said just exactly as cited, and dont answer straight questions. Do you
wanna take part in a discussion or just confuse abd avoid it?

------
techsupporter
I wish the Mozilla store hadn't gone away. I've used Firefox for a very long
time but it's been three or four laptops ago that I was able to adorn my
machine with Firefox (or Thunderbird!) stickers. Yes, it's a small thing, and
I tout Firefox whenever I can, but I'm also a sucker for something I can slap
on something that I carry around.

(I suppose I could also just make my own or have someone print them up for me
alongside giving money to the Mozilla Foundation.)

~~~
marpstar
I totally forgot about the Firefox shirts I owned in college until I read
this. I can't believe they closed it.

------
rlv-dan
This begs the question: Is it healthy that one of the most important
technologies today (web) is also very complicated (=expensive) and thus
effectively limiting number of players.

~~~
roca
It's not healthy, but unfortunately maintaining compatibility and staying
abreast of modern platform features (so that apps and content don't fully
migrate to the single-vendor platforms) just mandates a lot of complexity.

~~~
edejong
The reason why it’s expensive is that no HTML5 proposals are taking into
account the cost of development and maintenance. “Anything goes” as long as it
competes with the walled-garden platforms. Spending without budgeting nor cost
evaluation is similar to going to a casino spending your life savings thinking
you’re the lucky one.

~~~
roca
Deciding just to cede applications and content to single-vendor platforms
isn't that appealing for the open Web.

~~~
edejong
That implies a binary decision. The war is won in many battles. Deciding which
ones to go into is the deciding factor. Bringing your men to each is a sure
way to lose, and it’s what is currently happening with the modern web.

~~~
roca
If individual browser vendors decide that some feature is not worth the
effort, they can just not implement it and not support those apps fully. Maybe
change that decision if the feature gets popular. If the feature never gets
popular it can be removed. This actually happens all the time.

But vendors getting together and saying "no, we're just not going to compete
with native platforms in this space" seldom happens. As a proponent of the
open Web, I think that's a good thing.

~~~
edejong
Browser vendors usually do not have this choice. Either they proposed the
change themselves, forcing other vendors to follow, or a prisoners-dilema
occurs where either all vendors act, or non at all. These are well studied
problems in oligopolies and are the prime reason we need a certain amount of
governance of (independent) standards bodies.

~~~
roca
Browser vendors always have the choice not to implement, or to delay
implementing, standards are are seeing little uptake. I know, I did this work
for over a decade and made many such decisions.

------
rtpg
I feel like there's a golden opportunity here to have things like Firefox be
broken up into more independent parts.

We've already seen this in the JS engine space, though it's still pretty hard
to integrate alternate JS engines into browsers. Having more and more of the
app broken up makes it _much_ easier for contributors to come in and for work
to be shared.

We don't all need to write our own implementations of CSS style sharing, even
if higher level strategies are different.

~~~
qznc
The CSS engine just got replaced with a Rust implementation. Isn't that a sign
that it is quite modular already?

~~~
gsnedders
The CSS _style_ side got replaced with a Rust implementation (that matches
selectors and computes the used CSS value of each property for each node). The
_layout_ side is still all C++ (and Servo's implementation has nowhere near
parity with what Gecko already has).

------
richdougherty
I have so much admiration for Firefox. With the increasing market share of
mobile I'd love to see a well-funded, independent, compatible variant of
Android.

------
profalseidol
Supporting FF then is a kind of participating in mass movement to fight
against capitalism.

~~~
krapp
If you're supporting Firefox with money, it's still capitalism even if Mozilla
is a non-profit. You're paying an entity to continue maintaining a product,
and attempting to bias market share in favor of that product over its
competitors.

------
digi_owl
Yes it is, because what we keep referring to as a browser has, thanks to
commercial pressure, become a OS in its own right.

And rather than stop and ask if this is in any way sensible, they keep pushing
more stuff, like USB and Bluetooth, into it.

Whenever i run into a site that is either just giving me a blank page or a
error when i have JS turned off, i wonder when the train jumped the rails. And
i fear it may well go as far back as the browser war between Microsoft and
Netscape.

------
markpapadakis
I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just
too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers?
I’d be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back
and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to
know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ).
Of course, it’s likely that I am too naive or clueless.

~~~
roca
There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that
Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to
make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still
true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that
may not be true now.

Comparisons with the past are meaningless because browsers are far more
complex (and performant, and secure, and versatile, etc) than they used to be.

And sorry, but your gut estimates are not likely to be that accurate if you
don't work in this area.

~~~
gsnedders
> There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that
> Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to
> make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's
> still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I
> suspect that may not be true now.

Scope differences make it incredibly hard.

Plenty of people on the Blink team work on things like Skia, which neither the
WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of (because they just leverage OS-
specific APIs), or on their HTTP/TLS stack (again, neither WebKit nor EdgeHTML
teams have equivalents of), etc.

Gecko is somewhere in a middle-ground; they rely on third party libraries
(including Skia—does that make that part of the Chrome team Blink/Gecko
developers?) but not quite as much as WebKit and EdgeHTML do.

Core web stuff? The Blink team is larger, yes, but by how much is a hard
question.

FWIW, I believe the Gecko team is nowadays larger than the EdgeHTML team, but
they're certainly close in size. (And close to the size of the old Presto
team, which admittedly had a scope closer to that of the Blink team.)

~~~
Manishearth
Gecko also has its own infra/productivity/etc folks, whereas I bet these folks
are from a much larger shared team at the big companies

~~~
gsnedders
The Chrome team has a lot of its own infra due to policy that a lot of
Chromium stuff be public (its bug tracker system now code.google.com is dead
and its CI infra are all done by the Chrome infra team).

I imagine to some limited degree it's true for WebKit (though I suspect they
don't have anyone whose sole job is infra) given Apple don't have any general
public bugtracker or CI system, and totally untrue for Edge.

------
JumpCrisscross
How do Firefox and Chrome compare in respect of security?

~~~
Sylos
With Firefox 57, they're now essentially equivalent in terms of the security
architecture.

There's a small architectural difference with how tabs are sandboxed against
one another. That is, Chrome starts a new process for every tab, unless it's
on the same domain as another tab.

Firefox by default only uses as many processes for tabs as you have processor
cores and then round-robins tabs across those. This achieves essentially
equivalent parallelism with much lower resource usage, so overall better
performance. If you'd rather have the security than the performance, you can
set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to a higher number. This is the
maximum number of processes that it will use for tabs, so setting it to
something like 1000 will essentially make it start a new process for each tab.

Then there's something to be said about add-ons. Mozilla does manual code
reviews of most extensions and extension updates. (They have some criteria for
when they don't do a manual code review and instead just an automated check,
based on how damaging the extension is able to be with the things that it
accesses.)

As a result, AMO has essentially no problems with malware, whereas on the
Chrome Store you hear every other month of some trojan or adware spreading.

Mozilla also has a policy that disallows telemetry without user opt-in as a
whole, so recognizing adware or a trojan is just a matter of observing network
traffic where it shouldn't necessarily be going.

Lastly, Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password
needed. Chrome Sync is not, you need to set up a second password for it to be
end-to-end-encrypted. And Google will store and work with your Sync data, if
you do not opt for E2EE, so that's another possibility for a pretty big data
leak. Not a problem, if you are security-conscious and don't mind setting up
that secondary password, but recommending it to average users on the merits of
it being secure is essentially out with this.

~~~
chrismorgan
I believe Chrome has for a while been using much the same model as Firefox has
recently taken up, not a new process for each tab.

AMO’s lack of malware problem is simply because it’s not so popular—making
addons was, before WebExtensions, decidedly harder, and the browser’s not as
popular as Chrome, so why bother targeting it when there are bigger fish you
can catch more easily?

~~~
bpicolo
Hmm. `ps -A | grep -i chrome | wc -l` adds +1 per tab for me on Mac OSX as
long as I navigate off the home. Does it cap eventually?

~~~
bzbarsky
Yes, there's a cap. See [https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/process...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/process-models) for the detailed descriptions the "Caveats" section.

------
Endy
Question: Is there actually a good Independent browser for Windows at this
time? That is, not Firefox, not Chrome, not Chrome-Opera, not Vivaldi (alias
Chrome-Opera-2), and also not based on Chromium, WebKit, Blink, Gecko,
Trident, or any of the major bits of one of the corporate browsers? The
closest that I can see is Pale Moon, but even they are just a "better" fork of
Firefox.

~~~
pcwalton
There are exactly four major engines, each of which has a flagship browser:
Blink/Chrome, WebKit/Safari, Gecko/Firefox, and EdgeHTML/Edge.

~~~
BerislavLopac
Wouldn't introduction of Servo make it five? Gecko is not going away yet, IIRC
it's used in some browsers, like Pale Moon.
[https://www.palemoon.org/](https://www.palemoon.org/)

~~~
Sylos
Servo is not a _major_ browser engine. It's a small research project.

And Firefox continues to use Gecko. It has some bits and pieces from Servo in
it and the Mozilla marketing team has dubbed everything "Quantum" for the
Firefox 57 release to communicate that lots has changed, but it is still
Gecko.

------
jensv
I really hate it when things are not for sale to the highest bidder. Everyone
knows that’s the best way to go.... ;)

------
ThomPete
So here is a question. If one was to undertake the challenge of building a new
browser how would you go about doing it conceptually? What would at least
convince a small group of technically advanced users to adopt it?

~~~
rlanday
You would probably want to build a browser on top of Chromium, like Opera does
(and also what Microsoft is doing on Android), and would want to try
differentiating based on user-facing features. You could also build on top of
Gecko, but this doesn’t seem to be as popular. Building on WebKit probably
doesn’t make sense because its corporate backer (Apple) mostly only cares
about supporting macOS and iOS. Eventually, if you become big enough that you
think it’d be better to be independent, you can fork Chromium.

This is basically the approach Google took with Chrome: they built on top of
WebKit (which itself was originally an Apple fork of KHTML), then forked it
eventually.

------
moocowtruck
and it's only getting more difficult because the browser is turning into an
operating system

------
yuhong
I have been discussing the debt-based economy and Google and Mozilla recently
with BrendanEich on Twitter, including a debt diagram.

------
feelin_googley

       Annual salaries from 2015 (reportable compensation from IRS Form 990):
    
       Mitchell Baker, Chair $977,382 + $45,530
       Bob Lisborne, Director $92,000
       Mark Surman, Exec. Dir./President $170,699 + $40,602
       Jim Cook, Treasurer $934,526 + $45,530
       Angela Plohman, Secretary/VP Operations $121,322 + $30,342
       Christopher Lawrence, VP Learning $153,492 + $62,538
       An-Me Chung, Dir. Partnerships 154,946 + $72,672
       Daniel Sinker, Dir. Partnerships 123,630 + $64,215
       Hiram Paul Johnson, Marketing Lead 126,605 + 54, 903
       Andrea Wood, Online Organizing/Fundraising Lead $135,048 + $46,322
       Samuel Dyson, Director Hive Chicago $114,860 + $63,549
    

source: [https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Found...](https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Foundation_Forms_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf)

Perhaps the author is telling the truth. Consider the salary costs of
retaining skilled "maintainers" like the above personnel.

Note I am not condemning Mozilla. They do good work.

However I am not quite sold on the idea that their purpose for existence is to
"keep the web open" or whatever tagline they are going with.

For example, an "open" web would be one made for all browsers to access, not
just a select few who have chosen to try to keep up with an arms race of
recently-added, _non-optional_ "features" that carry serious costs to users.
The key word I wish to emphasize is "non-optional". Users are not given choice
and that is most likely intentional.

Many a web developer presents the user with a small selection of "acceptable
browsers", the ones that will run third party code and readily show heavy,
third party advertising. Anything else is "prohibited" and must be a "bot".
Users are sometimes even shamed for not using the web browser or version that
the web developer wants them to use, calling the user's software "outdated"
when they have almost no information about the user's software except its
behavior and some easily forgeable HTTP headers. In many cases, e.g., where
the user is just retrieving some information, that is just silly.

Not every website needs to show advertising. Not all information is
commercial. Not all information is graphical. I am not using one of the select
few targeted browsers to read HN or post this comment, but I am getting the
same information as the readers who are. And for some reason(s), web
developers flock to this "outdated" website. Why?

Clearly the web can be _both_ accesible by simpler user agents, _and_ fully-
functional for the most bleeding-edge features of corporate-sponsored browsers
at the same time. The original web standards, e.g. basic HTML, still work,
very effectively. The web as a means to offer basic functionality such as HN
can be "backwards compatible" with user agents that are far more simple than
Firefox, Chromium, etc.

The select few browsers that many web developers target overwhelmingly
controlled by corporations and other advertisers. Netscape and the idea of
corporations paying to use a browser may exist only as entries in the
historical record, but I do not think we can say that browsers are truly
separated from corporate funding (and influence). Browsers are still
commercial, in a sense, IMO. While it might be viewed as "free software", the
authors of these few browsers are well-paid by their corporate (or "non-
profit") employers and the end goal is "market share", ideally a monopoly.

This is fine if the web is 100% commercial. But it did not start that way and
it still isn't 100% commercial. Non-commercial uses are still alive and well.

It is not necessarily Mozilla's fault for the direction the web moves in,
e.g., making content less accessible by simpler user agents. _However_ , if
their purpose is to make the web "open" or some such "non-commercial" aim,
then what could they do to enable and promote use of simpler user agents (and
thereby promote their acceptability among web developers)? I can think of a
few things. I am sure others could as well. There is no shortage of users who
are dissatisfied with the (lack of) variety of user agents that are available.

[http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die](http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die)

The question is whether Mozilla really wants to listen to users who might
criticize dismiss their browser as, e.g., too bloated.

~~~
roca
The complexity of the modern Web platform is a problem. Mozilla developers
feel this acutely, believe me.

The problem is that if the open Web platform does not expand to meet the needs
of modern applications, then modern applications will simply be restricted to
single-vendor platforms like iOS, Android and Windows, and over time the
relevance of the open Web will atrophy. That is not an acceptable outcome for
Mozilla.

If you can convince Web developers to build sites that work on cut-down
browsers, great. I don't see any way to make that happen en masse though.

FWIW Mozilla obtaining a monopoly would be inconsistent with their mission and
I don't think actual Mozilla developers are aiming for that. Partly because
it's not a realistic outcome!

~~~
feelin_googley
"The complexity of the modern Web platform is a problem. Mozilla developers
feel this acutely, believe me."

I believe you. Do they want to take action to address it?

"The problem is that if the open Web platform does not expand to meet the
needs of modern applications, then modern applications will simply be
restricted to single-vendor platforms like iOS, Android and Windows, and over
time the relevance of the open Web will atrophy. That is not an acceptable
outcome for Mozilla."

I understand. Why does the "open Web" need to stay relevant? Honest question.
The answer to this question is really the core issue, IMO.

"If you can convince Web developers to build sites that work on cut-down
browsers, great. I don't see any way to make that happen en masse though."

Not sure where the "en masse" part comes from. That was not in the original
comment.

The comment was meant to draw attention to denial of choice in user agents
given to users. The illusory scarcity of browsers that will "work". (Thus web
developers design for browser implementations instead of according to open web
standards, which should be implementation-agnostic. Browser developers are the
ones who are seemingly in control of what is and what is not a "standard" in
the mind of the web developer. Too often, companies are the ones writing the
"open web" standards.)

I believe in the antithesis of the "en masse" notion.

That users do not need to converge en masse around a small selection of known,
complex web browsers because most sites, e.g. those that simply present
information, already "work" with cut-down browsers.

I use a non-graphical user agent. Most sites work fine for me. I get what I
need. And this is without the web developer even contemplating the software I
am using. To the extent they are following certain open standards for HTML, it
all works anyway.

On the same day as the OP was posted, it shared the HN front page with a re-
post of a 2012 ACM submission by PHK.

In this ACM submission, PHK describes building Firefox on FreeBSD.

He cites something like 122 dependencies, and a requirement for some binary to
run plugins.

I have build Firefox on BSD myself using pkgsrc. It takes longer than building
kernels.

Is there a "Firefox Lite" where a user can opt out of various features at
build time?

Why not?

"FWIW Mozilla obtaining a monopoly would be inconsistent with their mission
and I don't think actual Mozilla developers are aiming for that. Partly
because it's not a realistic outcome!"

Nor am I suggesting that providing options to users should result in any "en
masse" behaviour by users or web developers.

It is not a realistic outcome.

The goal of the experiment might be to provide some software to users that the
market share leaders will not provide. Is this realistic? Mozilla has taken
risks before. Not every project it has sponsored has attracted a mass
following of users.

For example, imagine a version of Firefox that optionally has no Javascript
engine. This software would be less complex (and intentionally less
functional). But believe me, as a text-only browser user, it would still work.

If a user complains about a major browser as "bloated", if she complains about
ads and is forced to use NoScript or an ad-blocker, if she is pondering how
complexity makes her browser more vulnerable to attacks, then it would be
interesting if there was another option she might try, which came from a well-
known source such as Mozilla. She might build Firefox without the features
that lead to these problems.

What happens after that is anyone's guess. As it is with any experimental
Mozilla project.

But at least one can say that an option was presented to move away a state of
from increasing complexity in addition to the option of using Mozilla's full-
featured Firefox browser competes for market share with the other major
browser vendors.

Internet commentators sometimes reference a quote from Steve Jobs something
like: users do not know what they want (until Apple gives it to them).

While this may be self-evident to developers, I believe that users _do_ know
what they _do not_ want. These are programs features, modifications and
behaviours that users are familiar with because they have been using the
software for years. Alas, rarely do developers of graphical programs give
users the option to remove features. As such, we can only guess what might
happen if they had that option.

A large portion of the web does "work" when using user-agents that lack the
latest features. It also works with the recommended browsers. The question is
whether Mozilla can acknowledge this is true and release software that takes
advantage of it. Mozilla can still pursue its mission, including keeping up
with the Joneses.

~~~
roca
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.

> Do they want to take action to address it?

Within the constraints of the assumptions I've outlined, yes, and they have.

One example is the fight for asm.js/Webassembly against PNaCl+Pepper. We
fought that fight in part because Google was fine with introducing a whole new
platform API in the form of Pepper, and Mozilla instead wanted to minimize the
additional complexity by reusing existing Web platform APIs.

> Why does the "open Web" need to stay relevant?

I want a platform that isn't controlled by any single gatekeeper, through
which app/content developers can reach all users and all users can reach the
apps and content they want. (A sort of corollary is that the platform should
be implementable in free software.) The Web is by far the closest thing we
have to that.

One problem with a niche browser is that when you have a browser with very low
market share, Web developers don't test against it, and with the state of
software development technology today, stuff that's not tested in a platform
implementation tends to not work on that platform implementation.

Another problem with a niche browser is that by definition it impacts a small
number of users, and therefore only a relatively small investment can be
justified.

Fortunately there is nothing stopping you or some like-minded group from doing
your experiment. Tor has already done something similar and that's gone quite
well.

~~~
feelin_googley
Our respective ideas of what constitutes complexity appear to differ. Both of
your alternatives are far too complex for what I envision of less complexity.
I envision a browser that browses hypertext, not a program that automatically
runs third party code.

Further, I do not think of browsers in terms of "market share" nor testing for
one browser or another. I guess I have done a poor job explaining the point
about standards.

Testing input, e.g. a webpage, against a program, e.g. a browser, is
backwards, IMO. A program should be tested against input. If the program fails
given legal input, then if desired, fix the program.

The web contains plenty of legal input for a wide variety of clients. I am
consuming it everyday.

This plain fact appears to be outside of Mozilla's purview. But to me, a user,
this is what the "open web" means, much more so than a squabble between
Mozilla developers working on Firefox and former Mozilla developers working on
Chrome over some exotic feature to entice web developers.

The "open" web to me means I can retrieve information with a simple open
source client I can compile, and without an overly complex web browser
controlled by a corporation/organization that is by its complex nature
unreasonably difficult to compile except for a select few people. That is not
"open" within the meaning I subscribe to, which is more along the lines of
"accessible".

The more complex the browser becomes and thus the more complex the input that
web developers create for it, the less "open" the web becomes, because it
becomes less accessible.

I do not expect anyone to agree with me, but I at least hope that these points
make some sense.

------
jstewartmobile
Mozilla is only "independent" if you take an extremely loose interpretation of
that word.

Follow the money:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations)

I only dug into this after having a mildly unproductive run-in with what-wg.
Mostly Google and Mozilla guys, and not terribly open. Asking them "why"
typically gets very evasive replies, if any at all! The guy Phillip at Opera
was a class act though. Been using Opera ever since!

~~~
scrollaway
Mozilla has many flaws, lack of transparency is not one of them.

I don't even know where to start with your comment. You're linking the Mozilla
Corp wikipedia page, insinuating they're "not terribly open" (and putting
Google in that basket), on a subject you give almost no hints about, but hey
Opera is a thing? And somehow this comment means that Mozilla is not
independent?

~~~
jstewartmobile
Read again.

I doubted Mozilla Corp's "independence" in the first sentence. "not terribly
open" in the last paragraph was in reference to the WHAT-WG group, which is
"[m]ostly Google and Mozilla guys". From the posts in that group, those guys
seem more like co-workers than competitors.

For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating _thing_ , it isn't
hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy.

edit: And apparently I have to have "hits" to my name to state that getting
85% of your revenue from Google puts your independence into question???

~~~
Jaepa
Would you rather have people in standards groups to act more like competitors
instead of coworkers? Cause that seems like a really bad idea.

As for:

> For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating thing, it isn't
> hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy > edit: And
> apparently I have to have "hits" to my name to state that getting 85% of
> your revenue from Google puts your independence into question???

You aren't bring its independence into question, you are stating its an easy
conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy.

The 85% was from 2011. As of 2015 Mozilla stop receiving cash from Google
inpart to them changing there default searches (why google paid Mozilla). That
may have changed recently with Firefox 57 as they change the default search
back, but even then google announced a while back they were cutting how much
they were going to pay, so I doubt it will be the same 85%.

~~~
moz23
Citations for "cutting how much they were going to pay"?

Mozilla revenue is up, they're making a LOT of profit, and the Yahoo deal was
supposed to be 5 years so they're not likely to be losing money by switching
to Google: [https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-revenue-jump-fuels-its-
fir...](https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-revenue-jump-fuels-its-firefox-
overhaul-plan/)

~~~
Jaepa
Well in all fairness the deal with Yahoo kind of went side wise. But yeah I
would agree its probably around equal.

As for the source, I can't seem to find a source for this. I may have been
mistaken, but it was something I heard several years ago on a google related
podcast.

------
dmitriid
Maintaining an Independent <Software Project> Is Expensive

------
NetOpWibby
I wrote my own browser a few years back and it was quite challenging/fun
trying to figure out how to do basic browser things. You can check it out
here:
[https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries](https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries)

Since then, I’ve been using Opera, then Vivaldi, and now Firefox, taking notes
of how certain things are done. Lately, I’ve been thinking about using Servo
as my base insead of Electron and doing a whole rewrite.

~~~
kevincox
This article is talking about a browser engine, now a UI. Creating an
independent UI is considerable less work (although it still takes considerable
effort do to a good job of course).

~~~
NetOpWibby
Ah yeah, that's true. I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

