lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Around 1:00, he hits the jackpot: Mozilla sucks at communication, they always send mixed signals to the userbase. I also like what he said near the end, about getting money even if you do stupid shit.
I’ve seen people proposing to fork Firefox, to “fork” Mozilla, but what I feel like we need is to fork the very concept of a web browser.
Web browsers became such convoluted beasts that it is not feasible, in 2025, to create a new web engine; unless you have lots of money and no desire for more (both things are incompatible). And yet due to Pareto principle I expect that only a fraction of that complexity is truly necessary - with the rest being imposed by Google-fuelled standards.
And just backwards comparability. Web developers aren’t going to fix their old site for your new browser, so you’d need to use the ancient convoluted code base to access them.
Unless you’re okay with only using the big new websites. Is it most people only use 4 websites regularly?
Weird take. Web browsers are document display systems that got a bunch built on top of them. Old websites are just documents. Web browsers are meant to render them. New websites are a single html entry point that hands all website construction to JavaScript which then creates a fake document in memory for the web browser to render.
Which one is the convoluted, hard to implement and support one?
I have a feeling that the “ancient convoluted code base” that exists for backwards compatibility isn’t convoluted or hard to maintain at all; rather the new features are, because they include everything and the kitchen sink, as necessary for the big new websites.
roil@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
There is Ladybird browser, its under development andif all goes well, maybe we will see it comming in a couple of years.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Ladybird is IMO a step in the right direction; specially if they’re able to release the alpha in 2026, otherwise they might be stuck chasing the Sun indefinitely*. However it is not enough - we should be seeing a situation where anyone reasonably motivated and knowledgeable should be able to pull out their own browser, it shouldn’t be restricted to big projects with big sponsors.
*I feel like web standards change so much not due to the underlying tech actually requiring them to do so, but to raise the entry of barrier of new competitors.