Support Firefox instead

Posted Jun 15, 2024 2:06 UTC (Sat) by himi (subscriber, #340)
In reply to: Support Firefox instead by roc
Parent article: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

Not that I'm planning to build a browser engine (for profit or itch-scratching - I'm not insane), but that's a nice description of the complexity of the modern browser environment - it's easily the most complex single piece of software on human-focused general purpose devices, and it's probably the most critical piece of software on those devices. The fact that Mozilla have been able to keep Firefox genuinely competitive with Chrome is a real achievement, anyone targeting that level of functionality from scratch is facing a truly massive battle just to get to the starting line.

That said, something that targets the Electron niche (and does it well enough) likely has a lot of legs. Definitely still an uphill battle, but far less of one than targeting a full browser . . .

Support Firefox instead

Posted Jun 15, 2024 2:27 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

There are projects in this area, like HTMLayout (now https://sciter.com/ ). It was done by a single person, and back in 2000-s quite a few widely used Windows programs had UI built using it.

Something like this would be extremely useful. Not a full browser engine, but a subset for UIs.

Support Firefox instead

Posted Jun 15, 2024 14:02 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

My immediate reaction to this is the web browser is trying to be the new Emacs - all it needs is some hardware to run on, it does everything else.

But seriously, to what extent is that the modern paradigm nowadays - the browser is the OS that runs your programs, and linux and Windows are just glorified hardware abstraction layers. For many people - especially at work - that is now not far from the reality ...

Cheers,
Wol

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