6 ms·

I am sooo ready to ditch chrome and firefox duopoly

by clot27 11mo ago

lambdaone 11mo ago
We are lucky it's even a duopoly. All it would take is the demise of Firefox, and the entire web would be defined entirely by the implementation of Chrome/Chromium. Servo is very welcome; a third leg to the stool makes real diversity possible again.
- whizzter 11mo ago
  Ladybird seems to be progressing at an impressive pace also, time will tell however if their choice of C++ will be a big problem or if modern ways of doing things are safe enough.
  - throwaway48476 11mo ago
    They chose c++ because the web spec implies object oriented design.
    - IshKebab 11mo ago
      No they didn't. It's C++ because the primary author was most familiar with C++ and only allowed C++ in SerenityOS. https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=The%20choice%20of%20language%20was,of%20modern%20C%2B%2B%20to%20maintain. https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=The%20choice%20of%20language%2...
      - throwaway48476 11mo ago
        That was the answer I remember Andreas give in a update video to answer the "why not rust" question.
        IshKebab 11mo ago
        That doesn't really make sense to me either. Even if WebIDL is inheritance based, that is going to be processed automatically so you can easily use codegen to make the resulting interface nice in Rust, in a way that would be relatively difficult if you were hand-writing it.
  - lawn 11mo ago
    They're announced they want to move to Swift to combat some of this.
    - whizzter 11mo ago
      Yep, but there was another post mentioning half a million lines of C++ code so far. While the C++ interop in Swift seems sane with Clang being embedded I wonder how much time/energy they will have to actually move significant parts if it's so large already.
  - tredre3 11mo ago
    Their choice is actually Swift and by the time there's a stable release all the C++ code is intended to have been replaced. Time will tell if that will be a big problem or if more mainstream ways of doing things are better for a project intended to run everywhere!
    - norman784 11mo ago
      I remember they mentioning Swift a few months ago, but currently I don’t see any swift in their github repo, didn’t checked other branches besides main.
    - hypeatei 11mo ago
      > all the C++ code is intended to have been replaced. That is not their goal at all, I don't where you heard that. Swift is currently stalled due to some blockers listed on their issue tracker, but any usage of it will be in safety-critical areas first and not a complete rewrite of existing code.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Very excited for Ladybird and Servo. I wonder if a good thing that may emerge from this era of LLM code-support capabilities is that its more feasible to support alternative browser codebases even as they get into the multi-million lines of code.
- bastawhiz 11mo ago
  Don't forget that pretty much 100% of iOS users and a nontrivial percentage of Mac users are on Webkit/Safari. That's not to say Safari is really leading the pack on anything at all, but Google also hasn't led Apple by the nose on pretty much anything on the web in recent years.
  - jorvi 11mo ago
    Yup, the split is really Blink+WebKit. Gecko marketshare is tiny these days. What's interesting is seeing a few non-Apple WebKit browsers pop up, like Orion (Kagi) and Epiphany. Call me cynical, but I don't see Ladybird or Servo do much beyond making a splash. Browser engines take an incredible amount of dev hours to maintain. Ladybird is hot now, but what about in a decade? Hype doesn't last that long and at that point the money and a chunk of the dev interest will have dried up. Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk.
    - nicoburns 11mo ago
      > Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk. There's always risk. IE/Edge also had a massive corporation championing it, until it didn't. The US DOJ also appears to be considering actively prevent Google from backing Chrome. Which could also do for Firefox given that it's revenue comes from the same source. No doubt that wouldn't completely kill those engine given our reliance on them, but in those kind of circumstances we might welcome the existence of some simpler engines that are cheaper/easier to maintain.
      - herewulf 11mo ago
        I don't see the current US DoJ doing anything that harms Big Business and doesn't cater to the petulant whims of the current Presidential Administration.
        nicoburns 11mo ago
        Plenty of the petulant whims of the current Presidential Administration are harmful to big business.
The_Rob 11mo ago
Firefox market share is so low, it really seems more like a Chrome and Safari duopoly.
- oblio 11mo ago
  It's all Konqueror's fault, really.
smt88 11mo ago
The duopoly is Chrome and Safari. Firefox barely registers, especially because all browsers on iOS are Safari. Also, what's your issue with Firefox?
kelnos 11mo ago
Firefox isn't a part of any duopoly, with market share numbers as low as they are these days. Chrome + Safari, perhaps? (Or Chrome + Edge if you exclude mobile, though Edge of course uses the same rendering engine as Chome.)
glenstein 11mo ago
I've seen a lot of criticism of Mozilla in these parts, some more fair than others. (Adtech = bad, regardless of whether you call it privacy preserving. CEO pay, not as bad as people say but don't love it.) But the notion that a trillion dollar platform company dictating web standards and Firefox are two sides of the same coin is, by my lights, the singularly most spectacular failure of comprehension that's been wrought by this era of Mozilla skepticism. It's not exactly a big lie because the people saying it seem to sincerely believe it but it's comparably disastrous as a test of information literacy.
- tracker1 11mo ago
  Mozilla was sitting on a chest of cash that could have funded engineering efforts for decades. Instead they decided to inflate managers and marketers in an effort to expand market/mindshare and follow that with needs for ever increasing funding drives to fund lavish parties and events on the marketing side, while shuttering engineering efforts and even laying off swaths of engineering talent. That doesn't even touch some of the more salient political movements or failure after failure to spin the brands off into something more/different for profit motives. Mozilla needs to restructure as an engineering focused organization where business operations, marketting and brand management are not steering the ship.
  - roryirvine 11mo ago
    Are non-profits in the US allowed to hoard cash long-term? In the UK, spending on furthering their charitable purpose is expected to roughly match income over the medium term. There are carve-outs for specific types of "permanent endowment" (and even there, spending is meant to match the investment income) but it wouldn't cover anything like Mozilla's commercial agreement with Google.
    - yencabulator 11mo ago
      Mozilla has already hoarded well over a billion. A billion would pay a sizable development team of experts for quite a while. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
TacticalCoder 11mo ago
[dead]
niutech 11mo ago
It's not duopoly, there is also WebKit, e.g. in Epiphany Browser.

I am sooo ready to ditch chrome and firefox duopoly

by clot27 11mo ago

I am sooo ready to ditch chrome and firefox duopoly

We are lucky it's even a duopoly. All it would take is the demise of Firefox, and the entire web would be defined entirely by the implementation of Chrome/Chromium. Servo is very welcome; a third leg to the stool makes real diversity possible again.

whizzter 11mo ago
Ladybird seems to be progressing at an impressive pace also, time will tell however if their choice of C++ will be a big problem or if modern ways of doing things are safe enough.
- throwaway48476 11mo ago
  They chose c++ because the web spec implies object oriented design.
  - IshKebab 11mo ago
    No they didn't. It's C++ because the primary author was most familiar with C++ and only allowed C++ in SerenityOS. https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=The%20choice%20of%20language%20was,of%20modern%20C%2B%2B%20to%20maintain. https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=The%20choice%20of%20language%2...
    - throwaway48476 11mo ago
      That was the answer I remember Andreas give in a update video to answer the "why not rust" question.
      - IshKebab 11mo ago
        That doesn't really make sense to me either. Even if WebIDL is inheritance based, that is going to be processed automatically so you can easily use codegen to make the resulting interface nice in Rust, in a way that would be relatively difficult if you were hand-writing it.
- lawn 11mo ago
  They're announced they want to move to Swift to combat some of this.
  - whizzter 11mo ago
    Yep, but there was another post mentioning half a million lines of C++ code so far. While the C++ interop in Swift seems sane with Clang being embedded I wonder how much time/energy they will have to actually move significant parts if it's so large already.
- tredre3 11mo ago
  Their choice is actually Swift and by the time there's a stable release all the C++ code is intended to have been replaced. Time will tell if that will be a big problem or if more mainstream ways of doing things are better for a project intended to run everywhere!
  - norman784 11mo ago
    I remember they mentioning Swift a few months ago, but currently I don’t see any swift in their github repo, didn’t checked other branches besides main.
  - hypeatei 11mo ago
    > all the C++ code is intended to have been replaced. That is not their goal at all, I don't where you heard that. Swift is currently stalled due to some blockers listed on their issue tracker, but any usage of it will be in safety-critical areas first and not a complete rewrite of existing code.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  Very excited for Ladybird and Servo. I wonder if a good thing that may emerge from this era of LLM code-support capabilities is that its more feasible to support alternative browser codebases even as they get into the multi-million lines of code.
bastawhiz 11mo ago
Don't forget that pretty much 100% of iOS users and a nontrivial percentage of Mac users are on Webkit/Safari. That's not to say Safari is really leading the pack on anything at all, but Google also hasn't led Apple by the nose on pretty much anything on the web in recent years.
- jorvi 11mo ago
  Yup, the split is really Blink+WebKit. Gecko marketshare is tiny these days. What's interesting is seeing a few non-Apple WebKit browsers pop up, like Orion (Kagi) and Epiphany. Call me cynical, but I don't see Ladybird or Servo do much beyond making a splash. Browser engines take an incredible amount of dev hours to maintain. Ladybird is hot now, but what about in a decade? Hype doesn't last that long and at that point the money and a chunk of the dev interest will have dried up. Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk.
  - nicoburns 11mo ago
    > Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk. There's always risk. IE/Edge also had a massive corporation championing it, until it didn't. The US DOJ also appears to be considering actively prevent Google from backing Chrome. Which could also do for Firefox given that it's revenue comes from the same source. No doubt that wouldn't completely kill those engine given our reliance on them, but in those kind of circumstances we might welcome the existence of some simpler engines that are cheaper/easier to maintain.
    - herewulf 11mo ago
      I don't see the current US DoJ doing anything that harms Big Business and doesn't cater to the petulant whims of the current Presidential Administration.
      - nicoburns 11mo ago
        Plenty of the petulant whims of the current Presidential Administration are harmful to big business.

The_Rob 11mo ago

Firefox market share is so low, it really seems more like a Chrome and Safari duopoly.

oblio 11mo ago
It's all Konqueror's fault, really.

smt88 11mo ago

The duopoly is Chrome and Safari. Firefox barely registers, especially because all browsers on iOS are Safari. Also, what's your issue with Firefox?

kelnos 11mo ago

Firefox isn't a part of any duopoly, with market share numbers as low as they are these days. Chrome + Safari, perhaps? (Or Chrome + Edge if you exclude mobile, though Edge of course uses the same rendering engine as Chome.)

glenstein 11mo ago

I've seen a lot of criticism of Mozilla in these parts, some more fair than others. (Adtech = bad, regardless of whether you call it privacy preserving. CEO pay, not as bad as people say but don't love it.) But the notion that a trillion dollar platform company dictating web standards and Firefox are two sides of the same coin is, by my lights, the singularly most spectacular failure of comprehension that's been wrought by this era of Mozilla skepticism. It's not exactly a big lie because the people saying it seem to sincerely believe it but it's comparably disastrous as a test of information literacy.

tracker1 11mo ago
Mozilla was sitting on a chest of cash that could have funded engineering efforts for decades. Instead they decided to inflate managers and marketers in an effort to expand market/mindshare and follow that with needs for ever increasing funding drives to fund lavish parties and events on the marketing side, while shuttering engineering efforts and even laying off swaths of engineering talent. That doesn't even touch some of the more salient political movements or failure after failure to spin the brands off into something more/different for profit motives. Mozilla needs to restructure as an engineering focused organization where business operations, marketting and brand management are not steering the ship.
- roryirvine 11mo ago
  Are non-profits in the US allowed to hoard cash long-term? In the UK, spending on furthering their charitable purpose is expected to roughly match income over the medium term. There are carve-outs for specific types of "permanent endowment" (and even there, spending is meant to match the investment income) but it wouldn't cover anything like Mozilla's commercial agreement with Google.
  - yencabulator 11mo ago
    Mozilla has already hoarded well over a billion. A billion would pay a sizable development team of experts for quite a while. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

TacticalCoder 11mo ago

[dead]

niutech 11mo ago

It's not duopoly, there is also WebKit, e.g. in Epiphany Browser.