This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If only this could lead to scaling down the scope of web technologies so it’s sustainable to develop a browser without that 80% funding.
Wouldn’t be the first time we dropped an ultra complex technology for something much more simple, e.g. DCOM/CORBA for JSON-based RPC.
Title made me think… Aren’t we end of the Browser development cycle yet? What improvement browsers can benefit from now on? What else on the roadmap?
It never ends. The browser as we knew it in the early 2000s has become an all-encompassing engine to run all sorts of - well, apps. Can't really call all of it just websites anymore. Media theaters. Secure banking and shopping. Health provider portals. etc etc etc
It never ends.
And the code base has become so vast, so complex, that you can never be 100% sure that it's "finished". Figuratively, there's always someone who dropped a cigarette in the wet cement some time back. That cement will be ever so slightly weaker than the cement surrounding it and might - or might not - break.
I'm not saying I like this, but it is what it is. The Internet of 2025 has very little in common with the internet of [however far you want to go back].
We had Java Web Start decades ago, but we decided to design web apps as stupidly as possible instead.
Probably the most important thing is keeping up with security fixes. I'm not an expert in web security, but my impression is that there's a never-ending cat and mouse game between hackers and browser developers to find or patch exploits. And since browsers play such an important role in the activity of hundreds of millions... billions?.. of consumers, it has the largest possible attack surface for hackers to target.
Then there's things like better support for web assembly (how I would love the web dev world to break the JavaScript hegemony), and the constantly shifting web standards that are meant to make websites more capable, easier to program, and more performant. E.g. things like websockets and WebRTC.
Are we at the end of the operating system development cycle? A browser is an operating system that abstracts away your operating system, at this point.
Anyway, there's a lot of ad tech and tracking stuff to be implemented. You'll love it, Google decided so.
As long as Google doesn't sell Chrome to OpenAI.
this is my most controversial take in computing in general:
i’ve always hated the browser. the reason there are only a few working browser engines is that HTTP and the HTML/CSS/JS tech stack is a gigantic pile of tech debt, and even using Chromium and Firefox you run into edge cases where, for certain edge cases, they don’t always follow the specs as defined in these ancient RFCs. and these specs: why tf are they treated as gospel? which software product specs drafted 50 years ago get this kind of reverence? why is it that other GUIs have had tons of iteration, not just of their spec but their full stack implementation (Wayland, .NET, Kotlin Compose, SwiftUI, etc), but we’re all just fine with this mess of janky boomer protocols cuz it lets startups get to market faster? why is downloading an entire app (less some caching) every time you want to use it feel less cumbersome than installing something native to the runtime environment where the protocols can be tightly controlled by the developer and not subject to whatever security and storage protocols whatever browser implementation decides is good for you? cookies? really? the browser should be reimagined with a tighter set of protocols that allow you to look at brochure sites and download content, ie apps. even the best web apps are a janky mess and have never worked better than properly developed desktop GUI. /rant
Well, I do think you're wrong about quite a lot of that. So yeah that is in fact controversial. Upvoted.
But I agree websites are a bloated mess that shouldn't be made on a giant javascript stack of unreadable unmaintainable garbage. It'd be cool if we got something more like applets. But then we'd have to design a framework that operates in a sandbox and is limited to only functions that are safe to perform on your computer without trusting the author and make it easy to write so developers can build it and.... we're back at html+css+javascript.
I think the big thing we need to do is fully replace javascript.
Have a look at Gemini and the Gemini capsules. Seems more like what a browser should be, in my opinion.
i know i’m in the minority here so i’m not going to bury myself in this hole, but i do think those are addressable problems. many of them have been addressed. replacing Javascript is exactly what i’m talking about.
Isn't that what wasm kinda is?
not really. using WASM as your full stack for your front end is just adding to the complexity and jank. WASM is there for compute heavy stuff. you can use it that way if you want.
there may be a little angst from reading and rereading the “Max-Age” portion of the cookie RFC that caused this trauma
I think browsers are unique because it's how laypeople interact with their computer the most.
~~Necessary~~ Necessity is the mother of invention
Thank you, my spell checker was "helping"...
There are four of them?
Firefox, safari, chrome, edge. Depending on your perspective that's either 3 or 4.
Edge is Chrome, so three then.
Yep that's what I meant by the "depending on your perspective" bit
Chrome used to be Safari, so it's really more like two and a half.
Safari used to be khtml/Konqueror so ... I'm not sure how we're dividing actually.
This is another bullet point on the list of MAGA stopping or confusing the flow and accessibility of information.
We are to know nothing about what they are doing in the world, ideally.
No. This is a thinly veiled pr price supporting Google as a monopoly
Sounds wonderful
