this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024

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127

Why is it so expensive to develop a web browser? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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(page 2) 8 comments

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Because it's super complicated and a thousand moving parts are involved. You have to parse HTML, draw everything correctly, do JavaScript, Canvases, WASM, Websockets, HTTP 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, SPDY, support 10 different image formats, 5 audio, 5 video formats, allow videoconferencing, write a plug-in system. Handle Bookmarks, History, File downloads, uploads, .... ..... ......

The standards alone are thousands of pages. You gotta read them all, understand them and program everything. Which takes years for a team of developers. And you also want it secure or your users get in all sorts of trouble. A browser is the number 1 way to get malware on your computer. And all these experts take a decent salary. Multiply that (hourly) wage with multiple people and several years and you'll end up with an expensive product.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Don't forget the fully fledged remote desktop thats built in, WebVR (which is being replaced with Web XR), Web Bluetooth, Web USB (aka Web Serial), the API's for notifications, ambient light sensors, an entire transactional database (indexed DB), the language translation API, the Gamepad API (videogame controllers), hardware passkeys (yubikey), speech to text, text-to-speech, webGL, webGPU, webworkers, service workers, an entire suite of cryptography tools, GPS location, battery, vibration, FileSystem API, picture-in-picture API, WebRTC, WebSensors, etc.

And then, on top of all that, building a miniture OS-kernel so that tasks can be sandboxed scheduled/executed and prevent 1 tab from crashing everything or hogging resources.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (2 children)

And despite all that, if you don't bend over to emulate Chrome's quirks a ton of sites still won't work properly and users won't use your browser because the other one is more "compatible". And you might still have to fake your user agent to be Chrome or Firefox so sites will even give you the fancy HTML instead of giving you the mobile or "limited" version meant for IE and older browsers.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Heheh, we're in the same situation as 15 years ago when I learned webdevelopment and had to handle lots of Internet Explorer quirks. And there were many. And IE was the dominant browser. Now it's a different one but a similar situation. I think it got substantially better, though.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (17 children)

I hate the fact that the only viable choice is between Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium or Firefox.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Makes sense, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago

You're welcome. I think people underestimate what's inside of a browser. I mean that piece of software does lots of things. And you can pretty much do most things with just some online services inside of the browser. Do office work, watch TV, do image editing, play games... Sure it needs some web application but also lots of interfaces that need to be provided by the browser.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

You can take a quick look at the W3C standard. Primarily at the page length.

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