this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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The thing is it's never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it's bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn't even close, despite relying on Apple's webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)
If Google is the only thing holding up the non-Apple web browsers, maybe then this will lead to scaling down the insane scope of the web standards so it becomes reasonable to implement and maintain a browser for non-megacorps.
Wishful thinking, but hey.
Bigger scope than a kernel? That’s a bold statement.
Not sure it's that bold even. Chrome has approx. 10% more lines of code than Linux, and even for Linux 60% is just drivers.
Flawed metric, sure, but it at least shows that they're probably similar in complexity.
Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that's a different layer that the kernel historically didn't worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there's shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management... A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS
The comment that was here was a bit rude, and I don’t like that. Well others didn’t either, but that just reminds me that being kind is possible while disagreeing. So I abridge to this.
I’m surprised by this take and personally feel the algorithmic density of the kernel and scope of work with hardware abstractions make it much more complex than a browser with access to system calls. But maybe that is just a crazy old man that isn’t thinking straight.