It’s a monumental effort really, building a browser engine from scratch and taking it to daily driver usable is probably among the most difficult programming challenges. It’s way easier to build a new Linux kernel from scratch than a browser engine lmao
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Not exactly. Yes a browser engine is one of the most, if not the most, complex pieces of software.
But if it was almost impossible to create a web engine then this, or KDE’s KHTML, or Servo, or NetSurf, or Kraken, or you-name-it wouldn’t exist.
Then how come (one of) the most powerful tech company in the world couldn’t make it, you ask? They already had a “functional” web engine. But what they had from the beginning was absolute shit that did not respect any web standard. And oh boy we people who fought against that shit trying to support it do know. Its baggage was immensely huge and shitty that after a while and the speed Chrome was taking over they found it was easier to yeet it altogether, and I do hope that piece of shit is burning in hell because it made our lifes so miserable.
Note that Opera did the same thing with their web engine - they gave up with it mostly because they found easier to jump in the Blink bandwagon, without realizing they were making Opera just another Chromium skin without much value, contrary to what Presto was.
Kinda what could happen if one day Microsoft decided to try make Windows to be as functional, fast and permissive as Linux.
The W3C (The body that dictates web standards) specification, that describes what browser engines should handle, like CSS features, HTML5 etc and how is equivalent to thousands of pages long and there are huge standards to implement.
HTML5 is a big thing to implement, so is CSS and the JavaScript engine and probably even more technologies I’m forgetting
And that’s just implementation, it takes even more work to get them running well enough for the average end-user
Ladybird has been working on their from scratch engine for ~5 years iirc and they’re not planning to even have the first alpha out until next year lol
Because if a website doesn’t work in your browser, but it works in everyone else’s, no one will say “oh that website’s badly written”, instead they say “what a shitty browser”.
So you have a huge web standard you have to respect, and then all the websites with non standard code you have to make work anyway.
It’s a monumental effort really, building a browser engine from scratch and taking it to daily driver usable is probably among the most difficult programming challenges. It’s way easier to build a new Linux kernel from scratch than a browser engine lmao
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
They also failed at building operative systems, so not sure they are the best example.
Not exactly. Yes a browser engine is one of the most, if not the most, complex pieces of software.
But if it was almost impossible to create a web engine then this, or KDE’s KHTML, or Servo, or NetSurf, or Kraken, or you-name-it wouldn’t exist.
Then how come (one of) the most powerful tech company in the world couldn’t make it, you ask? They already had a “functional” web engine. But what they had from the beginning was absolute shit that did not respect any web standard. And oh boy we people who fought against that shit trying to support it do know. Its baggage was immensely huge and shitty that after a while and the speed Chrome was taking over they found it was easier to yeet it altogether, and I do hope that piece of shit is burning in hell because it made our lifes so miserable.
Note that Opera did the same thing with their web engine - they gave up with it mostly because they found easier to jump in the Blink bandwagon, without realizing they were making Opera just another Chromium skin without much value, contrary to what Presto was.
Kinda what could happen if one day Microsoft decided to try make Windows to be as functional, fast and permissive as Linux.
Can someone eli5 why that is?
The W3C (The body that dictates web standards) specification, that describes what browser engines should handle, like CSS features, HTML5 etc and how is equivalent to thousands of pages long and there are huge standards to implement.
HTML5 is a big thing to implement, so is CSS and the JavaScript engine and probably even more technologies I’m forgetting
And that’s just implementation, it takes even more work to get them running well enough for the average end-user
Ladybird has been working on their from scratch engine for ~5 years iirc and they’re not planning to even have the first alpha out until next year lol
Because if a website doesn’t work in your browser, but it works in everyone else’s, no one will say “oh that website’s badly written”, instead they say “what a shitty browser”.
So you have a huge web standard you have to respect, and then all the websites with non standard code you have to make work anyway.