Why is it so expensive to develop a web browser?

nebulaone@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 127 points –
58

You are viewing a single comment

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

There is Safari, which uses a different rendering engine, but yeah, there's basically 3 browsers. Chromium, Safari, and Firefox.

I don't use Safari and never have, so I can't speak to its compatibility or quirks for the user or for developers.

Safari still has the best power management and speed in most cases. I mainly use safari but swap back and forth with Vivaldi on a daily basis.

Safari is behind on a ton of features from what i know i would not use safari even if i had the option.

It's known as the new Internet Explorer in web development circles. And just like IE, it's exclusive to an operating system so you have to figure out a way to get macOS to even test it out. On iOS it's the only browser engine even available, and when the EU stuff finally comes through, it's still an IE situation because defaults and OS integration. You can't ignore iOS for any serious web jobs.

I've been out of web development for a little while now, but the bugs were very IE-esque.

At least they finally just implemented WebPush, at long last.

Wasn't Safari available for Windows at some point? I swear I remember it being installed on my school laptop like 10 years ago.

According to the Safari (web browser) wikipedia article: «Between 2007 and 2012, Apple maintained a Windows version, but abandoned it due to low market share», so yes.

There are a decent amount of third party browsers. Many of them, to make things easier, encapsulate a chromium engine, but there is still the entirety of the user interface, options, customizability and additional browsing enhancements that make the experience vastly different and that’s really what most people are looking for. Give some other ones a try now and then, you might surprise yourself and find something that really does just what you want the way you like. It happens.

Currently using LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on android (both Firefox / gecko based) and I am happy with them :)

Very nice. Across my various devices I use maybe 5 or so browsers for various purposes.

Which one is the most unusual browser that you use and for what?

Eh, I don’t really think any are particularly unusual. Although I have tried some over the years.

I use Firefox on all my PCs which are all various distros of Linux, as well as Chromium for some things. I have a few sites setup as their own webapps using Electron, so essentially also chromium. I just installed Vivaldi recently to try for some things I need to test, haven’t started using it yet. I also try out different ones now and then.

Safari on my iOS devices as well as Aloha, OperaGX, occasionally Firefox but their iOS implementation is really sad. Some others now and then, but that’s mainly it at the moment. There were some I stopped using for one reason or another. Long ago I used Brave for a little while until I read about their agreements with some ad companies so that’s out. I really like Phoenix browser except it’s got some issues. Osiris, Puma, Dolphin, ugh so many that come and go if I need something temporarily.

What are you rating them on? How do you know you've found one you like?

If it does what you need and you cannot find any articles anywhere specifically calling attention to a security problem or anything like that, then you rate it “useful” I mean it’s not too complicated.

There is also Gnome Web (ex Epyphany), a browser that also uses the Webkit engine (as far as i know it's the only 'clone' of Safari cause of this). It's made for Linux (and Unix in general), though i heard somewhere they will make a windows version too. So we can broaden the choice to Chromium, Firefox or Safari.

It does suck ass that every browser is Chrome. But on the upside almost every website works in almost every browser.