HACKER Q&A
📣 akasakahakada

Story behind every browser is just a customized skin over Chrome


How do you deal with the struggle of losing functionalities over every updates?

What do you feel when you want some fresh air and install a new browser, but feels the same. Even the setting menu is as empty as Chrome.

What are those unique functions that you miss so much?

For example I remember that Vivaldi Mobile in 2020 can save the whold webpage locally. I use that to store html books to read them offline. But now this function just disappeared from the menu.


  👤 dtagames Accepted Answer ✓
The browser has become like a powerplant. Huge, complicated, and relied upon all day by everyone. It isn't really practical to write a new browser from scratch or support one. They're just too enormously complicated at this point. They are literally the engines for a huge portion of all of the software run in the world.

So naturally it's going to coalesce and standardize around 1 or 2 options. And this is what has happened with Chrome and Safari.

That's not to say that no one can make a better browser or that they shouldn't try, just that its a huge undertaking against a well-entrenched technology and those are very difficult to pull off.

To answer your question about functionality, the browser today is capable of being a full desktop app. It can do anything a desktop app can do. So what you're really looking for is not a replacement browser but a web app that saves pages as HTML, etc. It actually makes more sense from a development standpoint -- and ultimately benefits users -- to have the functionality come from apps and not the browser itself.


👤 jethronethro
> What do you feel when you want some fresh air and install a new browser, but feels the same

If the developers didn't do that, then you'd have more than a few users complaining that it's not like browser x so it sucks.

As for functions that disappear, I wonder if those are functions that the devs discovered (via telemetry or some other magic) that a majority of users didn't take advantage of. Why maintain them when most people don't use them?


👤 KingOfCoders
Waiting for Ladybird.