There's value on the wrapper around the rendering engine. Presumably you don't use the raw engine, and use many of the UX features provided by your chosen wrapper (of which there are many). Things like tabs and extensions, hell even having history,
settings, cookies, and a back button are UX niceties a raw engine doesn't necessarily provide. So the wrapper is important; making a better wrapper is thus a worthwhile endeavor. Extensions only go so far, and if ManifestV3 ever lands, and stops ad-blocking extensions from functioning, it's easy to see a hypothetical consumer-focused browser that restored that functionality, or had it natively would easily be worth millions.
The only question is if they can actually make money, and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that. Opera, the browser company had revenue of around $380 million last quarter, but if you don't use their browser, which is also "just" a chrome wrapper, you'd never know it.
To put it another way, Linux distros; Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc, are all "just" wrappers around the Linux Kernel. Yet "I made a Linux Kernel wrapper" is worth at least a billion, in the case of Red Hat. If you never come near that distro, you might not even see a reason for its value, but you can't argue with their sales numbers.
> it's easy to see a hypothetical consumer-focused browser that restored that functionality, or had it natively would easily be worth millions
And where would those millions come from? Make the browser paid? It could work if it's really that good, and it'd likely be targeted at Apple users who won't mind paying. Seems risky though, eventually if you're too popular, Google will just copy some superficial stuff you're doing and people will forget about you.
> and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that
That's an interesting question! Paying for things is the obvious answer, but us users have been trained to feel entitled to not paying for other people's hard work. So the most interesting one in the space of "how to get people to pay for a web browser" is Replay.io, which is "just" a firefox re-skin (it's infinitely more than that) selling to a niche audience that is known for being cheap. So rather than sell to them directly, sell to their employers (it's a business tool) and get into the enterprise space, which is its own can of worms. It's a ridiculously powerful tool, if only their target market could manage to hold it correctly.
Personally, I consider this switch to Chromium solidified Chrome and derivatives dominance - with Presto-based Opera there was always a choice. It's also a shame they didn't released the code of this engine.
The context of the statement was different, and you took it to a whole different level. A browser wrapper is a wrapper by any other name. Linux is different.
I understand this reaction, but you're missing the point. It's precisely that the rendering engine is not what drives value; it's what you build on top of that sediment layer.
Why do people care so much about the rendering engine? They are also basically the same for most websites people actually care about, the important part is the UI.
That being said I’d strongly prefer the native WebKit be used since it wouldn’t make the thing 300mb.
Lots of things are built on FOSS components. How many appliances are built on nix-with-an-app? Are they just wrappers? What about Linux distros themselves, or all nix flavors and distros?
The value, in this case, is in the UI. The engine is a commodity.
The value isn't in the browser engine, it's in the implementation and the user experience.
I don't love Arc -- I bounced off it pretty fast -- but it's not insane to think that a VC would see the reuse of the most common browser engine as a good thing, as it means less work on the part of the developers and more of a focus on what sets the browser apart.
The only question is if they can actually make money, and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that. Opera, the browser company had revenue of around $380 million last quarter, but if you don't use their browser, which is also "just" a chrome wrapper, you'd never know it.
To put it another way, Linux distros; Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc, are all "just" wrappers around the Linux Kernel. Yet "I made a Linux Kernel wrapper" is worth at least a billion, in the case of Red Hat. If you never come near that distro, you might not even see a reason for its value, but you can't argue with their sales numbers.