[andrewstuart]

I put it to you that the web browser and the operating system are the two most sophisticated applications ever built.

No doubt it’s possible to build a simple web browser that gets some 50% of the job done and could serviceabley display some websites.

However there would a very very long tail of detail and nuance and edge cases that would be very very hard to catch up.

This is why you should use Firefox and we should never lose Firefox.

If you don’t follow it closely, the pace of new feature development in web browsers is stunning. There is a huge amount of new stuff going in constantly.

I’m not knocking this project….. developers can build whatever they like. I’m just observing that the web browser is already the Pyramids of Giza or some other such gigantic human endeavor.

[asadotzler]

It's been a while since I had a need to know, but Firefox is certainly over 20 million lines of code by now. The web platform has a lot of features to support, both standardized and proprietary, and it needs to also work when web authors mis-write their sites and apps. (Forgot to close that tag, Firefox still works, that kind of stuff.)

What are the chances that a group of people come together to build another 20 million line browser? I'm with you in thinking not great. I'm also with you in supporting Firefox. That shouldn't be surprising as I'm one of the guys that started Firefox back in 2002 at Netscape when I was a member of [e-mail]

[andrewstuart]

I thank you for your service!

[samatman]

Ladybird is doing an excellent job of demonstrating that the putative unreproducible complexity of the modern web browser is just FUD.

I'm glad they didn't listen to all the people repeating the conventional wisdom that writing a modern web engine from scratch is impossible. Success is the best proof.

[asadotzler]

Use it for a week. It's not really a complete web browser, IMO, kind of like trying to navigate a massive Microsoft Office document repository with Open Office in 2004.

[samatman]

It isn't finished, that's true. But my bet is that at some point it will be.

[kerrie]

But is it really necesary to use the such a bloated piece of software as a web browser? i think it would be better to discard the whole web and replace it with the gemini protocol.

It can do 99.99% of what you use the web for with less resource usage. you can implement your own gemini client in 100 lines of code.

For the remainder 0.01% of stuff, use a dedicated application. Dont trust it? Use it with docker or similar.

As far as Im concerned all the browser bloat is worse than useless. Much of it is just to spy on you. Im sure these dedicated spying apps, you call web browsers, are deliberately full of security holes so they can upload your data to their servers

[andrewstuart]

The web browser is one of humanities greatest achievements and I don't mean that ironically.

The more you understand about the modern web browser and how stunningly powerful it is, the more you should be amazed.

And far from bloated, the modern web browser is trim and fast given the unbelievable feature range.

And if you don't trust something you're free not to use it.

When I see Chrome or Firefox and I deeply gladdened.

Go back 25 years and any time you wanted to do something at the user interface in any context it was hard and glitchy and maybe couldn't be done at all. Want to do something in a user interface today? Chances are the browser can do it.

Truly breathtakingly beautiful and powerful software and I love it.