[phendrenad2]

This post starts with a false dichotomy: You're either making a toy browser for fun, or you're trying to make the next Chrome. There are many points in-between on that spectrum. (Look how long Microsoft IE existed, despite being highly inferior.)

[dmazzoni]

Not at all: at the very end it suggests some in-betweens, like building an alternative to Electron or embedded WebViews.

There are lots of browser engines like that still around. It'd be really interesting to see one that supports the vast majority of web standards but without trying to do everything else a full browser does.

[IshKebab]

That's only because it was the "Chrome" (i.e. the dominant browser). Look at what happened when Microsoft eventually tried to catch up with Chrome - they gave up.

[wizzwizz4]

> Look at what happened when Microsoft eventually tried to catch up with Chrome - they gave up.

That wasn't because they weren't up to the job. It's because Google was using Microsoft's playbook against them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

> I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

(While this may seem like poetic justice, Google's also been doing this against everyone else, so we shouldn't cheer. Also, unlike when Microsoft pulled these stunts, this might not even be deliberate on the part of the Google webdevs.)

[kevingadd]

YouTube did this to Firefox too - for a while they were serving a special degraded version of YT to Firefox users (polyfilled web components, instead of native web components or their classic non-web-components version) even though they had versions that would perform better. "Oops".

If you used user-agent tricks you could get them to serve a good version.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Now I wonder if this is a thing that still exists, and I wonder if I should be spoofing my user-agent to Chrome just as a general rule in Firefox.

[kevingadd]

It was fixed years ago, though it's possible they still do similar things in other scenarios.

UA spoofing in firefox will get you blocked by recaptcha and cloudflare.

[praisewhitey]

IE/Edge was behind the competition at standards adoption since IE7. Just look at the history of Acid3, HTML5Test or Caniuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3

https://html5test.co/results/desktop.html

https://caniuse.com/ciu/comparison

[mkoubaa]

I hate that they did it but I have a hard time sympathizing with Edge/MS

[account42]

It's a travesty that Google hasn't been slapped harde for that kind of behavior.

[kernal]

What a weak excuse. To blame an empty div for the demise of your browser engine just seems desperate.

[wizzwizz4]

There will always be a case that kicks you out of the fast path, but shouldn't (or a case where you take the fast path incorrectly, resulting in incorrect behaviour). This is a corollary of Rice's theorem.

[pootempy]

More like a tautology: “if it ain’t Chrome/Safari/Firefox etc. it must be a toy”