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by polski-g 705 days ago
A web browser is an unbelievably complex piece of software. So complex that there are now only two. And also so complex that there are weekly updates because there's so many security holes.
2 comments

> So complex that there are now only two

There are more than two, and the vast majority of the time people don't need anywhere near the complexity that modern browsers have shoved into them. A lean browser that supported only a bare minimum of features would go a long way to reducing attack surface. As it is now, I already find myself disabling more and more functionality from my browsers (service workers, WebRTC, JS, SVG, webgl, PDF readers, prefetch, mathml, etc)

There are more than 2 browsers, but only 2 rendering engines, which are the complicated part of the browser.
More than two there too. For example: WebKit, Blink, Gecko, LibWeb, Servo, Goanna, Presto, and Libwww or whatever Lynx is using these days.
You’re right, I completely forgot WebKit. I would say there are currently 3 competitive engines, the rest are not very popular.
The first three cover basically 99% of browsers.
Yeah, options exist but it's not a very diverse ecosystem in practice. I'm excited and optimistic about ladybird for that reason. We need more options.
We've seen this week that the world does not want options. It wants a single point of failure in all infrastructure so that nobody is blamed for making the wrong choice.
When accessing a closed departure board display then that isn't a problem