Why are there no browsers that are not based on Chromium or Firefox?

submitted by trident765 from self.technology

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[–]trident765[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Here is what I think: It used to be that browsers conformed to standards. And so anyone could make his own browser and compete with the big browsers as long as he was willing to conform to the standards. But now Google controls so much of the internet that the real "standards" have become whatever are the whims of Google, even though they are not written down anywhere. I think Google keeps changing making pointless changes to the standards in order to break the other browsers, and at some point it just became too difficult for them to keep up. This is what I am guessing - I have no technical knowledge about browsers.

[–]package 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I disagree; the current standards are well documented and not by google: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API

There are just legitimately far too many and they cover far too many topics and fields for any new project to realistically support them all or even a majority of them. Any genuinely new browser would need like 5+ years of serious, dedicated development effort to even be usable on the modern web.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I agree, partly. The complexity problems stays and times when you even could think about starting a browser as a one-person-project are long gone. Even if you could get to the point of investing e.g. five years all the standards and possibly use-cases change so fast that it seems nearly impossible to "start" a new browser engine with some prospect on market share.

A friend of mine in web-dev also told me that most of commercial , "big" pages are heavily relying on web-services of amazon, google and cloudflare so you have to comply with their practice-standards as well if you want your browser to be able to display any of these major pages.

Maybe the big five now don't completely control the browsers but they surely control most of the hosting and software that fuels most data centers.