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On the browser monopoly

02 May, 2022

How to promote competition in the browser market

on erock's blog

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Problem statement

The browser is ubiquitous in society. It is the modern day operating system. The chromium browser has ~35 million lines of code with millions of lines of code added every year.
The competition for browsers has been dwindling. The only people that can compete are massive billion dollar companies.
Any new "browser" that emerges are just chromium reskins. Why is that?

Idea

Smaller teams cannot write 35 million lines of code, it is beyond their reach.
The browser serves many use-cases, what if we broke the browser up into many different apps?

Browser use-cases

Sharing, reading, and linking documents
Displaying multimedia (e.g. images, videos)
Displaying visualizations
Allowing the user to submit information via forms
Allowing the user to interact with website to display complex information (e.g. accordion, menus, drawers, etc.)
Allowing the user to query for information and have that data displayed without full page reloads (AJAX)
Allowing the user to have a desktop application experience

Sharing, reading, and linking documents

To start, create a document rendering browser
Support HTML 5
Support CSS 3
Support HTTP 1.1, 2.0, and TLS protocols
Gracefully handle when we cannot properly render a page by opening the link in the OS default browser.
Maybe focus on rendering blogs really well.
Maybe have a premium feature with a server running puppeteer that will render first paint and send the html and css to the browser.
Maybe remove website specific styling altogether and instead design a consistent design that optimizes navigation and readability.

What do you think?

I just cannot get over how on one hand browsers are so ubiquitous in modern society and yet immune from real competitive.
We need fresh ideas in the browser space and we cannot feasibly do that without dramatically reducing its complexity.
I want a minimal, modern set of browsing tools where I don't have to make any sacrifices between usability and compliance with the standards.

References

A clean start for the web

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