Comment by friendzis
7 months ago
> Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain.
The reason? Infinite[1] complexity. To Google that is a feature: as long as they can outspend competitors, they can control the complexity in their favor.
The question should not be "how do we fund development of operating system in a trench coat?", but rather "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs.
In theory, we should expect browser complexity to converge on available funding, with the upside that webpages created two hours ago would continue working. In reality, some foundation, funded by majority chromium supporters, will be set up and distribute compensation for Google employees working on open-source Chromium "totally on their free time, mr. prosecutor".
Parity with other application platforms demands more than just showing static HTML. Imagine the world with no XMLHTTPRequest because Microsoft wasn't allowed to innovate on the web.
> "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs
Sorry, but we're not going back to Lynx...