Why can’t they just fork the last usable version of chromium and go from there as an independent fork? Is it just that no one wants to?
Creating or even just maintaining a web browser is an insurmountable amount of work. With constantly changing and new specs coming out all the time, it’s an unwinnable amount of work. Not to mention, browsers and the Internet in general is so complex it’s like web browsers are an operating system themselves.
A web browser is likely the most complex software on your PC outside of the operating system itself.
It is not insurmountable, new browsers made by single or small dev teams exist. If there is enough demand and motivated people to make something like ladybird there is people who could handle maintaining a fork that works, Chrome wasn’t always the only game in town and in the IE there was even at least one sort of engine agnostic browser that you could switch between Trident (IE) or Gecko rendering. Its not an easy thing but its very much possible.
Web browser made by a single or small dev tends to not support nearly as much of the web standards, which are many.
Using the web today with partial support for some stuff is the nightmare we escaped when IE got deprecated, and some still have with Safari.
Funny you mention Ladybird… It’s a commendable project and I hope they succeed. But until it renders 99% of websites, plays Netflix videos, has all the modern features people expect of a web browser and is an actual viable option for non techies… It is really proving the opposite of your point. The fact that an alpha is still years away speaks to how hard this really is.
How about Konqeror which uses KHTML the engine both Chrome and Apple’s webkit are forked from which has only been getting maintenance updates for a while now, it renders youtube fine, I dont have netflix but i tried Pluto.tv and that also works fine, another browser that works is SeaMonkey, the predecessor to firefox (sort of), if these projects which have both been just maintained for the past decade can keep up with rendering the basics then I see no reason why doing it with a more updated version of Chromium would be any more difficult, but i suppose if it is falling back to KHTML should still work for 99% of websites.
Creating or even just maintaining a web browser is an insurmountable amount of work. With constantly changing and new specs coming out all the time, it’s an unwinnable amount of work. Not to mention, browsers and the Internet in general is so complex it’s like web browsers are an operating system themselves.
A web browser is likely the most complex software on your PC outside of the operating system itself.
It is not insurmountable, new browsers made by single or small dev teams exist. If there is enough demand and motivated people to make something like ladybird there is people who could handle maintaining a fork that works, Chrome wasn’t always the only game in town and in the IE there was even at least one sort of engine agnostic browser that you could switch between Trident (IE) or Gecko rendering. Its not an easy thing but its very much possible.
Web browser made by a single or small dev tends to not support nearly as much of the web standards, which are many. Using the web today with partial support for some stuff is the nightmare we escaped when IE got deprecated, and some still have with Safari.
Funny you mention Ladybird… It’s a commendable project and I hope they succeed. But until it renders 99% of websites, plays Netflix videos, has all the modern features people expect of a web browser and is an actual viable option for non techies… It is really proving the opposite of your point. The fact that an alpha is still years away speaks to how hard this really is.
How about Konqeror which uses KHTML the engine both Chrome and Apple’s webkit are forked from which has only been getting maintenance updates for a while now, it renders youtube fine, I dont have netflix but i tried Pluto.tv and that also works fine, another browser that works is SeaMonkey, the predecessor to firefox (sort of), if these projects which have both been just maintained for the past decade can keep up with rendering the basics then I see no reason why doing it with a more updated version of Chromium would be any more difficult, but i suppose if it is falling back to KHTML should still work for 99% of websites.