130
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
130 points (100.0% liked)
Firefox
4 readers
503 users here now
The latest news and developments on Firefox and Mozilla, a global non-profit that strives to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Related
- Firefox Customs: !FirefoxCSS@fedia.io
- Thunderbird: !Thunderbird@fedia.io
Rules
While we are not an official Mozilla community, we have adopted the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines as far as it can be applied to a bin.
Rules
-
Always be civil and respectful
Don't be toxic, hostile, or a troll, especially towards Mozilla employees. This includes gratuitous use of profanity. -
Don't be a bigot
No form of bigotry will be tolerated. -
Don't post security compromising suggestions
If you do, include an obvious and clear warning. -
Don't post conspiracy theories
Especially ones about nefarious intentions or funding. If you're concerned: Ask. Please don’t fuel conspiracy thinking here. Don’t try to spread FUD, especially against reliable privacy-enhancing software. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show credible sources. -
Don't accuse others of shilling
Send honest concerns to the moderators and/or admins, and we will investigate. -
Do not remove your help posts after they receive replies
Half the point of asking questions in a public sub is so that everyone can benefit from the answers—which is impossible if you go deleting everything behind yourself once you've gotten yours.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Internet standards are pretty stable and mature at this point, and they can always port over security fixes.
I wouldn't imagine it would be that difficult maintaining the existing code base.
Obviously I'm not saying it's super easy, but once the product is mature you don't need a huge staff for it, at least not in the short term.
Having said that, my point was just to alleviate the fears of the OP, who didn't want to move away from Firefox because they were afraid that what they moved to would die if Firefox does. My point was just to say they would be a long lag time before that would happen.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
There's a bit more changing on the web than what you may expect.
The web moves so fast that we ditched W3C standards for the WHATWG living standard because it took too long to release new features. I guess the "move fast and break stuff" stood too much in contention with W3C's vision of a standardisation track, and it did take a good while in the past. Anyhow, the last updatebto that stabdard was yesterday. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/document-sequences.html
Features like WebRTC, HTTP/3, CSS grid, JavaScript decorators, ... do not come for free. This is just a tiny fraction of what appeared in the past few years. The web is a highly evolving platform which (used to be? is? aims to be?) backwards compatible. This even ignores updates for required maintenance due to base platform APIs or frameworks changing.
It could be very smart to bring its evolution back under W3C so it would move at a more achievable pace with an equal voting process, but that's not the case today and I doubt it will happen any time soon.
In the coming years, building or maintaining a browser engine will be expensive.
That's because the W3C was focused on XHTML 2 at the time, which nobody outside of the W3C actually wanted. So any proposed amendments to HTML 4 was met with "But we'll have XHTML 2 soon!"
I'm skeptical of claims from browser makers that the spec process wasn't moving "fast enough", since it's not like they actually implemented it fully anyway.
I'm not disputing that change happens, but it doesn't happen as fast as you suggest, or as slow as I've seen in the past.
In either case, a small group of developers can maintain an existing code base and add new features to it. I've seen it (AND done it) with my own eyes before.
I truly don't mean to be argumentative, but I have to push back when someone tells me the equivalent of "0% chance of that being possible", when I know that's not true (and apologies if I'm misinterpreting what you said, but that's the impression I'm getting). Agreed, its not 100% possible either, but its closer to 100% than it is 0% possible.
Even for the sake of argument, lets say some "BIG NEW THING ™️" comes along, and the devs don't have enough resources to implement it. It doesn't mean the browser dies that very moment in time. There's plenty of time to migrate to another browser at that point, it takes something along the lines of less than an hour to move from one browser to another (we're talking personal here, not corporate).
Anyway, I take your point that WHATWG has apparently replaced W3C, and that they move faster. But I've also seen allot of products/standards come and go in the name of HTML5 over the years (and even before HTML5, the days of Client/Server, and other coding religions before that) to know that each don't have to be supported completely on day one, but just the ones that "win" the popularity contests.
One last thing ...
If an OS like Linux can be done, and well, so could an open-source codebase inherited browser. An OS is allot harder to maintain than a browser engine is.
Edit: Typo.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~