Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich? That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to.
It's called technical 'progress' - as technology progresses, you need bigger and more specialised teams of technicians. It reaches a point where huge entities like governments and corporates are the only groups with enough resources to compete.
It happens everywhere... a constant drive to improve by building on top of layers and layers of abstraction - to the point where even the experts give up and view it as, well, magic.
The most obvious example in the real world is those huge scientific projects like Cern's LHC, which requires the co-operation of multiple governments - no individual or team could attempt that. It's no surprise that the web came from there, since to create that at the time required a certain technical expertise.
If you want more software examples, how about operating systems? The good thing about software is there's a low barrier to entry, so you can have open source projects. That said, those open source experts often know their trade due to working as technicians for business or government, or relying on support materials.
The further down the road technology progresses, the less accessible it is for individuals to create.
>Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich?
No. It would be a shame if software were forced to be only ever be simple enough for a single programmer to trivially reproduce. We would never have gotten past the terminal in that case.
> That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to
Anyone can, they just need a lot of domain knowledge and time. They can also fork and edit existing open source browsers, or develop browsers which aren't quite so feature rich. But the complexity of the modern web is the result of generations of iteration on previous work, and of giving people a platform to express themselves in the way they want.
Most people want the feature-rich modern web, and that's impossible without browsers complex enough to deliver it.
Nothing that you said contradicts what I've said, so don't think you're the voice of reason here.
Of course it is good to have browsers supporting more and more features. I'm totally for "the web" against "the native" thing. I hope all "native apps" die in a fire and everything starts being written to run in browsers, as everything gets faster and better.
I just commented about a serious drawback of all this. I don't know what would be a solution, however, or if there's need for a solution.
Of course anyone can if they have domain knowledge and time. Anyone could have built a web browser 50,000 years ago if they had knowledge and time.
Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich? That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to.
Those who control the web browsers control the Internet. And web browsers have gotten so huge and hyper-complex that only wealthy corporations can afford to enter the market as new players.
Apart from the political rant that's exactly what I said, isn't it?
Or do you meant to say Google, Apple and Mozilla are working to increase the features of their browser in the last years with the objective of controlling the Internet in their minds?
Feature wise, I always think there isn't much between the big brand browsers without extensions. They could do so much more. They may be better at CSS, JS and have some good debug tools in them these days, but as actual web browsing tools, there's plenty of ground to cover. Bookmarking, History, Link management and even Meta inspections/overviews could be much more user friendly and useful. Example: Chrome is a tabbed browser, and as such titles are lost until you focus on tabs or select a tab. And that bit of meta information is really important. Publish dates, shouldn't necessarily be embeded in HTML body, when a browser could extract that information from a header or a head. Navigation could be more fluent and the browser could aid in that. So usability wise, I'd say they are pretty feature lacking.
Perhaps it wasn't the best example, as the Tab/Window title could fall under Window management. But fine, if you just want minimal chrome, perhaps Chrome will do. Parent said feature-rich. My point really is that there are technical and usability features. And while of course there is cross over - I don't see much in the way of advancement in usability (without extensions). Browser's haven't changed that much in the last ten years - from an end users perspective. Window and web page management isn't great.
Yes, you're not the only one to see this problem, but it's not as commonly understood as it should be.
I've long desired for a formal semantics for CSS for example (but I believe flexbox is a step in the right direction in this regard).
If we're heading into a p2p future, my opinion is we're going to have to build it on web (HTML/CSS) technology for being able to leverage browser efforts, and for cross web/postweb publishing.
And I believe the prospect for doing this, from a pure technical PoV, is quite good. While I'm not completely agreeing with everything they do, WHATWG have succeeded in spec'ing a reasonably declarative and rich document language that doesn't need JavaScript for each and everything.
OTOH, more and more CSS ad-hoc syntax, and entirely new procedural web runtimes (cough WebAssembly cough) should be resisted.
I don't see this getting better. In fact, I think the next big trick in web browsers will be to embed a full-blown GUI widget toolkit, so you can run what would effectively be a Visual Basic 6.0-type program, directly in the browser, allowing you to bypass all the HTML5/CSS/JS layers we slather on top of whatever framework we're using to make it approach the same UX as a desktop app. It's going to take even more bandwidth to deliver this kind of app, but no one seems to care about that anyway.
I think you're dead wrong about this. Desktop developers have been thinking for decades all the web needs is a more-desktop-like environment. The general conclusion of web developers is that they like html, CSS and JavaScript and want them to improve, not disappear. Many people see them as the evolution of GUI development, not anything to be removed.
Only web developers that have never actually written desktop apps think that in my experience. The prevalence of hacks, frameworks and layers that try to make the web stack marginally less terrible suggest that no, they don't like html, css and javascript - they deal with them because they have no other choice and it's all they've ever known.
Business using IE and Safari are still running them fine, and they're still supported in the latest Firefox ESR (though it will reportedly be the last). However, with the recent changes in Firefox, no "evergreen" browser now supports them.
There is a special circle of hell for people who write documentation on pages so javascript heavy that a lynx browser on a computer with broken graphics drivers can't load it.
