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Because it's super complicated and a thousand moving parts are involved. You have to parse HTML, draw everything correctly, do JavaScript, Canvases, WASM, Websockets, HTTP 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, SPDY, support 10 different image formats, 5 audio, 5 video formats, allow videoconferencing, write a plug-in system. Handle Bookmarks, History, File downloads, uploads, .... ..... ......
The standards alone are thousands of pages. You gotta read them all, understand them and program everything. Which takes years for a team of developers. And you also want it secure or your users get in all sorts of trouble. A browser is the number 1 way to get malware on your computer. And all these experts take a decent salary. Multiply that (hourly) wage with multiple people and several years and you'll end up with an expensive product.
Don't forget the fully fledged remote desktop thats built in, WebVR (which is being replaced with Web XR), Web Bluetooth, Web USB (aka Web Serial), the API's for notifications, ambient light sensors, an entire transactional database (indexed DB), the language translation API, the Gamepad API (videogame controllers), hardware passkeys (yubikey), speech to text, text-to-speech, webGL, webGPU, webworkers, service workers, an entire suite of cryptography tools, GPS location, battery, vibration, FileSystem API, picture-in-picture API, WebRTC, WebSensors, etc.
And then, on top of all that, building a miniture OS-kernel so that tasks can be sandboxed scheduled/executed and prevent 1 tab from crashing everything or hogging resources.
And despite all that, if you don't bend over to emulate Chrome's quirks a ton of sites still won't work properly and users won't use your browser because the other one is more "compatible". And you might still have to fake your user agent to be Chrome or Firefox so sites will even give you the fancy HTML instead of giving you the mobile or "limited" version meant for IE and older browsers.
I hate the fact that the only viable choice is between Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium, Chromium or Firefox.
There is Safari, which uses a different rendering engine, but yeah, there's basically 3 browsers. Chromium, Safari, and Firefox.
I don't use Safari and never have, so I can't speak to its compatibility or quirks for the user or for developers.
It’s pretty great. Compared with Firefox on both Mac and PC…I like them all.
Safari is behind on a ton of features from what i know i would not use safari even if i had the option.
It's known as the new Internet Explorer in web development circles. And just like IE, it's exclusive to an operating system so you have to figure out a way to get macOS to even test it out. On iOS it's the only browser engine even available, and when the EU stuff finally comes through, it's still an IE situation because defaults and OS integration. You can't ignore iOS for any serious web jobs.
I've been out of web development for a little while now, but the bugs were very IE-esque.
At least they finally just implemented WebPush, at long last.
Wasn't Safari available for Windows at some point? I swear I remember it being installed on my school laptop like 10 years ago.
According to the Safari (web browser) wikipedia article: «Between 2007 and 2012, Apple maintained a Windows version, but abandoned it due to low market share», so yes.
Safari still has the best power management and speed in most cases. I mainly use safari but swap back and forth with Vivaldi on a daily basis.
There are a decent amount of third party browsers. Many of them, to make things easier, encapsulate a chromium engine, but there is still the entirety of the user interface, options, customizability and additional browsing enhancements that make the experience vastly different and that’s really what most people are looking for. Give some other ones a try now and then, you might surprise yourself and find something that really does just what you want the way you like. It happens.
Currently using LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on android (both Firefox / gecko based) and I am happy with them :)
Very nice. Across my various devices I use maybe 5 or so browsers for various purposes.
Which one is the most unusual browser that you use and for what?
Eh, I don’t really think any are particularly unusual. Although I have tried some over the years.
I use Firefox on all my PCs which are all various distros of Linux, as well as Chromium for some things. I have a few sites setup as their own webapps using Electron, so essentially also chromium. I just installed Vivaldi recently to try for some things I need to test, haven’t started using it yet. I also try out different ones now and then.
Safari on my iOS devices as well as Aloha, OperaGX, occasionally Firefox but their iOS implementation is really sad. Some others now and then, but that’s mainly it at the moment. There were some I stopped using for one reason or another. Long ago I used Brave for a little while until I read about their agreements with some ad companies so that’s out. I really like Phoenix browser except it’s got some issues. Osiris, Puma, Dolphin, ugh so many that come and go if I need something temporarily.
What are you rating them on? How do you know you've found one you like?
If it does what you need and you cannot find any articles anywhere specifically calling attention to a security problem or anything like that, then you rate it “useful” I mean it’s not too complicated.
There is also Gnome Web (ex Epyphany), a browser that also uses the Webkit engine (as far as i know it's the only 'clone' of Safari cause of this). It's made for Linux (and Unix in general), though i heard somewhere they will make a windows version too. So we can broaden the choice to Chromium, Firefox or Safari.
Oh right, I forgot. And KDE has the Falkon browser.
It does suck ass that every browser is Chrome. But on the upside almost every website works in almost every browser.
Heheh, we're in the same situation as 15 years ago when I learned webdevelopment and had to handle lots of Internet Explorer quirks. And there were many. And IE was the dominant browser. Now it's a different one but a similar situation. I think it got substantially better, though.
Yeah, every browser being chrome sucks, but it's also so much better than being forced to focus any website development around IE compatibility.
Makes sense, thanks.
You're welcome. I think people underestimate what's inside of a browser. I mean that piece of software does lots of things. And you can pretty much do most things with just some online services inside of the browser. Do office work, watch TV, do image editing, play games... Sure it needs some web application but also lots of interfaces that need to be provided by the browser.