Josh Simmons

@glyph @eevee Ah snap and flatpak, the gift that keeps on giving. But yeah, I mentioned the update thing because I have a suspicion that's where the majority of my issues were coming from. Any time it updates in the background it just borks itself completely. You *really* gotta restart when it updates. Which kinda makes total sense, but probably could be handled with more grace.

@eevee @glyph plus the long list of things which are broken in FF but it's probably not their fault, like all the internal websites at work. In Firefox' favor: better DOM performance in some situations at least (useful if you want to load the single-page vulkan docs), manifest v2, not made by google. That's my personal rubric, and it's a pretty tough sell.

@eevee @glyph off the top of my head: go to the gdc site and try to seek a video, it'll crash the video player on Firefox. No webgpu on Linux, no webusb (which yes, I actually use), missing html/css features like anchors, the dev tools are broadly worse, background updates reliably cause issues (most recently the browser was leaking), Firefox android UI is busted often, it gets stuck in uninteractable states until you force restart it a few times, reliably if you try to use "add to home screen".

@tartley you still need to ship features with the browser (because it's a *lot* of code), and the interactions between layers need to be reliable and also performant.

@tartley yeah I'm not sure, I think that moving things to wasm blobs for example, and sharing the implementation between browsers, is an interesting approach, but it doesn't feel fundamentally different from the current situation. The API surface area is the complex part, and you can already share parts of the two-ish open source browser engines if you want. Shuffling around might be a good idea, but I don't think it'll change the fundamental mechanics of the tremendously complex platform.

@tartley like to be totally clear, the thing which has led us here is nothing to do with features, it's 1) the internet is wildly popular. 2) people make a lot of money selling advertising and advertising adjacent things on the internet. 3) more or less entirely unregulated companies grinding cash bucks at everyone's expense. browsers are complex for a lot of reasons, mostly to do with the fact that they need to correctly run roughly every website in existence, and are a huge target for malware.

@tartley personally i would just anti-trust the shit out of google. and no, the entire selling point of the web is that it's a broadly capable and compatible delivery platform for Stuff. creating some kind of ascetic web will only ever be a niche thing for nerds, the exact opposite of what you're going for here.

@tartley @glyph @eevee I don't agree at all with that take, the things I want are all *more complex*. I want webgpu (for starters, and ideally improved). I want webusb. I want videos to work. I want web audio. Wasm. Threading. http3 / webtransport etc, etc, etc.

@glyph @eevee yeah there's a long tail of things that aren't great, i think the only thing where it's still significantly more capable is the DOM performance on big documents, and that it hasn't ruined ublock origin yet. the rest is like "oh i hope oyu like your video player crashing if you seek", and "oh that fun new web api, you can't have it"