> The browser standards are open and have multiple open source implementations.

The browser standards are open only in name. The sad fact is, implementing those standards are flat out impossible if you’re not a megacorp. They’re just too damn big: I recall someone counted like more than a hundred million words.

Now using those standards is easy, you can implement a subset. But the number of browser engines that actually supports enough of those standards will only decrease.

I'm not really sure for how long we will have multiple implementations. And we won't have for sure any new implementation, we are stuck with the 3 we have and can only hope the 2 non chrome ones will survive.

That's exactly what people said about IE over 20 years ago. History has proven this reasoning untrue. Web isn't going anywhere. If there's an opportunity to build something 10x better than Chrome, it'll be shipped.

> If there's an opportunity to build something 10x better than Chrome, it'll be shipped.

There won’t be. Since IE6 the standards have grown to inhuman proportions, and implementing a new browser engine is even more difficult than it was then.

there's no need to do it from scratch, nor to do it all really.

if there's some great innovation it can be introduced in a fork of Firefox/Chrome/etc.

But then you’ll be tide to how your engine of choice did things. There’s no true independence if you don’t have the means to rewrite it.

It happened because both Firefox and Chrome were baked by Google.

So yeah, maybe we’ll get another engine somehow, but if we need again another agressive tech giant to pay for that, thanks but no thanks.

I'm sure with enough dedicated and enthusiastic people something better than Chrome can be implemented. Though will it survive at all is another question. Chrome has an effective stranglehold on the market, so for anything else to succeed it will take political will rather than development effort.

Browsers are absurdly well-optimized for performance. If you know how to tap it, you can make screaming-fast apps of various kinds, with top-notch graphics, font rendering, accessibility support, audio, video, etc. They also have really solid networking capabilities, as long as you don't need raw TCP or UDP. In particular, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, and WebRTC allow for a lot of advanced things.

By now, you also have WebGL and WASM, if JS's JIT is not fast enough for you.

I love how people use hyperbole such as "screaming fast" and yet a native application that's not even all that optimized will tend to run absolute circles around these "screaming fast" solutions.

How are we supposed to describe these native apps? What's faster than screaming fast? ear shatteringly quick?

> I love how people use hyperbole such as "screaming fast" and yet a native application that's not even all that optimized will tend to run absolute circles around these "screaming fast" solutions.

And you of course have nontrivial examples to prove that? Or as always source: trust me, bro?

This is like asking to prove the sky is blue in a sunny day. Walk outside and you'll see it. I was talking to friends about how we've forgotten how fast computers are because all we see are web pages and Electron applications. People don't even remember the wonder of native applications.

Try building an operating system or browser engine in Javascript and you'll see what the parent is saying. I'm just giving you these examples because these are some of the last remaining native applications everybody still uses, but pretty much any native application will be much faster than the Javascript version. The reason browser wins is that we got to a point where the performance is "good enough" and the development cost is significantly lower.

I've definitely seen some really well optimized web targets. Unfortunately that is not the common case in my experience currently.

That said the WebGL/WASM stuff is generally very nice in my experience and is very much changing my opinion. I'm interested to see what comes in the future!

WebGPU is that future.

No idea why you're being downvoted, you're completely right. And all that runs on every phone and computer from the last 10 years or so