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arnaudsmtoday at 12:32 PM2 repliesview on HN

There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.

If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?


Replies

tzikitoday at 12:39 PM

Having a "lighter standard" simply means people will have to write native apps, one per platform. I understand Apple wants this, but for Mozilla that should be the antithesis of what they're trying to achieve.

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vanviegentoday at 12:54 PM

> There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.

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