zlacker

Bring back the browser wars. I'm tired of only having essentially two browsers to choose from, both from unethical companies that use slimy marketing speak to disguise their intentions.

>>devmor+(OP)
Hear, hear! The problem is that browser complexity has exploded to the degree that at this point it seems impossible for a small team to reinvent the wheel. Who wants to write a web assembly engine from scratch, let alone the rest?

My main browser has been Waterfox which I update manually, which doubly insulated me from this. But don't misunderstand...I hate pretty much all browsers now, too.

>>doctor+Dk
Meh. Webassembly has polyfills. I think an incremental approach wouldn't be as hard as people make it out to be but someone does have to sit down and do it.

>>doctor+Dk
> Who wants to write a web assembly engine from scratch

Webassembly engine is one of the simpler things to implement in a browser. It's essentially a giant switch statement in a loop.

> let alone the rest?

But who said a new browser has to implement everything from scratch? Why couldn't a browser use well established libraries for things like image decoding, webasm, JavaScript, font rendering, webrtc, http, etc?

>>devmor+(OP)
I see it as a larger trend away from general purpose computing and toward appliances:

https://www.techspot.com/news/98811-windows-365-boot-paid-su...

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/24/windows_365_boot_prev...

The browser does a lot of my computing now, and I'm not surprised the "General Purpose Browser" is disappearing, replaced by an appliance with user-hostile behavior that might, maybe, sometimes ... give you some internet browsing. Remember AOL Online?

The solution isn't very complicated. Copyleft [1] uses copyright to preserve user freedom, instead of restricting it -- so the company that wants to monetize the software can't block the user from making copies of the source code.

Let's skip the quibbling over Affero GPL, that's boring. How about inventing a license, where the license restricts the valid activites of the software?

A browser restricted to only make network requests authorized by the user. An OS restricted from spying on the user. A computer that is personal again.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html