> And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
This is so important to look at, when we talk about this topic. I was there, 3000 years ago, when browser where kind of simple software. We could go back to that state and would loose almost nothing. All the complexity that is now in browsers was in the operating systems at that time. The millions of fronted-devs of today would just be "normal" devs three decades ago.
I know, that that will not happen. But it helps looking through all the bullshit that Google has created, where they've build and control the platform (the web with chromium), that Microsoft and Apple used to control (their oses).
FWIW i have a feeling (and it is just a feeling, not something i can confirm) that the entirety of Windows 95 was simpler than Firefox or Chrome today :-P.
By LOC: Windows 95 is estimated to have 10-15 million LOC, Chrome 30-40 million.
By binary size: Windows 95 took about 50 MB, Chrome 200-300 MB.
By architecture design: the codebase of Windows 95 is fairly shallow and monolithic, while Chrome is very modular (think V8, Blink, WASM, sandboxes...) and uses other dependencies.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.