Does anybody have guesses on what percentage of browser development is for 1. Ne...

mushufasa · 2025-05-01T04:43:15 1746074595

I did a quick get deep research web search and: > Modern browser engineering is heavily weighted toward maintenance work (bugs + security) rather than shiny new capabilities. After hand-classifying every bullet in the public release notes (stable channel) for the last 12 months of Firefox (versions 117-126), Chrome (versions 126-136) and Safari (17.0-17.6), then folding in counts that Apple, Google and Mozilla themselves publish (for example “39 new features and 169 bug fixes in Safari 17.2”), the picture that emerges looks like this: Even the most “innovative” browsers invest 45-55 % of their engineering time simply keeping the ship afloat.

True green-field standards work is roughly one-fifth of effort, with Safari and Firefox currently leading in CSS & media-query adoption, Chrome in new JavaScript/DOM APIs.

Eye-catching integrations (VPN, local AI summariser, etc.) stay single-digits because the core browser still has to do the unglamorous work of being correct and secure.

kjkjadksj · 2025-05-01T09:18:11 1746091091

Counting bullets just counts bullets not time spent laboring over those bullets

matwood · 2025-05-01T11:01:30 1746097290

Yeah, just counting bullets does not convey the work involved in defining a new standard prior to implementation.

maxloh · 2025-05-01T04:40:02 1746074402

Note that 1. makes web apps more and more powerful, which in turn actually benefits end users (in most cases). It enables us to replace storage and memory consuming Electron and Chromium Embedded Framework apps with their web counterparts.

You could argue that Tauri exists, but I doubt that it would gain large-scale corporate adoption, as storage consumption was never their concern, development time and cost are.