> Is it a cartel or is it a fact that writing a fully specs-compliant browser is a huge undertaking due to the complexity of everything?

And who made the specs so stupidly complex in the first place?

Back in early 2000s you could visit pretty much every site using a KHTML-based browser and that was written by a handful of KDE devs.

We did.

I certainly peacock every time the new latest greatest [thing] is added to the spec, and am certainly not shy about using those features. There is a handful of misses, but it feels a little dishonest to point the finger squarely at Google when HN in particular lights up like a Christmas tree with every new feature.

Want me to link to our discussion(s) about the new browser DateTime library - Temporal? Or what about Streams, Pattern Matching, Subgrid, Container Queries, color-mix, et al. We ask for this stuff, and we're thrilled when it arrives. Seems hypocritical to then turn around and complain that they're making the browsers "too complicated."

Well, HN isn't really of a unified opinion on the matter - you'll find as many people complaining about browser complexity as people who love these features. The thing is, only one choice between having them or not would make it harder to create new browsers.

>would make it harder to create new browsers.

Blink and v8 are open source. You don't even need to implement the spec yourself. New browsers can piggy back off open source (which is what Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc also did) to help making a browser easier.

They literally giveaway the base of Chrome for free under one of the most permissive licenses out there, a new browser doesn't even have to start from scratch.

Hardly cartel behaviour then

At what point does the complexity of the browser cross a line to being anticompetitive?

With sufficient funding and scope creep, everything is a huge undertaking.

The complexity is enormous but isn’t google employees are active on various standards committees? Google benefit from the complexity because it ensures there will be less competing browsers.

I think Google basically _is_ the standards committees, at this point. Not in the sense of having majority control just by themselves, but in the sense of (1) the cartel being argued over here (browsers funded by Google) having that or close to it, and (2) Chrome being the main source of new features getting implemented, so that the job of the standards committees is mostly to play catch-up with Chrome.

A lot of the complexity stems from backwards compatibility.

Also I seriously doubt there is any conspiracy here!

(opinions are my own)

It is not necessary a conspiracy. It's just google had (and still has) no incentives to keep web ecosistem simple and accessible to browser developers, while making it harder perfectly aligns with google's interests.

Maybe we can finally reduce some of the absurd complexity then?

Yeah, I'm not even a web dev, but even I can see that Google wants to make the web stack ever more complicated and is has been good at getting what it wants.

I always thought they do that to make it more expensive for anyone to compete with them. E.g., want to introduce a new operating systems for phones? No one will use it unless it has a web browser. So you have to hire a thousand expensive developers to create and maintain the browser (or maybe somehow induce Mozilla to port Firefox to it, which would probably also be expensive).

Sounds very similar to the practice of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".

They also do it depending on who wins internal turf wars. When Chrome/ChromeOS wins, we get a hundred hardware APIs.

When ads win (they always win) we get FLOC and other bullcrap.

etc.

I don't think there would be demand for extraneous web APIs if the native ones were a good enough replacement. Kinda feels like the fault of OEMs for driving people to the web for good content.

All web APIs are built on the corresponding native APIs - there's no secret bypass mechanism.