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Ask HN: Developing a web browser is the most difficult thing in software?

9 points by jorangreef ↗ HN
Do you think that developing a web browser is the most difficult thing you could do in software?

8 comments

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byoung2
It is difficult enough that only huge companies (Microsoft, Google, and Apple), or big open-source projects (Mozilla), have the resources to do it well. Nowadays, the browser is handling much of what the OS did a decade or so ago. Email, office productivity, media, games, and more have to run perfectly across multiple platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile). And you can't charge for it anymore. So, yeah, it's an uphill battle
jorangreef
"And you can't charge for it anymore." - great point.
hcho
No. There are other pieces of software which you cannot humanely imagine how the users will interact with.But why the question?
michael_dorfman
Not by a long shot. Why would you think so?

And, why is it even an interesting question?

jorangreef
Perhaps "What's harder than a web browser?" would have been a better question. I think it's pretty interesting. We take browsers for granted. Yet they deal with immense complexity.
hga
Hmmm, what other type of software has so little control over its input while being expected to do something "reasonable" with all of it?
AmberS
Difficult is totally subjective. It's probably the most resource intensive just because of how many different pages there are, but to me that's not what makes a problem difficult.

Also, I could see this ranking high for consumer-level problems, but there are way more difficult (both resource intensive AND hard to figure out) and interesting problems when you look at some of the business applications.

zokier
Writing a modern, fully featured operating system sees quite hard. Especially when most OS's seem to include a web browser :)