11 replies to this topic

[peter simon]

hi I'm peter dutch living in Egypt. First forum ever.
I need some help for a project I'm working on.
I have a question to anyone who can answer.
I need to build a browser like Firefox on different platforms windows, mac osx and Linux.
Question: An estimation of programmers I'll need to create the browser in six months.

[CommittedC0der]

My first question is why are you making a browser? There's already a nice amount of browsers out there, and if you don't beat them in some aspect yours probably won't catch on.

But to the point. It will depend on how big the browser is, and how experienced your programmers are. To give you an idea Mozilla currently has over 600 employees, not to say that all work on FireFox but you get the idea.

Assuming you want a FireFox clone I'd say you'd need a nice size team(10+), but this could vary a lot by the amount of experience the developers have.
~ Committed

[Alexander]

A browser such as firefox cannot even compile on a 32 bit machine any longer, it is too large. You may be able to find some cross-operating system libraries such as Qt, Wx, Gtk and create a browser out of that. These libraries can compile on most operating systems, and often provide networking capability that a browser could utilize.

[Vaielab]

Some browser like firefox and I'm pretty sure chrome are open source... you could base your code on thoses
Maybe opera too... but this one I have some doubt

[peter simon]

wow that's a fast answer. Thanks a lot.
so if i understood well, 20 medium/good programmers can build it up in six months on tree platforms?

[Alexander]

peter simon said:

wow that's a fast answer. Thanks a lot.
so if i understood well, 20 medium/good programmers can build it up in six months on tree platforms?

it would be much more difficult to make it from scratch, however if you utilize some cross platform libraries with some developers knowledgeable with them (not just "good") then you may be able to reach your end goal.

Hiring 20 developers to work on some nearly random task may take a lot of practice to be productive, there are various books on this trade (i.e. the Mythical Man-Month)

[Vaielab]

To build a browser is not that difficult... to build a browser that correctly support html, xhtml, html5, css1, css2, css3, javascript and all the other language that hard... no browser manage to do it (not even firefox or chrome)

There are a lots of rules and exception of thoses rules.

[Alexander]

You can as well work with webkit, Chrome, Safari and quite a few web browser use it. Mozilla based browsers tend to use something like Gecko. These are cross compatible and leave the actual browser implementation up to you (i.e. web functionality = webkit, GUI = Gtk)

[Hostingsource]

Personally I prefer to use Mozilla Firefox - I consider it to be the best Browser available. It has so many features and is fast.

[UWH-Mike]

Yeah, I also support Mozilla Firefox Browser. It is super!!!

[RhetoricalRuvim]

I use Safari and Internet Explorer a lot. Firefox is still good, though, especially with Firebug; I use that to test/debug my JavaScript programs.

[RhetoricalRuvim]

I think it could also depend on what language they use.