A few days ago, a blogger exposed that a senior manager working in Huawei's browser team revealed that he would be able to use a better Huawei browser in two years, and with the words "the four cores of today's browsers are American technology", as well as the recent "Huawei Browser MEET X Salon • Education" introduction long picture.
One of the managers of huawei's R&D team mentioned in the blogger's post said: In 2 years, you will be able to use a better Huawei browser.
There is nothing wrong with this sentence itself, the technology is moving forward, Huawei is moving forward, and it is a good thing to develop a better browser.
Interestingly, many people have taken a bias and over-interpreted this news, and believe that Huawei is developing the browser kernel.
Leifeng Network news on January 18, Huawei related sources said that the self-developed browser kernel does not exist, but on the basis of the original browser to do some algorithm innovations and corrections.
Technicians revealed that the development of a mature browser kernel, the amount of code in tens of millions to hundreds of millions, and at least 1,000 skilled engineers, cost more than 5 years, the cost will be as high as billions.
So it's just a word game farce. In fact, this kind of farce has been tried before.
In 2018, a red-core browser with the banner of "domestic independent research and development of kernels" was born in China, and it was announced that it had completed a series of 250 million C series financing.
Promotional press releases on IT websites and news media blew the browser to the limit.
However, on the day of announcing the completion of financing, the Red Core browser was not unexpectedly exposed to layers of shell Chromium, and the official also argued that it was "standing on the shoulders of giants to innovate".
Later, under the condemnation of all parties, Red core Browser hastily issued an apology statement, admitting that there was exaggeration in the propaganda.
Domestic self-developed technology is actually a case of fraud and deception, resulting in the public's expectation of domestic technology gradually turned into doubt.
Since the "Red Core Browser", there has been no longer a browser in China that claims to have "independently developed the kernel".
Why don't we develop a browser kernel?
A closer look will reveal that all areas that China is backward or cannot master have in common, that is, areas that need to be accumulated for a long time, while the emerging fields in recent years china are basically not backward.
Due to China's late development, it missed the early technological start-up stage, and there are few opportunities to overtake in these areas. Not all technologies can overtake in curves, and some technologies have been straight for more than 40 years, and the first-mover advantage will always be maintained.
The browser kernel is such a field, the most popular kernel in the world is WebKit, its predecessor is KHTML, in 2002 Apple used KHTML as the kernel of safari browser, and KHTML was developed as a sub-project of the KDE project as early as 1998.
Another popular browser kernel is Mozilla's Gecko, the kernel of the Firefox browser, whose predecessor was a browser from Netscape, and which can be traced back to Mosaic, which was developed when Netscape was founded in 1993.
The current browser kernels all started in the 90s, and even the ones that were eliminated were basically developed in the 90s. Opera started in 1995 and IE to fight Netscape in 1994.
The domestic Internet industry is very prosperous, covering up some things, such as the backwardness of the ultra-large-scale software field, the ultra-large-scale software is a project that starts with tens of millions of lines of code and requires hundreds or even thousands of engineers to jointly develop and maintain the project.
If ultra-large-scale software wants to succeed, it must start early, and it must be able to insist on investment, relying on a lot of manpower, material resources and time to accumulate.
In the 90s, even the best programmer level and the United States have a huge gap, and it is very rare, for example, the best programmers in the early 90s are Lei Jun, Zhou Hongyi, Zhang Xiaolong, Bao Yueqiao, Wang Zhidong, Liao Hengyi, etc., can only do application development, they have not yet done the technical ability of super-large-scale software.
The only large-scale software projects in China that can start in the 90s and survive to this day are WPS Office.
WPS Office has more than 35 million lines of C++ code, compiles and integrates once, even uses the highest performance server for nearly three hours, and requires more than 1000 programmers for daily development and maintenance.
The programmers in the initial stage of today's version of the WPS project include Shen Jiazheng and Xu Shiwei.
Xu Shiwei may be more famous, he is the founder CEO of Qiniu Cloud Storage, the evangelist of Golang, and the initiator of Go+.
Shen Jiazheng may be few people know, but this picture is estimated that many people have seen, the picture was Qiu Bojun, Lei Jun, Liu Chuanzhi, Yang Yuanqing, the four chairman CEOs watched to write the code programmer is Shen Jiazheng Shen teacher, the technical soul of the WPS team, and the screen they are looking at at this time is likely to be the source code of WPS.
If you want to develop the browser kernel, then at least you should start doing it ten years ago, if you start now, then at least ten years later there will be a more complete version. Even Google and Apple have used Webkit to achieve a level of user recognition for more than a decade.
Therefore, Huawei is very aware that developing the browser kernel is not an easy task.
(Leifeng Network)