Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What’s next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type “McDonald’s” before I can actually navigate there?
Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What’s next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type “McDonald’s” before I can actually navigate there?
Okay but you mean which is harder?? Both projects rely on a bunch of salaried professionals supervising an army of volunteers. Firefox is a web browser, i.e. notoriously the space shuttle of software. But the Wikipedia is doing some surprisingly innovative and cutting-edge stuff with its own codebase too, as I understand it. Whichever is costlier, I’m not sure we’re talking about an order of magnitude of difference.
I’m not an expert on either codebase but I believe the main driver of complexity with developing a browser engine is the sheer number of standards and how fast they change and multiply. Wikipedia has to update articles and maintain the server backend, which is no small task with such a global and comprehensive website, but Firefox has to do similar things on top of vastly more complex code with much more churn. There’s a reason Mozilla developed Rust as well.
Firstly, updating the articles is the one thing Wikipedia doesn’t do, the army of unpaid volunteers does that.
But as for “just maintaining the backend”, the Wikimedia Foundation does far more than that. It created and maintains and constantly iterates a huge pile of ever-complexifying frontend code - the wiki itself, discussion software, media tools etc - not just for Wikipedia but for a whole bunch of peer sites. Much of it is pretty cutting-edge, it’s used daily by many thousands of editors and there’s also the accessibility requirement. I know from personal experience that there’s nothing harder than front-end when you have to tick the accessibility box. No doubt Firefox’s technical challenge is greater but really the difference is not night and day.