I cannot imagine a time when browsers were "servant-oriented".

Every browser I can think of was/is subservient to some big-big-company's big-big-strategy.

There have been plenty of browsers that were not part of a big company, either for part or all of their history. They don't tend to have massive market share, in part because browsers are amazingly complex and when they break, users get pissed because their browsing is affected.

Even the browsers created by individuals or small groups don't have, as far as I've ever seen, a "servant-oriented mindset": like all software projects, they are ultimately developed and supported at the discretion of their developer(s).

This is how you get interesting quirks like Opera including torrent support natively, or Brave bundling its own advertising/cryptocurrency thing.

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etchalon 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Both of those are strategies aimed at capturing a niche market segment in hopes of attracting them away from the big browsers.

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akerl_ 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I guess? I don't get the sense that when the Opera devs added torrents a couple decades ago, they were necessarily doing it to steal users so much as because the developers thought it was a useful feature.

But it doesn't really make a difference to my broader point that browser devs have never had "servant-mindset"

	▲	etchalon 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree. They've never had that mindset.

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trinsic2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't remember it this way. It was my understanding that browsers were designed to browse servers and that servers, or websites designed themselves around web standards that were initiated by specs made part of browsing experience that web browsers created.