How much would it cost to pay a programmer to design a web browser for me?

Question

I want to have a web browser that I can own and get people in a niche market to start using (I am fully aware of the difficulties of promoting a browser but I have an angle that I am not going to talk about that I strongly believe would market itself).

How much would it cost to pay a programmer to make a web browser for me. I was hoping someone would tell me how many hours it would take a professional programmer to do and then I could just multiply that by between 100 and 200 dollars (what I would assume would be their billable rate). Any ideas on how many man hours it would take? Feel free to shoot from the hip on this one.

Answer 1

A modern, full featured web browser is not a trivial undertaking so you're probably best off forgetting the whole idea now. A web browser needs to implement 20-30 different standards each of which is fairly complex in their own right. Starting from scratch budget for around 100,000 hours as an initial ballpark figure. More realistic might be to take an existing web engine (e.g. WebKit) and customizing and wrapping it for your needs. That's a lot simpler but still substantial for a product differentiated enough to be worth bothering with - perhaps 5,000 hours.

Answer 2

There are already enough web browsers out there, programmers already find it a hassle o reach cross browser compatibility so adding another browser to the list would be annoying.



perhaps you should look into open source web browsers. Firefox being one of them.



there is tons of work to be done to make a web browser, more than you probably think.



chrome only became popular because google is a creditable company that everyone trust.



if a reputable company asked me to build a web browser with out a team I would give them the price of $1,000 an hour. If I had a team of 3 I would require 700 each an hour.



building a web browser is an ongoing process that should be written with assembly and c++.



not to mention you have to write for cross platforms.

Answer 3

People make it seem hard/crazy. It's not.



Find an open source browser that falls close to your expectations, then modify it. If you don't know how, get an estimate from a programmer. OR on-the-cheap, post your questions in a forum for the software w/all related details, then tell the nice people who help you THANK YOU!

Answer 4

It depends what you mean by "browser"...do you need custom functionality in the HTML rendering itself? Like a complete new engine? If so, read Richard's response below...that's a ridiculously huge project.



If your idea can be used with any browser engine, and it's just the application itself that contains new/unique features that you feel would be marketable...that's a much easier task.

Answer 5

Use Google Developer tools and make one yourself.