3 ms·

I'm not a fan of another monopoly in the browser space, but the situation is quite different this time around. The largest being that Chrome is a branded versio

I'm not a fan of another monopoly in the browser space, but the situation is quite different this time around. The largest being that Chrome is a branded version of Chromium, an open source project. The author is right that creating a browser from scratch is a often prohibitive amount of work at this point, but if Google stops allowing innovation or directs it in selfish ways in Chrome/Chromium, all that work is not suddenly lost to competitors. If pages only work in Chromium derivatives, then build your competing browser by refactoring Chromium. If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like we were with IE. That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in general) than Firefox/Gecko. Looking at their roadmap[1], I was surprised at how soon its milestones are. If they hold to that timetable we may be seeing Firefox or a totally new browser steal first place before long, especially on mobile. [1]: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap

pcwalton 11y ago
> If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like we were with IE. > That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in general) than Firefox/Gecko. These statements are contradictory. If you get what you want in your first paragraph, Servo won't be possible, ever.
- johncolanduoni 11y ago
  The first not what I want, it's the future I think this article is actually predicting (as opposed to IE round two), and I'm saying it won't be such a crying shame. Also not "possible ever" is pretty hyperbolic, considering the lock-in when IE had a monopoly was far stronger than it would be if Chrome/Blink got a monopoly. At the worst we'd have a permissively licensed reference implementation, which is a lot better than trying to be compatible with a closed source blob like IE.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    Closed versus open source isn't a big deal in terms of difficulty of reverse engineering. It's relatively easy to figure out what IE does; Hixie even clean room reverse engineered IE's entire HTML parsing algorithm back in the day. Having to be bug-for-bug compatible with one engine with no sensible specification is what causes the problems.

pcwalton 11y ago

> If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like we were with IE. > That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in general) than Firefox/Gecko. These statements are contradictory. If you get what you want in your first paragraph, Servo won't be possible, ever.

johncolanduoni 11y ago
The first not what I want, it's the future I think this article is actually predicting (as opposed to IE round two), and I'm saying it won't be such a crying shame. Also not "possible ever" is pretty hyperbolic, considering the lock-in when IE had a monopoly was far stronger than it would be if Chrome/Blink got a monopoly. At the worst we'd have a permissively licensed reference implementation, which is a lot better than trying to be compatible with a closed source blob like IE.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  Closed versus open source isn't a big deal in terms of difficulty of reverse engineering. It's relatively easy to figure out what IE does; Hixie even clean room reverse engineered IE's entire HTML parsing algorithm back in the day. Having to be bug-for-bug compatible with one engine with no sensible specification is what causes the problems.