6 ms·

While we blink, we lose the Web (a rant on WebKit/Blink monoculture)

70 points by soapdog 8y ago

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
Not to diminish the severity of the problem, but I was under the impression WebKit and Blink are actually quite different nowadays, even though they were originally one and the same. That said, three engines is not all that much better than two, especially given FireFox's marketshare.
- olliej 8y ago
  yup, they are fairly diverged at this point. I assume this is similar to many people refusing to acknowledge that webkit and khtml (or jsc and kjs) were meaningfully different for years after that was clearly the case.
- soapdog 8y ago
  Author here, not assuming they are the same, just they sprouted from the same tree. And even though they diverged a lot, they are still more similar than different. I am basically afraid of a monoculture of that family of engines, specially given chromium dominance in terms of browser vendor.
avaer 8y ago
The argument that you can escape Google monoculture by going with Mozilla never resonated with me, given that Google ads pay for both. It always felt like a Pachinko prize situation, where adding an extra step to the process lets us sweep human incentives under the rug.
- soapdog 8y ago
  If Microsoft drops EdgeHTML, Mozilla will be the only remaining browser vendor using an engine that is not from that family. It doesn't matter if Google is paying for it, they pay to be the default search engine, and thats it. They don't get a say on what Mozilla does.
- rebelwebmaster 8y ago
  Not a coincidence in my opinion that Mozilla's talking more about revenue diversification lately too.
superinnuendo 8y ago
Isn't this a paradigm shift more than anything? Both companies will contribute code to the browser. There will be more eyes on one quality code base. It will become the standard just like railroads had to standardize. It's about time to be honest. Now we can all focus on something else.
- undoware 8y ago
  We already did standardize. With standards. By a standards body. This is more like, "and all cars on the road have a Toyota motor." Gonna be waiting a while for those figurative Teslas...
scarface74 8y ago
In practice, IE has been ignored for years as far as compatibility from what I can tell. But I didn’t realize that IEs market share was so small. I would think it would be larger by virtue of it being the default on Windows. But without IE, what could possibly drive traffic to Bing?
- Hamcha 8y ago
  Bing is "Google Search but not Google and cheaper". The cheap bit is easy to understand, Google has APIs for GSearch, Translate etc but they are quite expensive. Microsoft on the other hands has much lower costs for services that are usually not that far off. The "not Google" bit is probably the reason why it will always have at least some traction though: It's used by Google competitors (eg. Alexa uses Bing, Siri used to.)
sitkack 8y ago
Complexity builds in a thing until it becomes too heavy to operate in its original environment, a lighter thing more adapted to the current ecosystem replaces it. You see this in Wikipedia pages on Mathematics, they start small and succinct. Then the Mathematicians move in and make it correct and thorough. And then they keep doing this, until only Mathematicians can understand and edit it. This exactly mirrors browser evolution. It would be nearly impossible to create a new engine, because the existing ones have accreted over time and staffed > 10M/Y in salaries. Developers are like complexity sponges. Budgets, timelines, cpu cycles, memory, latency. Any resource will be consumed by even a small number of developers on the corporate dole. The web spec maintainers should have a total complexity budget for the thing they are specifying. The next browser that comes out, will run in a browser using WASM and render using Canvas. It will have to, there is no other way.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  All of that's bullshit when you realize WHATWG and W3C are controlled by browser marketshare majorities. Create a browser that people want that sheds 99% of the bullshit APIs and now you have momentum. It doesn't matter whether or not your browser supports WebGPU or WASM when no one cares to use it because they enjoy a browser with built-in ad blocking or resource limits that prevent idiot developers from offload 10s of megabytes onto them. Protect users and make them your number one priority and everything else is bullshit. Firefox forgot this and lost to Chrome. Microsoft woke up too late and played catchup, and they're still playing it, too.
IloveHN84 8y ago
We fought against IE supremacy for over a decade, now we have to fight against Chrome, which does even worse and evil than IE
- jasonvorhe 8y ago
  It features proprietary add-ons that only work on one platform and can't be easily implemented in other platforms? How? Since when? Which ones?
Eridrus 8y ago
Everyone who is old enough appreciates what Firefox did for the web. But I'm not convinced that a Chromium monoculture is the same as an IE6/Trident monoculture. Largely because Chromium is open source. Apple has successfully forked it to Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs. Opera/Brave/Electron have used it as a base for their product. So I'm left wondering what people expect will happen. Is it that the standards will no longer be relevant because people only care about one implementation? In some sense, Microsoft decision is basically irrelevant to that because we're already there since web developers were not testing Edge, leading to compatibility challenges for the Edge team.
- pier25 8y ago
  > Apple has successfully forked it to Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs You mean Google?
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    You're right, thanks, I had thought it was the other way around. That's a slightly different narrative to what I had in my head, but I'm not sure it matters a lot, since it's basically Apple & Google not being able to agree on what to do resulting in a split.
omarforgotpwd 8y ago
We don’t need diversity in browser engines anymore. Not that much. We’ve got Firefox, Blink, WebKit (Blink was forked off WebKit but is not WebKit. They also has different JavaScript engines. Chrome is called V8 and I think WebKit has one called SpiderMonkey). And we’ve also got Opera. Having less diffferences to code against is good. Yet there are still different browser engines from different comapanies. If Google did something stupid Apple could counteract them, etc. Thus I feel the author’s sentiment but don’t think this will matter at all from a practical perspective.
- megous 8y ago
  SpiderMonkey is from Mozilla.
  - omarforgotpwd 8y ago
    Right, my mistake. Apple's is called Nitro.

70 points by soapdog 8y ago

Not to diminish the severity of the problem, but I was under the impression WebKit and Blink are actually quite different nowadays, even though they were originally one and the same. That said, three engines is not all that much better than two, especially given FireFox's marketshare.

olliej 8y ago
yup, they are fairly diverged at this point. I assume this is similar to many people refusing to acknowledge that webkit and khtml (or jsc and kjs) were meaningfully different for years after that was clearly the case.
soapdog 8y ago
Author here, not assuming they are the same, just they sprouted from the same tree. And even though they diverged a lot, they are still more similar than different. I am basically afraid of a monoculture of that family of engines, specially given chromium dominance in terms of browser vendor.

avaer 8y ago

The argument that you can escape Google monoculture by going with Mozilla never resonated with me, given that Google ads pay for both. It always felt like a Pachinko prize situation, where adding an extra step to the process lets us sweep human incentives under the rug.

soapdog 8y ago
If Microsoft drops EdgeHTML, Mozilla will be the only remaining browser vendor using an engine that is not from that family. It doesn't matter if Google is paying for it, they pay to be the default search engine, and thats it. They don't get a say on what Mozilla does.
rebelwebmaster 8y ago
Not a coincidence in my opinion that Mozilla's talking more about revenue diversification lately too.

superinnuendo 8y ago

Isn't this a paradigm shift more than anything? Both companies will contribute code to the browser. There will be more eyes on one quality code base. It will become the standard just like railroads had to standardize. It's about time to be honest. Now we can all focus on something else.

undoware 8y ago
We already did standardize. With standards. By a standards body. This is more like, "and all cars on the road have a Toyota motor." Gonna be waiting a while for those figurative Teslas...

scarface74 8y ago

In practice, IE has been ignored for years as far as compatibility from what I can tell. But I didn’t realize that IEs market share was so small. I would think it would be larger by virtue of it being the default on Windows. But without IE, what could possibly drive traffic to Bing?

Hamcha 8y ago
Bing is "Google Search but not Google and cheaper". The cheap bit is easy to understand, Google has APIs for GSearch, Translate etc but they are quite expensive. Microsoft on the other hands has much lower costs for services that are usually not that far off. The "not Google" bit is probably the reason why it will always have at least some traction though: It's used by Google competitors (eg. Alexa uses Bing, Siri used to.)

sitkack 8y ago

Complexity builds in a thing until it becomes too heavy to operate in its original environment, a lighter thing more adapted to the current ecosystem replaces it. You see this in Wikipedia pages on Mathematics, they start small and succinct. Then the Mathematicians move in and make it correct and thorough. And then they keep doing this, until only Mathematicians can understand and edit it. This exactly mirrors browser evolution. It would be nearly impossible to create a new engine, because the existing ones have accreted over time and staffed > 10M/Y in salaries. Developers are like complexity sponges. Budgets, timelines, cpu cycles, memory, latency. Any resource will be consumed by even a small number of developers on the corporate dole. The web spec maintainers should have a total complexity budget for the thing they are specifying. The next browser that comes out, will run in a browser using WASM and render using Canvas. It will have to, there is no other way.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago
All of that's bullshit when you realize WHATWG and W3C are controlled by browser marketshare majorities. Create a browser that people want that sheds 99% of the bullshit APIs and now you have momentum. It doesn't matter whether or not your browser supports WebGPU or WASM when no one cares to use it because they enjoy a browser with built-in ad blocking or resource limits that prevent idiot developers from offload 10s of megabytes onto them. Protect users and make them your number one priority and everything else is bullshit. Firefox forgot this and lost to Chrome. Microsoft woke up too late and played catchup, and they're still playing it, too.

IloveHN84 8y ago

We fought against IE supremacy for over a decade, now we have to fight against Chrome, which does even worse and evil than IE

jasonvorhe 8y ago
It features proprietary add-ons that only work on one platform and can't be easily implemented in other platforms? How? Since when? Which ones?

Eridrus 8y ago

Everyone who is old enough appreciates what Firefox did for the web. But I'm not convinced that a Chromium monoculture is the same as an IE6/Trident monoculture. Largely because Chromium is open source. Apple has successfully forked it to Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs. Opera/Brave/Electron have used it as a base for their product. So I'm left wondering what people expect will happen. Is it that the standards will no longer be relevant because people only care about one implementation? In some sense, Microsoft decision is basically irrelevant to that because we're already there since web developers were not testing Edge, leading to compatibility challenges for the Edge team.

pier25 8y ago
> Apple has successfully forked it to Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs You mean Google?
- Eridrus 8y ago
  You're right, thanks, I had thought it was the other way around. That's a slightly different narrative to what I had in my head, but I'm not sure it matters a lot, since it's basically Apple & Google not being able to agree on what to do resulting in a split.

omarforgotpwd 8y ago

We don’t need diversity in browser engines anymore. Not that much. We’ve got Firefox, Blink, WebKit (Blink was forked off WebKit but is not WebKit. They also has different JavaScript engines. Chrome is called V8 and I think WebKit has one called SpiderMonkey). And we’ve also got Opera. Having less diffferences to code against is good. Yet there are still different browser engines from different comapanies. If Google did something stupid Apple could counteract them, etc. Thus I feel the author’s sentiment but don’t think this will matter at all from a practical perspective.

megous 8y ago
SpiderMonkey is from Mozilla.
- omarforgotpwd 8y ago
  Right, my mistake. Apple's is called Nitro.