3 ms·

As a professional web developer I don't know how I feel about this. 1. Edge is terrible, in my experience, and has strange edge-case bugs to work around on com

by trebor 8y ago

As a professional web developer I don't know how I feel about this. 1. Edge is terrible, in my experience, and has strange edge-case bugs to work around on complicated sites. Also, the fixes don't fix what might break in IE. 2. Chromium can easily account for ~70% of all browser traffic. This helps, but also locks us into stagnation. It puts all Chromium-based browsers into the IE6-of-the-interwebs category. I think I fall on the "this is bad" side, though. Edge wasn't much in the way of an innovator, so we aren't losing much. We're just losing as chromium browsers continue to gain market share and make competition difficult.

vidanay 8y ago
What if Google were to strengthen the community ownership of Chromium and reduce theirs? If Chromium could indeed become a true standard, wouldn't it make everyone's lives easier and then the only features we would all have to argue about are the truly value added aspects of the different implementations, and no longer have to worry about the rendering engine?
- scarejunba 8y ago
  And related to this, is “the implementation is the standard” bad if the implementation is open-source and community owned? I feel yes, but I can’t articulate why.
  - belltaco 8y ago
    It is because spec or implementation quirks and bugs will get papered over to save time and effort. The standard will become less exact over time and point to the source code of Chromium "just do it like Chromium, here's the link to the code", instead of having a clean spec with multiple standard implementations. Firefox will suffer even more as this happens. Its like Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, where the standard literally said in some places "how Word/Excel 95 implements this feature".
pilif 8y ago
> into the IE6-of-the-interwebs category Does it though? Chromium or rather the Blink engine is very different from IE6: It's in active development, it's available for multiple platforms, it's open source and it follows web standards as they developed. The old days of IE6 were very different in that the web standards were stuck in a limbo (remember XHTML?), IE6 had features that were specific to Windows and could not be ported to other OSes without bringing half of Windows with it (ActiveX) and IE6 was full of quirks and bugs that directly contradicted the standards. If you made a site to work correctly in IE and using all of its features it was very unlikely that it could work unaltered on any other platform and, again, IE itself was inherently non-portable. Conversely, if you made a site targeting standards, you would a) lose out on features the market wanted and other sites provided (back then, even AJAX was an IE-only feature for a while) and b) the site would not work at all on the browser with 90% market share. Today the standards move fast enough and are implemented quickly enough by browser vendors that your standards-compliant site will not be at a competitive disadvantage. And even if Google decided to stop being standards compliant and removing features they don't like or adding features we don't like, Chromium is open source and Microsoft is powerful enough to keep the eventual fork alive. As somebody who lived through the bad old IE6 days, I see this current situation as a much more positive thing than what the IE-of-old situation ever was. To the contrary: The way how the siutation looks like right now, we are finally at the position where every OS with any significant market share will now come with a default browser that supports the majority of the current web standards and that will be updated often enough to stay up do date with the standards as they evolve. While Edge was much better than IE in that regard, have a look at caniuse.com and compare what's offered to-date by the default browser shipping with Windows to what's offered by any other OSes default browser. Edge was still based on Trident, no matter what MS was saying. The decades of technical dept remained and by being tied to the OS, Edge could only ever be updated every 6 months anyways.
- forgot-my-pw 8y ago
  > While Edge was much better than IE in that regard, have a look at caniuse.com and compare what's offered to-date by the default browser shipping with Windows to what's offered by any other OSes default browser. Edge and Safari are a bit behind: https://caniuse.com/#compare=edge+18,firefox+63,chrome+70,safari+12 https://caniuse.com/#compare=edge+18,firefox+63,chrome+70,sa...

by trebor 8y ago

vidanay 8y ago

What if Google were to strengthen the community ownership of Chromium and reduce theirs? If Chromium could indeed become a true standard, wouldn't it make everyone's lives easier and then the only features we would all have to argue about are the truly value added aspects of the different implementations, and no longer have to worry about the rendering engine?

scarejunba 8y ago
And related to this, is “the implementation is the standard” bad if the implementation is open-source and community owned? I feel yes, but I can’t articulate why.
- belltaco 8y ago
  It is because spec or implementation quirks and bugs will get papered over to save time and effort. The standard will become less exact over time and point to the source code of Chromium "just do it like Chromium, here's the link to the code", instead of having a clean spec with multiple standard implementations. Firefox will suffer even more as this happens. Its like Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, where the standard literally said in some places "how Word/Excel 95 implements this feature".

pilif 8y ago

> into the IE6-of-the-interwebs category Does it though? Chromium or rather the Blink engine is very different from IE6: It's in active development, it's available for multiple platforms, it's open source and it follows web standards as they developed. The old days of IE6 were very different in that the web standards were stuck in a limbo (remember XHTML?), IE6 had features that were specific to Windows and could not be ported to other OSes without bringing half of Windows with it (ActiveX) and IE6 was full of quirks and bugs that directly contradicted the standards. If you made a site to work correctly in IE and using all of its features it was very unlikely that it could work unaltered on any other platform and, again, IE itself was inherently non-portable. Conversely, if you made a site targeting standards, you would a) lose out on features the market wanted and other sites provided (back then, even AJAX was an IE-only feature for a while) and b) the site would not work at all on the browser with 90% market share. Today the standards move fast enough and are implemented quickly enough by browser vendors that your standards-compliant site will not be at a competitive disadvantage. And even if Google decided to stop being standards compliant and removing features they don't like or adding features we don't like, Chromium is open source and Microsoft is powerful enough to keep the eventual fork alive. As somebody who lived through the bad old IE6 days, I see this current situation as a much more positive thing than what the IE-of-old situation ever was. To the contrary: The way how the siutation looks like right now, we are finally at the position where every OS with any significant market share will now come with a default browser that supports the majority of the current web standards and that will be updated often enough to stay up do date with the standards as they evolve. While Edge was much better than IE in that regard, have a look at caniuse.com and compare what's offered to-date by the default browser shipping with Windows to what's offered by any other OSes default browser. Edge was still based on Trident, no matter what MS was saying. The decades of technical dept remained and by being tied to the OS, Edge could only ever be updated every 6 months anyways.

forgot-my-pw 8y ago
> While Edge was much better than IE in that regard, have a look at caniuse.com and compare what's offered to-date by the default browser shipping with Windows to what's offered by any other OSes default browser. Edge and Safari are a bit behind: https://caniuse.com/#compare=edge+18,firefox+63,chrome+70,safari+12 https://caniuse.com/#compare=edge+18,firefox+63,chrome+70,sa...