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> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019 Yes, lots of projects want multiple, competitive rendering engines. It used to
by mch82 8y ago
> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019
Yes, lots of projects want multiple, competitive rendering engines.
It used to be that Windows was the only viable target OS for commercial software. Firefox and Safari gave IE competition and gave developers who wanted to target Mac and Linux a way to get a foot in the door. That kicked off the whole generation of web apps we’ve just lived through. If developers give up on Gecko and WebKit, then they allow a monopoly again. And since Electron is made by GitHub and is now owned by Microsoft, Microsoft will again have the monopoly (with the caveat that Google has primary influence over Blink).
Render engine competition keeps web standards relevant, which keeps the web open. Take away competition & we’ll be back in a world where people build to IE6 for a decade instead of targeting standard HTML/CSS/JS.
- EGreg 8y agoI’m going to disagree. Over the two decades I have been programming I have come to appreciate the benefit of Open Source Collaboration vs competition. Competition between platforms is good, but it’s not the best. Because those who produce content waste millions of hours collectively trying to address every little quirky difference between the platforms. And the standards only help so much, whether it’s POSIX or WHATWG. The real reason MS and IE were not so good is because they were a closed source monopoly! And moreover the copyright was enforced by the government. Now even M$ switched over to WebKit / Blink. Collaboration beats competition in the end. Wikipedia beat Britannica quite handily. And it beat Encarta, too. Open source beat closed source over time. The Web beat AOL and Compuserve. Science beat secret cults and alchemy. Today Pharma is using patents and competition. People are prevented from building on each other’s work in microbiology but not in other sciences. Isn’t that wild? I would rather have lots of people adding to one snowball platform, than having competing platforms. AS LONG AS that platform is open source and anyone can use it for any purpose. If your commits don’t make it into the core, just market them until they get popular enough. Compatibility is the goal, though.
- gpvos 8y agoChrome/Blink may be open source, but it's controlled by Google after Blink forked from WebKit. It's hardly collaborative.
- aaronbrethorst 8y ago“M$”? Really? This isn’t slashdot.
- vedantroy 8y agoThe point is that developers don't want to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines--hence why Electron was built. Maybe having multiple engines is good (although maybe the benefits are overstated since nowadays most engines align with the spec instead of implementing non-standard extensions like ActiveX), but it's not good for people for who want to quickly, and with low effort, develop desktop applications. The point of the parent comment was that developers chose Electron over other frameworks for reasons such as speed of development, and DeskGap does not align with those reasons.
- kijin 8y agoWhat developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron. I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.
- jhgg 8y agoThe cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.
- kijin 8y agoStartup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.
- icelancer 8y ago> but what users want is even more important Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack. It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.
- arvinsim 8y agoIt's good that you are advocating for render engine competition. But I think you think you are getting off tangent. It has nothing to do with the point that trying to make your code work in multiple browsers/rendering engines is painful. Wanting a project to work with multiple rendering engines just because is an idealogical decision.
- gpvos 8y agoAll software is political, so ideology is relevant.