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I agree with you on Google's monopoly but imagine if every browser has to go through proposal process to release any feature? Everything will just stagnate. Br
by dannyr 8y ago
I agree with you on Google's monopoly but imagine if every browser has to go through proposal process to release any feature? Everything will just stagnate.
Browsers copy features from each other. If this is a useful feature, it would make its way to other browsers pretty soon.
- adrianN 8y agoStagnation is not always bad. For one, it helps keep complexity down. We're at a point where building a browser is impossible unless you have literally millions and millions of dollars to invest. That is not good.
- SquareWheel 8y agoIf building from scratch maybe, but when was the last time a browser was built from scratch? Even Chromium was forked from WebKit.
- adrianN 8y agoThat's my point. The web is so complex that browser engines are becoming a monoculture. Even if you forked Chromium now, you'd need hundreds of engineers just to keep up with all the new things that are constantly added.
- ummonk 8y agoYeah, I was rather sad to see EdgeHTML go. Although I never used Edge, rendering engine diversity is good for the ecosystem.
- kordlessagain 8y ago> new things that are constantly added By golly, that's the problem right there.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoOne thing I’ve discovered from learning and using Common Lisp seriously is that it’s really important for a system to be specified in a way that allows for extensions to the system to be implemented in terms of primitives the language provides (e.g. you want a new language construct, write a macro to transform your desired syntax into Common Lisp). In languages and systems that don’t have this feature, an implementation that introduces useful extension begins to develop lock-in and makes it harder to compete. (E.g. no one writes the Haskell specified in the Haskell report anymore, because all the libraries you might want to use use one or more ghc-specific extensions.( )
- Felz 8y agoThere are significant tradeoffs between shared constructs and self contained systems. Self contained systems resist ossification; they can be unilaterally replaced. A shared construct has to evolve in step with all of its users. But the self contained system will have thousands of incompatible implementations, and the shared system will be easier to interact with and build on top of. What this means is that a browser should standardize on things meant to be interfaces, and leave out all of the rest. Unfortunately, they didn't and now browser engines are huge and impossible to evolve except by adding more stuff. Similarly, the value of programming languages is almost entirely in the interfaces they provide which allow you to develop code. Lisp provides almost none of that, and that is why it failed to become mainstream.
- tome 8y ago> no one writes the Haskell specified in the Haskell report anymore, because all the libraries you might want to use use one or more ghc-specific extensions This is a bit of a misconception. One can still write Haskell98 whilst using a library that use a GHC-specific extension. The library doesn't (have to) force its consumers to use extensions too!
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoI phrased that a bit wrong: my experience (from talking to the Haskellers in my company) is that Haskellers generally prefer to turn on a bunch of extensions when they write code. So, while you might be able to write pure Haskell98, it tends not to be idiomatic to do so.
- izacus 8y agoAnd yet the fact that the major engine implementation is opensource still allows each vendor to innovate by adding new useful features to the users. We're really far from IE6 era of complete stagnation.
- pcwalton 8y agoNot really, as far as the core browser engine tech goes. In practice it's too difficult to maintain a Chromium fork that diverges in any significant way other than the front end. Opera and Edge (per announcement) use vanilla upstream Blink.
- misterman0 8y agoBut since when is it a good thing that the last time someone managed to build a web render engine from scratch was thousands of years ago?
- SquareWheel 8y agoHopefully Mozilla will have some luck modernizing by replacing pieces one at a time with Rust components. ;)
- xg15 8y agoWhat do Firefox implementation details have to do with this?
- SquareWheel 8y agoThey are modernizing the browser by replacing pieces over time. That's relevant to the topic of browsers being built on legacy tech.
- xg15 8y agoI don't see how this supports to the argument that you can easily build a new, competing browser by forking. If you fork and then need the same kind of resources to replyce the forked codebase with your own, I don't see what you'd win.
- xg15 8y agoEven if you fork, you'll still need constant investment to just keep it up-to date with the ever-evolving "living standard".
- chottocharaii 8y agoWhy is the possibility of a wheel being reinvented a desirable thing?
- adrianN 8y agoBecause competition is good?
- genericone 8y agoThe hundreds if not thousands of ad supported calculator and flashlight apps on play store beg to differ.
- EchoAce 8y agoGood for the consumer.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoReasonable amount of competition is good.
- claudiawerner 8y agoCompetition that spurs innovation is good, more like, but I am skeptical of the claim that competition is necessary to prompt innovation, and whether the costs of such a model (leading to massive waste of society's productive capacity) are worth the purported benefits. For instance, a good deal of mathematics and science was not done on the principle of competition, but search for improvement. The real question is whether the development in goods and services can be or could have used similar principles, which is not only more efficient but seems condusive to better mental well-being; I'd rather desire to improve than to slight (and possibly sabotage) someone who must be my opponent.
- giornogiovanna 8y agoIs a browser really a "wheel"? There are so many choices to make, so many lines drawn in the sand. And besides, you really don't want the marketing and tracking giant Google to make all the decisions regarding the software that delivers so much content to billions of users' screens, do you? They've been okay so far, but there's a huge conflict of interest here.
- sverhagen 8y agoIt's not just a browser feature, now is it, it's an interoperability feature since you're supposed to share links (it's in the title). This means that the near-monopoly is going to drive people who receive the shared link to consider using the browser that supports this. That puts other browsers quite on the defense, does it not?
- sametmax 8y ago"Your link doesn't work with firefox" sounds indeed really bad.
- Lorkki 8y agoIt sounds not unlike what used to be the role of W3C before HTML5. Everything stagnated, while Microsoft with IE largely did not care, and everyone ended up making their pages in Flash because it was the only really consistent target.
- otabdeveloper1 8y ago> Everything will just stagnate. And that is bad exactly why?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoBecause we've all been heavily brainwashed in to requiring constantly "new" stuff. It's going to take a World changing event to break us out of that cycle IMO.