4 ms·

I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome and I go back and forth on this. Polar is an app for managing your reading. It also supports

I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome and I go back and forth on this. Polar is an app for managing your reading. It also supports advanced features like caching web pages locally, annotating PDFs, tagging the documents you're reading, etc. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's based on Electron and I've been going deep into Chrome internals as well as experimenting with Chrome extensions. It's definitely a double edges sword here but I think there's an overly negative view of Chrome and/or having one platform. Chrome is owned by Google. However, Chromium is Open Source. Electron wouldn't exist without Chromium and there are other browsers based on Chromium. I don't really see the benefit of duplicating things for the sake of duplicating them. A lot of Firefox fans here argue that Firefox provides an alternative to keep us safe. Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source? Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer? It's not like Chromium is going to vanish. There's the argument that most Chromium developers are employed by Google - but not if Mozilla employs them. It's always possible for fork these things.

isostatic 8y ago
> I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome IE6 called
sstangl 8y ago
> Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source? Safe from monopoly control over Web standards. The Web has been a consensus ecosystem, and Google does not have a track record of proposing reasonable standards. In my mind this is most grossly evident in the case of PNaCl, which was tied to their Pepper API and effectively impossible for non-Blink browsers to implement. Google pushed for PNaCl to become a Web standard, and it was only through years of difficult effort that Mozilla was able to show AsmJS as a better solution, which eventually gave rise to the reasonable standard of WebAssembly. Were Google in a monopoly market position back then, they would have pushed PNaCl, and non-Blink browsers would be unable to render the modern Web. That might sound fine if you believe that Blink is the be-all-and-end-all of Web technology. But we have Servo now, and we already know better.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Right but Mozilla could still do this within the context of Chromium. They could fork it if necessary. And I definitely agree that Google is faltering on a lot of their execution lately. Most of the things they ship are like a 6/10 in terms of usability.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    There would be a ton of pressure to adopt NaCl in a world in which it's just a configuration flag away. Absent other browser engines, we would be using NaCl and Dart everywhere.
minitech 8y ago
Chromium certainly shouldn’t die. However… > Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer? Hah. Yes, and if there’s a point when we don’t, I vote we keep Servo instead of Blink. (There won’t be.) Although it’s possible I’m replying to some filler in a comment that starts with a link to a product only related in the sense of “apps that use Electron exist”…
pcwalton 8y ago
I've never understood the "just fork Blink" argument in favor of a single renderer. Forking Blink results in multiple renderers that diverge over time: just look at what happened to WebKit and Blink. You can't have it both ways: either the entire Web is under control of Google management, or you have multiple competing renderers.

isostatic 8y ago

> I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome IE6 called

sstangl 8y ago

> Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source? Safe from monopoly control over Web standards. The Web has been a consensus ecosystem, and Google does not have a track record of proposing reasonable standards. In my mind this is most grossly evident in the case of PNaCl, which was tied to their Pepper API and effectively impossible for non-Blink browsers to implement. Google pushed for PNaCl to become a Web standard, and it was only through years of difficult effort that Mozilla was able to show AsmJS as a better solution, which eventually gave rise to the reasonable standard of WebAssembly. Were Google in a monopoly market position back then, they would have pushed PNaCl, and non-Blink browsers would be unable to render the modern Web. That might sound fine if you believe that Blink is the be-all-and-end-all of Web technology. But we have Servo now, and we already know better.

burtonator 8y ago
Right but Mozilla could still do this within the context of Chromium. They could fork it if necessary. And I definitely agree that Google is faltering on a lot of their execution lately. Most of the things they ship are like a 6/10 in terms of usability.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  There would be a ton of pressure to adopt NaCl in a world in which it's just a configuration flag away. Absent other browser engines, we would be using NaCl and Dart everywhere.

minitech 8y ago

Chromium certainly shouldn’t die. However… > Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer? Hah. Yes, and if there’s a point when we don’t, I vote we keep Servo instead of Blink. (There won’t be.) Although it’s possible I’m replying to some filler in a comment that starts with a link to a product only related in the sense of “apps that use Electron exist”…

pcwalton 8y ago

I've never understood the "just fork Blink" argument in favor of a single renderer. Forking Blink results in multiple renderers that diverge over time: just look at what happened to WebKit and Blink. You can't have it both ways: either the entire Web is under control of Google management, or you have multiple competing renderers.