6 ms·

That's not the point gp is making. You're right of course: Chrome is competent, IE6 definitely wasn't. Chrome is, however, proprietary and driving further tha

That's not the point gp is making. You're right of course: Chrome is competent, IE6 definitely wasn't. Chrome is, however, proprietary and driving further that way. IE6 showed that a single, dominant browser is not good for consumers or progress. Especially when it originates from one of the two leading surveillance tech firms. [As an aside, I was disappointed to see MS admit defeat with Edge and jump into bed with G. Still seems a bit suspicious tbh].

TylerE 7y ago
Competence compensates for a monoculture. You don't see people complaining that GHC is de facto the only Haskell compiler.
- spinningslate 7y ago
  > Competence compensates for a monoculture. Sometimes. But motivation matters. The motivation behind ghc is clearly and unequivocally to advance the Haskell ecosystem. The motivation behind Chrome's dominance is another thing entirely.
  - jfk13 7y ago
    In addition, the Haskell ecosystem is only one among many programming ecosystems that we can choose among for any given task. If the Haskell ecosystem is a monoculture, and isn't headed in a direction that suits your needs, you can choose another environment. There's (pretty much) only one Web that needs to serve us all.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Competence is also a transient determination. IE6 was highly competent in its time, it is only retrospectively that it "earns" most of its incompetence. IE defined the modern CSS box layout strategy of choice (and realized that box layout model was something underdefined in the specifications), for just one instance. Most of IE6's particular incompetence was the "mic drop" peace-out of Microsoft declaring victory on web browsing and disbanding the team for far too many years; unless you are crazy, you don't "mic drop" on what you think to be an incompetent project, and there's certainly a delicious irony in being considered "too competent" becoming a major part of your core incompetency in a "mic drop" incident.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  Not when one of the concerns is to make it possible to maintain compatibility with it. Microsoft threw the towel for this very reason. It is quite hard to keep up when you have an implementation used by more than 70% of the market, because that makes it the de facto standard, regardless of what the standard really is. We are going to see the same issues as with IE6: chrome does (and breaks) things before the standards are updated, and dictate huge chuncks of poorly-thought features on the web platform, that might become required for any kind of serious business (think flash, java, silverlight, widevine). This really is the E part in EEE (the middle one...)
mixedCase 7y ago
> Chrome is, however, proprietary and driving further that way. Given that all the relevant bits are in Chromium (sans Widevine, which is a whole subject on its own) this is not a strong argument.
- Hackbraten 7y ago
  Forking Chromium won’t help you if Chrome’s market share is so overwhelmingly large that it can basically force its ideas down the web’s throat.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    If you're worried about there being a browser monoculture, being able to fork is useful but not sufficient. For example, suppose Microsoft's new browser gets a large enough share that they (along with Firefox) can veto some of Chrome's changes? Since they have enough technical competence and resources to maintain a branch, upstream doesn't control what they release; they can take changes or not. And they also have ways to gain significant user share. We are probably past the point where a scrappy new open source browser could gain enough developer talent and user share to be relevant, though. Particularly since it can't be done without mixing in some proprietary code for DRM. So there may be competition, and a significant chunk of open source code will be involved, but it won't satisfy the folks who want a pure open source browser.

TylerE 7y ago

Competence compensates for a monoculture. You don't see people complaining that GHC is de facto the only Haskell compiler.

spinningslate 7y ago
> Competence compensates for a monoculture. Sometimes. But motivation matters. The motivation behind ghc is clearly and unequivocally to advance the Haskell ecosystem. The motivation behind Chrome's dominance is another thing entirely.
- jfk13 7y ago
  In addition, the Haskell ecosystem is only one among many programming ecosystems that we can choose among for any given task. If the Haskell ecosystem is a monoculture, and isn't headed in a direction that suits your needs, you can choose another environment. There's (pretty much) only one Web that needs to serve us all.
WorldMaker 7y ago
Competence is also a transient determination. IE6 was highly competent in its time, it is only retrospectively that it "earns" most of its incompetence. IE defined the modern CSS box layout strategy of choice (and realized that box layout model was something underdefined in the specifications), for just one instance. Most of IE6's particular incompetence was the "mic drop" peace-out of Microsoft declaring victory on web browsing and disbanding the team for far too many years; unless you are crazy, you don't "mic drop" on what you think to be an incompetent project, and there's certainly a delicious irony in being considered "too competent" becoming a major part of your core incompetency in a "mic drop" incident.
MayeulC 7y ago
Not when one of the concerns is to make it possible to maintain compatibility with it. Microsoft threw the towel for this very reason. It is quite hard to keep up when you have an implementation used by more than 70% of the market, because that makes it the de facto standard, regardless of what the standard really is. We are going to see the same issues as with IE6: chrome does (and breaks) things before the standards are updated, and dictate huge chuncks of poorly-thought features on the web platform, that might become required for any kind of serious business (think flash, java, silverlight, widevine). This really is the E part in EEE (the middle one...)

mixedCase 7y ago

> Chrome is, however, proprietary and driving further that way. Given that all the relevant bits are in Chromium (sans Widevine, which is a whole subject on its own) this is not a strong argument.

Hackbraten 7y ago
Forking Chromium won’t help you if Chrome’s market share is so overwhelmingly large that it can basically force its ideas down the web’s throat.
- skybrian 7y ago
  If you're worried about there being a browser monoculture, being able to fork is useful but not sufficient. For example, suppose Microsoft's new browser gets a large enough share that they (along with Firefox) can veto some of Chrome's changes? Since they have enough technical competence and resources to maintain a branch, upstream doesn't control what they release; they can take changes or not. And they also have ways to gain significant user share. We are probably past the point where a scrappy new open source browser could gain enough developer talent and user share to be relevant, though. Particularly since it can't be done without mixing in some proprietary code for DRM. So there may be competition, and a significant chunk of open source code will be involved, but it won't satisfy the folks who want a pure open source browser.