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> A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will

> A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly useless features that cause browsers to be bloated, unmaintainable codebases nobody except 9-figure-budget entities can hope to reimplement. It's an unstable, far too complex platform that wastes billions in unnecessary maintenance work for web developers. Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible. Then there's the insanity of preserving unsafe behaviour as default and adding response headers and extra HTML tag attributes to avoid it, so broken sites could stay broken and everyone else had to do maintenance work. I'm not saying Google is the driving force behind this, but it reeks of the same stuff that Microsoft was doing to prevent Word, Excel file formats from becoming readable and writable for the competition. It's too late to freeze the web platform, it needs to be replaced with something sane and stable, controlled by people with no ulterior motives.

saulrh 7y ago
> controlled by people with no ulterior motives. Everyone used to think that was Google. Anyway, if by some miracle you do find anyone that matches that description but knows where the lever is to kick everything over to a new paradigm, don't tell anyone about them, because as soon as you do they'll have more ulterior motives then you can count.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > Everyone used to think that was Google. When was that? Around the time they decided to liberate the web from the evil clutches of Microsoft/IE and ... Mozilla/FF (20%+ and growing at that time)?
  - mcny 7y ago
    I may be remembering things incorrectly but I think Mozilla almost got in trouble with the IRS because too much of funding came from a single source: Google. What I'm trying to say is Mozilla might have died a long time ago if not for Google.
    - DanielBMarkham 7y ago
      And Apple might have died if not for Microsoft investment. We very well may be assuming different actors and motivations where there are none: there's just messaging and market differentiation.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    > When was that? When people still believed in the slogan 'Don't be evil' [1]. Google even removed the slogan. I guess they don't believe in it themselves anymore. The replacement 'Do the right thing' seems like a variation of Nike's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
    - Smithalicious 7y ago
      Hah, I love that slogan change. "Yes, we do things that are evil, but we also do things that aren't evil sometimes"
    - petecox 7y ago
      Fun fact: Pine64's dev-kit for their forthcoming PinePhone offering is codenamed "Don't be evil". https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don%27t_be_evil https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don%27t_be_evil
  - mda 7y ago
    Compared to both of them Chrome was technically miles better as well. And no, Firefox was stagnant. It actually saved web from IE.
  - collyw 7y ago
- leoc 7y ago
  Indeed you won't solve the problem by finding people with no ulterior motives. Instead, the least-bad chance you have of solving it is to make the base platform small enough that the Too Big To Fork problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6807380#6810259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6807380#6810259 is kept under control, so that competing implementations (and the threat of competing implementations) will help to keep the implementers honest, or at least more honest than they would otherwise be. Instead the Web started as an overly large platform, and fell increasingly under the control of its small group of large implementers (partly) as a result; then those implementers, for a variety of reasons, predictably made the platform even larger and more unforkable, which in turn squeezed out some more of those implementers. The strange thing is how many observers were cheering this process until pretty recently.
  - mgreenleaf 7y ago
    It would be nice if someone came up with a "network VM" that could run sandboxed code that was more like traditional native applications, but seamlessly networked to a server (like Erlang or Phoenix LiveView on multiple nodes but simplified for server-client). Then it would be possible to write more standard apps on a well designed, purpose-built system which would simplify a lot of Dev work. Then you could have a well designed markup language for easier building of documents too. But start fresh in a VM system with all the hindsight of what purposes the web is used for, and the layout systems that are most flexible/popular. You could have some low level thing like web assembly (or even just we assembly itself and get all of the current optimization and standardization work for free) that other languages compile too. And a low level GUI library like Vulkan that you can build libraries on top of.
    - leoc 7y ago
      Basically: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057 (including the grandchild comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131870 ). Not that most of this was new in 2011 either: similar "modular-browswer" ideas were kicking around in the late '90s iirc.
leoc 7y ago
It's like the cat who gets too far up a tree, then decides to deal with the problem by going further up the tree.
hlkps 7y ago
>Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible. That's what Google did with the shadow DOM they used on YouTube: since Firefox had no support for it they wrote a polyfill (which is a JS library to emulate a feature) and the resulting performance was terrible.
roca 7y ago
> any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them, they will usually pick an alternative solution that does work in all of them, avoiding the bug in the buggy browser, thus avoiding a situation where their site depends on that bug continuing to exist. It doesn't always work out as well as that, but it often does. You can wish for something better than the Web platform, but it's a tall order. You want a platform that's not controlled by a single vendor, that has multiple open-source non-patent-encumbered implementations with significant market share, that is available across just about every device, that has a vibrant content/application ecosystem and developer community, that supports everything from simple static content to extremely complex applications like office suites and 3D games. Good luck with that.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  > extremely complex applications like office suites and 3D games Who really needs that in the browser? Native apps are consistently better in every single aspect - more powerful, more privacy-respecting, more eco-friendly, etc. Except native apps are vanishing - a month ago I wanted to fire-up SketchUp on my old Mac, only to find out that the casual 3D scene is now using 100% webapps. The reason we have these abominations is that they're one of the only avenues left for financing app development (either ad-driven, or in a fremium model) because nobody buys software anymore. And that is indeed a contradictory effect of making software a commodity through F/OSS when the original motive was to empower users. Now I know folks chase browsers and wasm and whatnot as the ultimate cross-platform app delivery platform (coming from a 1990s MS and 2010s iOS app dominance experience) and make browsers even more complex. However I whish they could stop and think about if their work is actually helping the situation. What I think would be helpful is to define a base web profile for content delivery, and then additional profiles for webapps. The "march of progress" argument against versioning and profiling HTML, CSS, devices, and JavaScript we've heard from web standardization efforts isn't convincing at all, and only helps the big guys (basically, only Chrome at this point).
  - enraged_camel 7y ago

saulrh 7y ago

> controlled by people with no ulterior motives. Everyone used to think that was Google. Anyway, if by some miracle you do find anyone that matches that description but knows where the lever is to kick everything over to a new paradigm, don't tell anyone about them, because as soon as you do they'll have more ulterior motives then you can count.

lazyjones 7y ago
> Everyone used to think that was Google. When was that? Around the time they decided to liberate the web from the evil clutches of Microsoft/IE and ... Mozilla/FF (20%+ and growing at that time)?
- mcny 7y ago
  I may be remembering things incorrectly but I think Mozilla almost got in trouble with the IRS because too much of funding came from a single source: Google. What I'm trying to say is Mozilla might have died a long time ago if not for Google.
  - DanielBMarkham 7y ago
    And Apple might have died if not for Microsoft investment. We very well may be assuming different actors and motivations where there are none: there's just messaging and market differentiation.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > When was that? When people still believed in the slogan 'Don't be evil' [1]. Google even removed the slogan. I guess they don't believe in it themselves anymore. The replacement 'Do the right thing' seems like a variation of Nike's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    Hah, I love that slogan change. "Yes, we do things that are evil, but we also do things that aren't evil sometimes"
  - petecox 7y ago
    Fun fact: Pine64's dev-kit for their forthcoming PinePhone offering is codenamed "Don't be evil". https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don%27t_be_evil https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don%27t_be_evil
- mda 7y ago
  Compared to both of them Chrome was technically miles better as well. And no, Firefox was stagnant. It actually saved web from IE.
- collyw 7y ago
leoc 7y ago
Indeed you won't solve the problem by finding people with no ulterior motives. Instead, the least-bad chance you have of solving it is to make the base platform small enough that the Too Big To Fork problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6807380#6810259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6807380#6810259 is kept under control, so that competing implementations (and the threat of competing implementations) will help to keep the implementers honest, or at least more honest than they would otherwise be. Instead the Web started as an overly large platform, and fell increasingly under the control of its small group of large implementers (partly) as a result; then those implementers, for a variety of reasons, predictably made the platform even larger and more unforkable, which in turn squeezed out some more of those implementers. The strange thing is how many observers were cheering this process until pretty recently.
- mgreenleaf 7y ago
  It would be nice if someone came up with a "network VM" that could run sandboxed code that was more like traditional native applications, but seamlessly networked to a server (like Erlang or Phoenix LiveView on multiple nodes but simplified for server-client). Then it would be possible to write more standard apps on a well designed, purpose-built system which would simplify a lot of Dev work. Then you could have a well designed markup language for easier building of documents too. But start fresh in a VM system with all the hindsight of what purposes the web is used for, and the layout systems that are most flexible/popular. You could have some low level thing like web assembly (or even just we assembly itself and get all of the current optimization and standardization work for free) that other languages compile too. And a low level GUI library like Vulkan that you can build libraries on top of.
  - leoc 7y ago
    Basically: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057 (including the grandchild comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131870 ). Not that most of this was new in 2011 either: similar "modular-browswer" ideas were kicking around in the late '90s iirc.

leoc 7y ago

It's like the cat who gets too far up a tree, then decides to deal with the problem by going further up the tree.

hlkps 7y ago

>Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible. That's what Google did with the shadow DOM they used on YouTube: since Firefox had no support for it they wrote a polyfill (which is a JS library to emulate a feature) and the resulting performance was terrible.

roca 7y ago

> any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them, they will usually pick an alternative solution that does work in all of them, avoiding the bug in the buggy browser, thus avoiding a situation where their site depends on that bug continuing to exist. It doesn't always work out as well as that, but it often does. You can wish for something better than the Web platform, but it's a tall order. You want a platform that's not controlled by a single vendor, that has multiple open-source non-patent-encumbered implementations with significant market share, that is available across just about every device, that has a vibrant content/application ecosystem and developer community, that supports everything from simple static content to extremely complex applications like office suites and 3D games. Good luck with that.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
> extremely complex applications like office suites and 3D games Who really needs that in the browser? Native apps are consistently better in every single aspect - more powerful, more privacy-respecting, more eco-friendly, etc. Except native apps are vanishing - a month ago I wanted to fire-up SketchUp on my old Mac, only to find out that the casual 3D scene is now using 100% webapps. The reason we have these abominations is that they're one of the only avenues left for financing app development (either ad-driven, or in a fremium model) because nobody buys software anymore. And that is indeed a contradictory effect of making software a commodity through F/OSS when the original motive was to empower users. Now I know folks chase browsers and wasm and whatnot as the ultimate cross-platform app delivery platform (coming from a 1990s MS and 2010s iOS app dominance experience) and make browsers even more complex. However I whish they could stop and think about if their work is actually helping the situation. What I think would be helpful is to define a base web profile for content delivery, and then additional profiles for webapps. The "march of progress" argument against versioning and profiling HTML, CSS, devices, and JavaScript we've heard from web standardization efforts isn't convincing at all, and only helps the big guys (basically, only Chrome at this point).
- enraged_camel 7y ago