4 ms·

Matters because if at least two engines are equally popular (in terms of market share) or close to that, then no one entity will be able to disregard or exert u

Matters because if at least two engines are equally popular (in terms of market share) or close to that, then no one entity will be able to disregard or exert undue influence over the standardisation process of web technologies. They will be forced to work together and presumably if one entity tries to do something evil the other will resist and since they have roughly equal market share, the evil proposal will be dead in water. Diversity of implementations is important as a means of checks and balances.

hollerith 7y ago
I continue to fail to understand. Is it not the case that if the popularity of Edge Chromium becomes close to that of Google Chrome, then your argument will apply just as well, i.e., if either Google or Microsoft tries to do something evil the other will resist? Why is whether the 2 project descend from the same codebase the decisive factor? I would've thought that the decisive factor is whether the second project is willing to deploy developer (and managerial) resources to the same extent as Google is willing to, i.e., many hundreds of full-time developers, each earning over 100,000 usd per year (and sufficiently competent managers).
- Santosh83 7y ago
  True. But there still remain subtle bugs in rendering engines that become 'features.' On the other hand if there are multiple popular engines (deep forks count too), those bugs will be exposed and there will be incentive to fix them and align towards a single standard behaviour.
wayneftw 7y ago
Mozilla alone is the reason we couldn't have Web SQL and instead we have that stupid piece of shit known as Indexed DB. So, how did that happen? They had less market share and they still got their way. https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/ https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memor...
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  IIRC WebSQL failed more because it was too dependent on Sqlite being the only implementation. So it's not just about the rendering library.
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    Yes, they were against it for that reason. Microsoft was meh. Google and Apple were for it. So, my point stands I think. Having only one (very good and stable) implementation for something isn’t a good enough reason to lose such great functionality IMO.

hollerith 7y ago

I continue to fail to understand. Is it not the case that if the popularity of Edge Chromium becomes close to that of Google Chrome, then your argument will apply just as well, i.e., if either Google or Microsoft tries to do something evil the other will resist? Why is whether the 2 project descend from the same codebase the decisive factor? I would've thought that the decisive factor is whether the second project is willing to deploy developer (and managerial) resources to the same extent as Google is willing to, i.e., many hundreds of full-time developers, each earning over 100,000 usd per year (and sufficiently competent managers).

Santosh83 7y ago
True. But there still remain subtle bugs in rendering engines that become 'features.' On the other hand if there are multiple popular engines (deep forks count too), those bugs will be exposed and there will be incentive to fix them and align towards a single standard behaviour.

wayneftw 7y ago

Mozilla alone is the reason we couldn't have Web SQL and instead we have that stupid piece of shit known as Indexed DB. So, how did that happen? They had less market share and they still got their way. https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/ https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memor...

paulryanrogers 7y ago
IIRC WebSQL failed more because it was too dependent on Sqlite being the only implementation. So it's not just about the rendering library.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  Yes, they were against it for that reason. Microsoft was meh. Google and Apple were for it. So, my point stands I think. Having only one (very good and stable) implementation for something isn’t a good enough reason to lose such great functionality IMO.