6 ms·

Although I can see the advantages for Microsoft, I don't think it's a good thing that the browser engine landscape is going to get even more homogeneous. Firefo

by shdon 7y ago

Although I can see the advantages for Microsoft, I don't think it's a good thing that the browser engine landscape is going to get even more homogeneous. Firefox is now the only web browser of note that is not based on a WebKit/Blink/Chromium derivative. Sure, it's one fewer target to test against, but it saddens me to think that this is going to make it even more likely that web developers target Chrome and its ilk only and that the layout bugs in it are becoming the de-facto standard, just as happened with IE6 for ages. This is actually bad for Firefox even in the parts where it adheres to the standards when other browsers won't.

akho 7y ago
If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that — perhaps bundling Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction of the cost of continued Edge development. Trident was not much of a contender in 2010s. It’s formal death does not decrease diversity. Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less.
- bayindirh 7y ago
  > If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that... With all the coupling with other Windows subsystems and some features just to enable a Windows-only PC ecosystem, I'm not sure that IE/Edge/Trident/EdgeHTML can be open sourced in a whim. > Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less. Internet explorer just became a OS vendor backed version of NeoPlanet browser. Just the same thing, in different shell.
  - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
    Former Internet Explorer SE here: it’s not the coupling with Windows that makes it impossible (MSHTML is actually really self-contained). The main reason Microsoft doesn’t open-source legacy code is because there a huge chunks of licensed third-party source code that cannot be publicly disclosed. While those portions could be stripped-out, it would be a mammoth task to go through the source code history and identify what belongs to who and stub it out if necessary (let alone replace it with first-party code). Whereas MS’ new projects (like .NET Core) were made open-source from the start and made in the open (Cathedral and the Bazaar) - so there’s no mean ol’ lawyers from LCA to stop people having fun.
    - bayindirh 7y ago
      Hey, thanks for the information. That's really enlightening. Now I know better.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  > perhaps bundling Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction of the cost of continued Edge development. I think that would have been a preferable outcome, for it would have pushed at least some fraction of users towards Firefox, potentially helping to shore up the only browser using a (significantly) different engine. Instead we have another Chromium-based browser, which doesn't add anything of significance to the browser landscape.
spankalee 7y ago
Another way of looking at this is that we lost 0 open source engines, and all major engines are open source. A huge benefit from that is that companies like Igalia are able to push features forward across all engines via OSS contributions.
CydeWeys 7y ago
It seems to me that having a single pervasive open source web rendering engine is actually the ideal state of affairs. How is fragmentation helpful in this area? It's duplicated effort and it makes Web development harder (and less efficient) for the millions of Web developers out there. I personally don't see people taking this approach to, say, Linux; generally people are happy that it's dominant in the server realm and that they can learn one thing and use it everywhere. IE used a proprietary rendering engine. It's now being replaced with a free and open source one. This seems like a strict improvement. It's the opposite situation -- a single proprietary engine being dominant -- that is the doomsday scenario, and that's what we saw a decade and a half ago with IE. The farther we get from that being a possibility, the better. For related reasons, I'm not happy that DRM has become part of the standard Web feature set.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  The monoculture around Linux is actually a problem. Linux' design is suboptimal in many ways, particularly how drivers run with full privilege. (For a sobering look at how this impacts security, watch [1].) It's unfortunate that the monoculture of Linux is going to make this very difficult to change. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBVXxZDVQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBVXxZDVQY
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    But it's not monoculture that's the problem here, it's architecture. Different OS with similar architecture, like FreeBSD, can't solve those problems. The same way reimplementing Chromium in Firefox can't fix anything.
    - pcwalton 7y ago
      There are significant architectural differences in components of Blink, WebKit, Gecko. For example, the CSS style recalculation is very different—Blink uses a single-threaded engine in C++, WebKit uses a C++ JIT, and Gecko does multithreaded style recalculation in Rust. It would be hard to do WebKit or Gecko's approach with the current Chromium governance, because WebKit's CSS JIT uses parts of JavaScriptCore (per my understanding) and because Chromium doesn't currently allow Rust code.
cxr 7y ago
"WebKit/Blink/Chromium" is a really poor choice in grouping, as far as the context of this conversation goes. Blink is not WebKit.

by shdon 7y ago

akho 7y ago

If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that — perhaps bundling Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction of the cost of continued Edge development. Trident was not much of a contender in 2010s. It’s formal death does not decrease diversity. Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less.

bayindirh 7y ago
> If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that... With all the coupling with other Windows subsystems and some features just to enable a Windows-only PC ecosystem, I'm not sure that IE/Edge/Trident/EdgeHTML can be open sourced in a whim. > Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less. Internet explorer just became a OS vendor backed version of NeoPlanet browser. Just the same thing, in different shell.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  Former Internet Explorer SE here: it’s not the coupling with Windows that makes it impossible (MSHTML is actually really self-contained). The main reason Microsoft doesn’t open-source legacy code is because there a huge chunks of licensed third-party source code that cannot be publicly disclosed. While those portions could be stripped-out, it would be a mammoth task to go through the source code history and identify what belongs to who and stub it out if necessary (let alone replace it with first-party code). Whereas MS’ new projects (like .NET Core) were made open-source from the start and made in the open (Cathedral and the Bazaar) - so there’s no mean ol’ lawyers from LCA to stop people having fun.
  - bayindirh 7y ago
    Hey, thanks for the information. That's really enlightening. Now I know better.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
> perhaps bundling Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction of the cost of continued Edge development. I think that would have been a preferable outcome, for it would have pushed at least some fraction of users towards Firefox, potentially helping to shore up the only browser using a (significantly) different engine. Instead we have another Chromium-based browser, which doesn't add anything of significance to the browser landscape.

spankalee 7y ago

Another way of looking at this is that we lost 0 open source engines, and all major engines are open source. A huge benefit from that is that companies like Igalia are able to push features forward across all engines via OSS contributions.

CydeWeys 7y ago

It seems to me that having a single pervasive open source web rendering engine is actually the ideal state of affairs. How is fragmentation helpful in this area? It's duplicated effort and it makes Web development harder (and less efficient) for the millions of Web developers out there. I personally don't see people taking this approach to, say, Linux; generally people are happy that it's dominant in the server realm and that they can learn one thing and use it everywhere. IE used a proprietary rendering engine. It's now being replaced with a free and open source one. This seems like a strict improvement. It's the opposite situation -- a single proprietary engine being dominant -- that is the doomsday scenario, and that's what we saw a decade and a half ago with IE. The farther we get from that being a possibility, the better. For related reasons, I'm not happy that DRM has become part of the standard Web feature set.

pcwalton 7y ago
The monoculture around Linux is actually a problem. Linux' design is suboptimal in many ways, particularly how drivers run with full privilege. (For a sobering look at how this impacts security, watch [1].) It's unfortunate that the monoculture of Linux is going to make this very difficult to change. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBVXxZDVQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBVXxZDVQY
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  But it's not monoculture that's the problem here, it's architecture. Different OS with similar architecture, like FreeBSD, can't solve those problems. The same way reimplementing Chromium in Firefox can't fix anything.
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    There are significant architectural differences in components of Blink, WebKit, Gecko. For example, the CSS style recalculation is very different—Blink uses a single-threaded engine in C++, WebKit uses a C++ JIT, and Gecko does multithreaded style recalculation in Rust. It would be hard to do WebKit or Gecko's approach with the current Chromium governance, because WebKit's CSS JIT uses parts of JavaScriptCore (per my understanding) and because Chromium doesn't currently allow Rust code.

cxr 7y ago

"WebKit/Blink/Chromium" is a really poor choice in grouping, as far as the context of this conversation goes. Blink is not WebKit.