4 ms·

the webkit monoculture is saddening. just yesterday i ran into chrome's 2016 img/flex-basis bug which works properly in firefox but requires an extra wrapping

the webkit monoculture is saddening. just yesterday i ran into chrome's 2016 img/flex-basis bug which works properly in firefox but requires an extra wrapping div as a work-around in chrome. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560 what possible motivation is there to fix it when you're not competing with anyone? hopefully microsoft can help fix it now? also yesterday, i was writing some ui tests that use getBoundingClientRect() at different media query breakpoints. not only does chrome intermittently fail to deliver consistent results between runs (even with judicious timeouts), at different screen pixel densities its rounding errors are several pixels off and accumulate to bork all tests in a major way. on the other hand, firefox behaves deterministically across test runs and there's a single pixel (non-accumulating) error in one of several hundred tests. somehow, i made it through the dark ages of IE6 without permanent hair loss, but i dont have fond memories of those years in my career. now manifest v3 is starting to roll out in Chrome 80. once uBlock Origin stops working, i will use chrome even less (i try only to use it for its devtools currently)

tuespetre 7y ago
Chromium and WebKit are not synonymous
- leeoniya 7y ago
  ok, it's Blink now. nuances aside, the fact that 75-80% of the landscape will be blink-based is unfortunate.
  - bagacrap 7y ago
    blink and webkit are diverging in not-insignificant ways. Is it really that important that various rendering engines have zero shared lineage?
MR4D 7y ago
Why does nobody say “the TCP/IP monoculture is maddening,” or “the HTML monoculture is maddening” ? Seriously, I need somebody to explain it to me because I don’t get it. Having one core base of code is not a bad thing to me. What am I missing here?
- recursive 7y ago
  Specification vs implementation. And there certainly are people that say the HTML monoculture is maddening. Perhaps you've heard people complaining about Electron being used for desktop apps.
- Uehreka 7y ago
  TCP/IP is a protocol and HTML is a format. The reason that’s OK is that lots of people have built different TCP/IP stacks and HTML renderers, and so no one person/organization can control them. They aren’t “one codebase”.
- rst 7y ago
  There is no single TCP monoculture codebase -- even among Unix-alikes, the Linux networking stack is a reimplementation, with no common ancestry with the BSD stack. (To say nothing of routers with their own implementations, often including hardware assist at the high end.)
- jandrese 7y ago
  There are definitely people pushing back against TCP. QUIC is one example. IP is a bit too low level for most people to care about. Also, pretty much every other thing we've tried at that layer has been worse for general internet traffic. I still remember the days of ATM networks and what a constant headache they were to keep working.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  You're conflating standards with products.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  There's a fundamental difference between a standard (eg TCP/IP, HTML...) and an implementation (Chromium/Blink/Trident...).
onion2k 7y ago
what possible motivation is there to fix it when you're not competing with anyone? Considering the bug hasn't been fixed in 4 years with completion from Firefox and Edge, I think your assuming that competition drives bug fixes might be a bit off. It clearly doesn’t.
- leeoniya 7y ago
  > I think your assuming that competition drives bug fixes might be a bit off. i guess phrased differently, dominant market position (which Chrome has had for those 4 years) is not conducive to "boring" tasks, such as bug fixes - at least those for which workarounds exist. but this is also what happened with IE6 - devs found clumsy workarounds for its bugs, so they never got fixed because even if end users switched to firefox, it's not like devs could suddenly ignore the 800lb gorilla with 90% market share, their sites had to continue to work everywhere, greatly reducing the incentive to switch (users will say "it works fine in both browsers!"). it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. that being said, i've had some positive experience with a rendering bug i've reported getting fixed: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=899342 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=899342, but that bug was relatively simple since it did not affect layout, just paint.

tuespetre 7y ago

Chromium and WebKit are not synonymous

leeoniya 7y ago
ok, it's Blink now. nuances aside, the fact that 75-80% of the landscape will be blink-based is unfortunate.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  blink and webkit are diverging in not-insignificant ways. Is it really that important that various rendering engines have zero shared lineage?

MR4D 7y ago

Why does nobody say “the TCP/IP monoculture is maddening,” or “the HTML monoculture is maddening” ? Seriously, I need somebody to explain it to me because I don’t get it. Having one core base of code is not a bad thing to me. What am I missing here?

recursive 7y ago
Specification vs implementation. And there certainly are people that say the HTML monoculture is maddening. Perhaps you've heard people complaining about Electron being used for desktop apps.
Uehreka 7y ago
TCP/IP is a protocol and HTML is a format. The reason that’s OK is that lots of people have built different TCP/IP stacks and HTML renderers, and so no one person/organization can control them. They aren’t “one codebase”.
rst 7y ago
There is no single TCP monoculture codebase -- even among Unix-alikes, the Linux networking stack is a reimplementation, with no common ancestry with the BSD stack. (To say nothing of routers with their own implementations, often including hardware assist at the high end.)
jandrese 7y ago
There are definitely people pushing back against TCP. QUIC is one example. IP is a bit too low level for most people to care about. Also, pretty much every other thing we've tried at that layer has been worse for general internet traffic. I still remember the days of ATM networks and what a constant headache they were to keep working.
bdcravens 7y ago
You're conflating standards with products.
chrisweekly 7y ago
There's a fundamental difference between a standard (eg TCP/IP, HTML...) and an implementation (Chromium/Blink/Trident...).

onion2k 7y ago

what possible motivation is there to fix it when you're not competing with anyone? Considering the bug hasn't been fixed in 4 years with completion from Firefox and Edge, I think your assuming that competition drives bug fixes might be a bit off. It clearly doesn’t.

leeoniya 7y ago
> I think your assuming that competition drives bug fixes might be a bit off. i guess phrased differently, dominant market position (which Chrome has had for those 4 years) is not conducive to "boring" tasks, such as bug fixes - at least those for which workarounds exist. but this is also what happened with IE6 - devs found clumsy workarounds for its bugs, so they never got fixed because even if end users switched to firefox, it's not like devs could suddenly ignore the 800lb gorilla with 90% market share, their sites had to continue to work everywhere, greatly reducing the incentive to switch (users will say "it works fine in both browsers!"). it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. that being said, i've had some positive experience with a rendering bug i've reported getting fixed: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=899342 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=899342, but that bug was relatively simple since it did not affect layout, just paint.