3 ms·

Makes me reminiscent of the days when Chrome and Safari were in lockstep (ish) because they were both based on Webkit. Imagine if Microsoft, Apple, and Google

by cbhl 7y ago

Makes me reminiscent of the days when Chrome and Safari were in lockstep (ish) because they were both based on Webkit. Imagine if Microsoft, Apple, and Google were all sharing the same browser engine.

TwoBit 7y ago
I don't like there being a single browser engine. At least Blink is somewhat open source.
- gjsman-1000 7y ago
  And Blink is based on WebKit, which is also open source, which is in turn based on KHTML, which is also open source. Of course, one rendering engine, it isn't great. But at least Microsoft can hopefully correct some of Google's baser impulses.
  - dblohm7 7y ago
    > But at least Microsoft can hopefully correct some of Google's baser impulses. Good luck with that!
  - loulouxiv 7y ago
    SVG-in-OpenType is a standard developped by Microsoft and Adobe. It was supported by every browser except Chromium, now it is not suported anymore by Edge. Do you really think Microsoft has a say on Google decisions for what should be in a browser or not ?
    - loulouxiv 7y ago
      related Chromium issue : https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078
thrusong 7y ago
Having suffered through both browser wars and the Internet Explorer 6 era, I shudder at any meager suggestion of it.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  IE6 was not releasing, which is not at all the same as getting the same features every month or two.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Microsoft is maintaining a fork of Chromium, which they probably rebase against upstream quite often. It may seem like “lockstep” but that’s probably just because they have effective and time-efficient release processes - and employ a great deal of expertise in the field of upstream fork tracking.
zelly 7y ago
It should happen. The web browser is not a particularly interesting problem to solve. Let's make the base layer the same and distinguish ourselves at a much higher level. It's like the JVM--would humanity really be benefited by having multiple competing implementations of the JVM? This argument may not make sense applied to an operating system/kernel. There are obvious benefits to having multiple competing operating systems. The crucial difference between a kernel and a web browser is that the kernel is a product, whereas the web (ECMA, W3C) is an international standard. So the only functional differences allowed to exist between implementations are at a very high level e.g. UX or privacy. The benefits of competing implementations are from innovation, but innovation in a way that violates the standard is not allowed, so innovation in functionality happens in the standards space. Where does innovation matter? In performance. Who can implement the standard with the best performance? It makes sense to have competition only up to such a point where a winner becomes 10x better than its competition. After that point it becomes useless to bet on the losers (save for extreme niches like lynx). There wouldn't be enough reward to heroically save the tied-for-last-place losers in a winner-take-all game. It has to happen eventually. I think it would be quite sad to have flying cars on Mars and still have people working on rendering HTML.
- thayne 7y ago
  > This argument may not make sense applied to an operating system/kernel. I don't follow your reasoning. If competing implementations makes sense for operating systems, wouldn't it also make sense for browsers, which are basically the equivalent of an operating system for web apps? Conversely, if there should only be one implementation of a browser, wouldn't it make even more sense for there to be only one implementation of the operating system, so there is only one platform for native applications to target? > whereas the web (ECMA, W3C) is an international standard. So the only functional differences allowed to exist between implementations are at a very high level e.g. UX or privacy. The benefits of competing implementations are from innovation, but innovation in a way that violates the standard is not allowed, so innovation in functionality happens in the standards space. Where does innovation matter? I think you might be a little bit confused about how web standardization happens. Browsers are very much allowed to innovate beyond what is specified in standards. And in fact most standards are based on features that at least one browser has already implemented. Innovation drives standards, not the other way around. After Internet Explorer won the last browser wars, both the winning implementation (IE6) and the web standards stagnated, until competition (in the form of Firefox and more importantly Chrome) came along. I don't want that to happen again. Maybe it will be different with Chrome as the winner since for Google uses the browser as a platform to deploy its own web apps, but it still means the direction of browser development is primarily decided on by Google, and will meet Google's needs, which may or may not be the needs of the internet community as a whole.

by cbhl 7y ago

TwoBit 7y ago

I don't like there being a single browser engine. At least Blink is somewhat open source.

gjsman-1000 7y ago
And Blink is based on WebKit, which is also open source, which is in turn based on KHTML, which is also open source. Of course, one rendering engine, it isn't great. But at least Microsoft can hopefully correct some of Google's baser impulses.
- dblohm7 7y ago
  > But at least Microsoft can hopefully correct some of Google's baser impulses. Good luck with that!
- loulouxiv 7y ago
  SVG-in-OpenType is a standard developped by Microsoft and Adobe. It was supported by every browser except Chromium, now it is not suported anymore by Edge. Do you really think Microsoft has a say on Google decisions for what should be in a browser or not ?
  - loulouxiv 7y ago
    related Chromium issue : https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078

thrusong 7y ago

Having suffered through both browser wars and the Internet Explorer 6 era, I shudder at any meager suggestion of it.

Dylan16807 7y ago
IE6 was not releasing, which is not at all the same as getting the same features every month or two.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Microsoft is maintaining a fork of Chromium, which they probably rebase against upstream quite often. It may seem like “lockstep” but that’s probably just because they have effective and time-efficient release processes - and employ a great deal of expertise in the field of upstream fork tracking.

zelly 7y ago

It should happen. The web browser is not a particularly interesting problem to solve. Let's make the base layer the same and distinguish ourselves at a much higher level. It's like the JVM--would humanity really be benefited by having multiple competing implementations of the JVM? This argument may not make sense applied to an operating system/kernel. There are obvious benefits to having multiple competing operating systems. The crucial difference between a kernel and a web browser is that the kernel is a product, whereas the web (ECMA, W3C) is an international standard. So the only functional differences allowed to exist between implementations are at a very high level e.g. UX or privacy. The benefits of competing implementations are from innovation, but innovation in a way that violates the standard is not allowed, so innovation in functionality happens in the standards space. Where does innovation matter? In performance. Who can implement the standard with the best performance? It makes sense to have competition only up to such a point where a winner becomes 10x better than its competition. After that point it becomes useless to bet on the losers (save for extreme niches like lynx). There wouldn't be enough reward to heroically save the tied-for-last-place losers in a winner-take-all game. It has to happen eventually. I think it would be quite sad to have flying cars on Mars and still have people working on rendering HTML.

thayne 7y ago
> This argument may not make sense applied to an operating system/kernel. I don't follow your reasoning. If competing implementations makes sense for operating systems, wouldn't it also make sense for browsers, which are basically the equivalent of an operating system for web apps? Conversely, if there should only be one implementation of a browser, wouldn't it make even more sense for there to be only one implementation of the operating system, so there is only one platform for native applications to target? > whereas the web (ECMA, W3C) is an international standard. So the only functional differences allowed to exist between implementations are at a very high level e.g. UX or privacy. The benefits of competing implementations are from innovation, but innovation in a way that violates the standard is not allowed, so innovation in functionality happens in the standards space. Where does innovation matter? I think you might be a little bit confused about how web standardization happens. Browsers are very much allowed to innovate beyond what is specified in standards. And in fact most standards are based on features that at least one browser has already implemented. Innovation drives standards, not the other way around. After Internet Explorer won the last browser wars, both the winning implementation (IE6) and the web standards stagnated, until competition (in the form of Firefox and more importantly Chrome) came along. I don't want that to happen again. Maybe it will be different with Chrome as the winner since for Google uses the browser as a platform to deploy its own web apps, but it still means the direction of browser development is primarily decided on by Google, and will meet Google's needs, which may or may not be the needs of the internet community as a whole.