4 ms·

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 hig

by 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.
- zelly 7y ago
  > 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. Yes and that company already has huge voting rights on the standards committees and is the primary benefactor of its "competition". Chrome and the web is already one and the same. > 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. It mostly comes from demand from the community. Take this lazy loading images proposal for example. It's only implemented by one vendor: https://caniuse.com/#search=lazy https://caniuse.com/#search=lazy Its demand comes from the huge amounts of websites that use lazy loaded images with their own libraries. The browser vendors did not implement let alone invent this feature. > 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? Because the web is already standardized, already a solved problem. One day the market will bring forth an ideal operating system, and we will standardize on that. The analogous event has happened for web browsers. Some people are understandably in denial, still used to the old religious warfare way tech ecosystems worked.
throwaway8941 7y ago
>would humanity really be benefited by having multiple competing implementations of the JVM Um… sure? There are at least three popular JVMs out there. I am sure any Java expert can name at least as many more. http://openjdk.java.net/ http://openjdk.java.net/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.azul.com/products/zing/ https://www.azul.com/products/zing/ The last one is well known for its (almost) zero-pause GC. I believe it was one of the things that have led to some interesting GC developments inside the OpenJDK project in the last few years, and resulted in two competing low-pause GC implementations (one from Red Hat and one from Oracle).
- zelly 7y ago
  I'm aware of these. Also aware they're based on core OpenJDK with proprietary extensions to or replacements of high level components. There were a few completely alternate implementations, but most of them have died off or exist as toys in 2020. Since they're all descendants of the same source tree, it's not very different from saying there are multiple Chromium distributions like Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera.

by zelly 7y ago

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.

zelly 7y ago
> 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. Yes and that company already has huge voting rights on the standards committees and is the primary benefactor of its "competition". Chrome and the web is already one and the same. > 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. It mostly comes from demand from the community. Take this lazy loading images proposal for example. It's only implemented by one vendor: https://caniuse.com/#search=lazy https://caniuse.com/#search=lazy Its demand comes from the huge amounts of websites that use lazy loaded images with their own libraries. The browser vendors did not implement let alone invent this feature. > 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? Because the web is already standardized, already a solved problem. One day the market will bring forth an ideal operating system, and we will standardize on that. The analogous event has happened for web browsers. Some people are understandably in denial, still used to the old religious warfare way tech ecosystems worked.

throwaway8941 7y ago

>would humanity really be benefited by having multiple competing implementations of the JVM Um… sure? There are at least three popular JVMs out there. I am sure any Java expert can name at least as many more. http://openjdk.java.net/ http://openjdk.java.net/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.azul.com/products/zing/ https://www.azul.com/products/zing/ The last one is well known for its (almost) zero-pause GC. I believe it was one of the things that have led to some interesting GC developments inside the OpenJDK project in the last few years, and resulted in two competing low-pause GC implementations (one from Red Hat and one from Oracle).

zelly 7y ago
I'm aware of these. Also aware they're based on core OpenJDK with proprietary extensions to or replacements of high level components. There were a few completely alternate implementations, but most of them have died off or exist as toys in 2020. Since they're all descendants of the same source tree, it's not very different from saying there are multiple Chromium distributions like Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera.