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I don't understand the concern over lack of browser engines. There's only one Linux kernel and that seems to be working out just fine for all the distros using

I don't understand the concern over lack of browser engines. There's only one Linux kernel and that seems to be working out just fine for all the distros using it and all the cloud operations running those distros. You could say that their are more Unixes than just Linux too, but among browser engines there are also Gecko, Servo and others [0]. WebKit and Blink are both open source too and with less restrictions than the Linux kernel since they're LGPL and not GPL. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines#General_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines#...

ultrarunner 6y ago
This is an interesting counter take, and it’s clear that it’s not all doom and gloom. On the other hand, as someone on macOS there are plenty of esoteric projects on github that work great, but are written specifically for Linux. Sometimes it’s just a matter of replacing Linux-specific headers to get them to build, but most of the time changing otherwise unrelated OS specificities is a real pain for the ultimate goal of getting on with whatever project I’m working on. My fear is that standards development will become dictated by Google, leading to sites built to Google standards only— like the web becoming centered around AMP, for example.
chomp 6y ago
There's only one Linux kernel that is primarily driven by volunteers, headed up by a non-profit, and does not define and interpret a shared resource (HTML/Javascript) A monoculture of browser engines gives a lot of control to the parent organizations of those engines. Google gets to define the future of HTML and Javascript because theirs is the #1 engine by a wide margin, which in my opinion, they got to in part due to anticompetitive practices. Licensing doesn't mean anything in terms of the monoculture because, let's be honest, there's only 1 Blink. You can fork, but you're still forking Google's spec of HTML.

ultrarunner 6y ago

This is an interesting counter take, and it’s clear that it’s not all doom and gloom. On the other hand, as someone on macOS there are plenty of esoteric projects on github that work great, but are written specifically for Linux. Sometimes it’s just a matter of replacing Linux-specific headers to get them to build, but most of the time changing otherwise unrelated OS specificities is a real pain for the ultimate goal of getting on with whatever project I’m working on. My fear is that standards development will become dictated by Google, leading to sites built to Google standards only— like the web becoming centered around AMP, for example.

chomp 6y ago

There's only one Linux kernel that is primarily driven by volunteers, headed up by a non-profit, and does not define and interpret a shared resource (HTML/Javascript) A monoculture of browser engines gives a lot of control to the parent organizations of those engines. Google gets to define the future of HTML and Javascript because theirs is the #1 engine by a wide margin, which in my opinion, they got to in part due to anticompetitive practices. Licensing doesn't mean anything in terms of the monoculture because, let's be honest, there's only 1 Blink. You can fork, but you're still forking Google's spec of HTML.