9 ms·

What is the value of browser diversity?

149 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

CalChris 6y ago
Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow Would a single browser make the Web fast? No, it wouldn't. If Microsoft Explorer had won and locked down users and websites, would the Web today be fast? No, the Web would not be fast. Are there fast websites? Yes, I'm typing into one. I think the reason the web is slow is feature creep by both browsers and websites. Diversity is not the problem. Complexity is the problem.
- politician 6y ago
  The article is talking about the rate of change of the specs, not the speed of loading a page.
  - CalChris 6y ago
    Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow It is very difficult to parse that sentence and come to your conclusion. I'll grant you, the author talks about innovation as well, but not in that sentence. You're free to mark it up to bad reading but perhaps it is bad writing.
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      Thankfully, the article is longer than that single sentence.
    - frissonlabs 6y ago
      Yes, based on that sentence alone, it would be ambiguous. But the author expanded on this with a whole section clarifying what he meant, which is about the rate of feature development and adoption. Not sure if you missed it, but it starts with "I think the Web platform’s most frustrating aspect is also its greatest asset: it’s slow. It’s not just slow, it’s “it took 10 years1 to ship the <main> element which is just a spicy <div>” kind of slow. It’s glacial."
      - CalChris 6y ago
        If the author wants to conflate speed of the web with speed of innovation, that’s on them.
    - andrewem 6y ago
      I think that sentence is misleading, and also that the author eventually gets around to making their meaning clear in the later section headed "Slow, like brisket." That section expands on the somewhat opaque initial formulation.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    Yes, that was my reading of "slow" as well, but ironically, GP's point applies under that reading as well: When Microsoft dominated the web, the pace of spec evolution slowed down as well.
- onion2k 6y ago
  The difference between Chrome and IE is that IE didn't really benefit Microsoft in a noticeable way. They had no incentive to improve it once they had a monopoly. Chrome being faster, better and more feature-rich makes users stay in their browsers longer which benefits Google directly (which some might argue is actually a bad thing). But still, Google would have an incentive to not let Chrome stagnant even if they had 100% of the market.
  - dblohm7 6y ago
    IE greatly benefitted Microsoft: My holding the web back, it ensured the continued dominance of desktop applications.
deleted 6y ago
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vimy 6y ago
Are there Chinese browser engines?
- tokai 6y ago
  Opera is Chinese now, right?
  - chinathrow 6y ago
    Opera Software is a public company now. Opera the browser itself uses Blink and V8 though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software
  - gsnedders 6y ago
    And based on Chromium.
  - everybodyknows 6y ago
    Before installing Opera, I suggest everyone quack: "opera africa lending"
- brianush1 6y ago
  They have a whole alternative to the web, it's called WeChat Mini Programs.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
I think it's pretty clear what would happen if Google could controlled the web through a browser monoculture. They would rapidly transform it into something more akin to a closed app ecosystem, with more DRM and proprietary features. They might also give less of a crap about being backward-compatible and not breaking your website. The relative "slowness" of the evolution of the web is a good thing. It's already too fast IMO.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  Chrome Origin Trials (https://developers.chrome.com/origintrials/#/trials/active https://developers.chrome.com/origintrials/#/trials/active) has some of the scent of a closed ecosystem -- Google gets to decide who can use certain browser features (if only for limited numbers of users, right now) If the idea were extended to production features, that's basically a walled-garden model for the web.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    If there's an experimental feature you want to test out on your site, you should be able to register for the origin trial. I don't think it's something where Google decides who can register? Origin trials are a reaction to the failure of shipping new features under prefixes, where those experimental features fossilized. By restricting origin trials only to sites that explicitly opt in and making those registrations time limited it's possible to get feedback on whether an experimental feature works without sites becoming dependent on it. (Disclosure: I work for Google on unrelated things; speaking only for myself)
    - etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
      Well, it does require a Google account to register for origin trials. Google could conceivably block access for a domain to use origin trials, if they wanted. It may be fully open right now, but perhaps not in the future. These are hypothetical scenarios but very possible.
  - untog 6y ago
chacha2 6y ago
I've been wondering recently if you could classify Mozilla under the Bullshit Job heading. It seems they only exist at the moment to prevent Google from being regulated. Their stances on privacy and an open web don't seem to impact the browser any more than a chrome add-on would. Even this post is all about preventing Google from doing something malicious instead of the value they add. Is this an efficient society, to spend the lives of hundreds of extremely intelligent people duplicating solutions purely to slow down another organization? Isn't there a better solution to this?
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Frank Herbert has a few writings [0] about a future galactic state that moves at such speed that they have needed to create an official Bureau of Sabotage, whose purpose it is to allow down the working of government to the point that it can be considered and understood in all its implications by the people. Perhaps we really are at that state in some ways/places, where just slowing down is a net good. Does the web really need all of this progress? Or is it more being dragged at increasing speeds in a harmful direction? [0] I know about "Whipping Star" and "The Dosadi Experiment", but there may be others.
  - asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago
    This is a very good question, especially when you consider who exactly is driving the "progress" of the web right now.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Is this an efficient society, to spend the lives of hundreds of extremely intelligent people duplicating solutions purely to slow down another organization? Isn't there a better solution to this? Monocultures are a Bad Thing, even if it seems inefficient to have multiple competing implementations of a standard. Unfortunately the article does a poor job exploring why, it just rambles about slow-moving standards, so here's a short article from the IndieWeb folks [0]. It's good that we have various browsers, operating systems, compilers, standard library implementations, etc. (Crypto might be the exception, as implementations are very hard to get right, very costly to get wrong, and are highly reusable.) [0] https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages
sthnblllII 6y ago
Most of the web features beyond html 1.0 were 'proprietary' platform specific features developed internally at Netscape and rolled out with no consensus or standardization. Brandon Eich though something was a cool idea so he shipped it, end of story. I wish Firefox and Safari would start solving problems again and let other vendors decide wether or not to adopt their solution or develop their own. As it stands, google's vision is that all webpages are multi-thousand line programs that require full asynchronous network and local storage access just to display a news article. Requiring js for simply getting the user agent string (and increasingly everything else) is how they keep one step ahead of efforts to stop fingerprinting tracking and targeting.
- BrendanEich 6y ago
  Netscape was behind JS, Sun too (for the trademark license). It wasn't just me throwing up whatever I liked against the wall and seeing what stuck. The <blink> tag, on the other hand, did result from a drunken outing (before my time) of first floor folks. I agree that when there is no functioning, consensus-based standards process, browsers should innovate.
jgowdy 6y ago
Zomg I love standards when they don’t benefit the implementation I prefer, but fuck standards when they benefit the implementation I prefer. Great way to encourage companies in the future to contribute to standards you dumb short sighted hypocrites.
- throwaways885 6y ago
  Language aside, I do agree. People should be happy that companies are contributing to standards rather than forcing them down people's throats by virtue of having a giant user base.
- jgowdy 6y ago
  I apologize for the tone of this comment.
yuvalr1 6y ago
Generally, I think that decentralization of power is a really important aspect of our society, and we should fight to preserve it. Just like we fight for free speech. This is because power tends to become centralized, unless we intentionally strive to do the opposite.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  If the code remains open, the opportunity to decentralize power still exists.
  - ChrisSD 6y ago
    Not really. There are two problems: 1) Developing and maintaing a modern browser is fantastically expensive and yet does not directly make any money. Few organisations have that kind of money to burn. 2) Chrome's (and Google's) market share gives them effective control of the "standard". You can fork all the code you like but if you ever stop singing Google's tune you've got a problem. Safari is the only browser able to effectively fight back against these two issues, and only in a limited way (mostly by dragging its feet as much as possible). They are only able to do this because the iPhone gives them a captive audience. Other organisations don't have this advantage.
  - yuvalr1 6y ago
    However today we have more than just an opportunity. We have a living example for a good competitive browser, and I think we should aspire to maintain it.
  - kibwen 6y ago
    It doesn't matter if Chrome's code is open, what matters is that Google controls Chrome's updating mechanism. The ability to fork the code doesn't mean anything if nobody uses your fork, and if you can't prove to site developers that people are going to use your browser then they won't go to the trouble of making their sites work in your browser, which means your fork has achieved no meaningful change.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
bilal4hmed 6y ago
If you want to experience browser monoculture just buy an iPad or a iPhone, where every browser is Safari. The platform doesn't even allow proper PWAs
- madrox 6y ago
  This is not really correct, since I'm writing this to you through Chrome on an iPad. Edit: I stand corrected. I learned something about my browser today.
  - katsura 6y ago
    Chrome is just a re-skinned Safari on iOS: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11259152/chrome-ios-is-it-just-a-uiwebview https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11259152/chrome-ios-is-i...
  - tomger 6y ago
    Apple requires iOS browsers to use WebKit rendering and WebKit JS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS
- katsura 6y ago
  Wouldn't this be solved if they would switch to Chrome as well? Note, I'm not saying they should. But this is exactly the kind of problem that a global single engine would solve. The same things could run on every device where that engine is available.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Ironically this is the only reason Safari has the market share it does. If Apple didn't force its browser on iOS users, Chrome would dominate there too.
ddingus 6y ago
Oh how I wish Mozilla could be forked and a small Netscape type group could pose a great answer to this question!
amadeuspagel 6y ago
> Those features aren’t bad, just not my favorite. “Bad” usually comes in the form of unilaterally shipped features that take a long time to fix, retroactively standardize, or undo (e.g. vendor prefixes, <dialog>, window.event, etc). Again, once shipped, they’re shipped. They linger around in the platform, working in some browsers, never in another, frustrating developers. It produces brittleness. This is a problem created by browser diversity, not one that browser diversity would solve.
xg15 6y ago
> This can be agonizing while you wait for a much needed feature to roll out in all browsers, only to find out five years in the process one browser refuses the entire premise of the feature (RIP HTML Imports). Slightly OT, but could someone explain to me why Mozilla was so adamantly against this feature? Allowing modular and dynamic HTML on the client without opening the pandora's box that is JavaScript seems like a clear value-add.
- jhardy54 6y ago
  More info here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-component...
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Some small fraction of less than 1% consider "without opening the pandora's box that is JavaScript" a "clear value-add". The JS method already existed and worked for dynamic content as well. The latter part was Mozilla's reasoning. Also for a while they wanted to see how ES6 modules worked out and apply those lessens before committing to a certain import design for HTML. What they took back was the HTML imports proposal wasn't configurable enough and to make it that configurable you'd basically have the existing JS import method but fossilized and for fewer use cases. Looking at HTML imports it really breaks down into 2 types of use: - I want to import static HTML for the same origin - I want to import static HTML cross origin The former is relatively inefficient, the static HTML for the page should have been served when the client requested it not served as a request for the client to request it. The latter is odd (I'm sure there are use cases though) and wasn't considered worth implementing a new HTML feature for when the JS method gave better control of the import anyways. Mozilla's official musings: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-component... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/12/mozilla-and-web-components/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/12/mozilla-and-web-components...
  - sthnblllII 6y ago
    Why not just replace html entirely with a vm? All websites are obfuscated webasm programs that get a frame buffer to write pixels directly to the browser window. You want to be able to select text? Pray the website implements that "feature". Right click to show source? Ha. Good luck figuring out what the code is doing. Im describing taking Mozilla's logic to the extreme to show where it has led us.
coldtea 6y ago
I don't think the reply tweet "We're not going Chromium" from a Mozilla engineer is really re-assuring. The team didn't know tons of people were going to be fired in the first place, so why would they know about such a change, or when it's their turn?
perardi 6y ago
So, if browser diversity is important, how do we keep it? We’re at the point that Firefox’s market share is quite small on desktop, and effectively zero on mobile. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) What will plausibly change that? It’s not privacy. I know we like to pretend people care about privacy, but people don’t actually care about privacy, or they care about privacy in that they pay lip service to privacy, and go right ahead and keep using Facebook and TikTok. Chrome got ahead of Internet Explorer because it was appreciably faster, and had features like tabs. Is it possible to differentiate on features these days? I’d like to think so, but momentum is such a force.
- cxr 6y ago
  > So, if browser diversity is important, how do we keep it? The same way it happened 10 years ago. If your non-techie family and friends for some reason have desktops or notebooks and not just phones and tablets, then ask them to use Firefox (or install it for them yourself). If they don't want to use Firefox but they have a MacBook, check if they're using Chrome, and if so, ask them to use Safari instead. If they're interested in getting a computer and want a recommendation, suggest they get a Mac instead of a Windows machine, and get them to use Safari or Firefox instead of Chrome. If they're trying to decide between an Android device and something from Apple, tell them that either is acceptable, but if they go for Android, ask them to install and use mobile Firefox instead of Chrome. If a techie friend is thinking about starting a project and there's a chance that they'll choose Electron, ask them to consider building on top of WebKit instead. In general, spread the word far and wide that WebKit exists and avoid feeding into the popular misconception that the only choices are Firefox or Chrome. If you yourself are interested in alternative, non-mainstream browsers, look first for a WebKit-based one, and maybe consider contributing yourself. However, if you're already using Firefox and consider it acceptable, try to keep using it instead of switching to WebKit. If you're looking to switch, try holding on as long as possible, but make sure your criticism is clear. (And it should be well-informed, too; as Frank Hecker mentioned, albeit more politely, there are too many people talking out of their ass when it comes to Mozilla. That goes for detractors and advocates. The level of uninformedness every time Mozilla comes up—including the tweets quoted in the article—is pretty unreal.)
AmericanChopper 6y ago
Framing this in relation to diversity is weird. The real question is what is the value of competition in the browser market. Which has an answer that is much more obvious. Because without it, Google would control the entire internet browsing experience.
madrox 6y ago
Seeing this play out for the last 25 years (a quarter of a century...whoa), I think diversity in the browser space is the only reason we still have an open web. I worked at a large media company that had a stake in the way browsers handled video (ie DRM) when the specs were getting written. The only reason DRM didn't get a stronger foothold was because the spec had to be developed in the open as it was. View source would've been the first to go, though. I still remember arguments about whether that feature would survive back in 2005. I'm sure there were arguments about it even earlier than that.
- deleted 6y ago
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- m463 6y ago
  That's why I see webasm as a bad thing
  - Spivak 6y ago
    But we’re already kinda there. JS goes through so many layers: compilation, translation, optimization, minification, polyfills, obfuscation, that the code you see in the browser is only sorta kinda related to the original source which is what wasm would be. JS is already a just a compilation target for a lot of shops, might as well give people a saner target.
    - m463 6y ago
      Might as well as remove 'show source'. then the url bar. ... :)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    WebAssembly is Flash and Java revenge, by the way we are already there. For example, https://platform.uno/ https://platform.uno/
- 6y ago
CivBase 6y ago
The web is a collection of standard protocols which browsers support because they do not have enough influence to push their own protocol, which would undoubtedly serve the interests of the company who develops and distributes the browser at the exclusion of other would-be browser competitors. IE6 is a perfect example of what happens when a lack of browser diversity allows one browser to push their own, self-interested, proprietary protocols.
remote_phone 6y ago
I use both browsers on my desktop simultaneously. I use Firefox for my Gmail and Facebook, so that my tracking is sandboxed in that browser along with tracking cookies, and most other browsing through chrome. If there’s a difference in speed between the two it’s largely academic, because I can’t tell the difference. Plus I’m on an 8 year old desktop that I’ve yet to upgrade.
wintorez 6y ago
In almost everything, advancement comes from competition, and competition comes from diversity. Without diversity, things will become stale. Between the fall of Netscape and rise of Firefox; Internet Explorer reigned the Browsers, and to be honest web and web development was a boring field. Once Firefox was released, web and web development revived. It popularized things like web 2.0, table-less css layouts, using web browser as an application development platform, etc. Monopoly is never good, even if that monopoly is the best and perfect. There's innovation and strength in diversity. I always encourage people to never settle into one tool and always looks for alternatives out there.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Internet Explorer reigned the Browsers, and to be honest web and web development was a boring field. Once Firefox was released, web and web development revived. Boring is good. It means a stable platform you can rely on. It popularized things like web 2.0, table-less css layouts, using web browser as an application development platform, etc. ...and now we have sites that would be perfectly fine as static HTML being turned into app-sites that require running megabytes of arbitrary code just to render some static content, consuming resources on every single machine that visits them, every time they visit.
  - wintorez 6y ago
    Fair points, but web today is not what web was intended for. It was supposed to be a document delivery network, but it became an application development platform. Why? Because we need a sandboxed, distributed application delivery platform, and every previous solution failed or didn't catch on: Java Applets, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, etc. The business case of developing client-side applications trumps the need for a faster web at the moment. Is it ideal? No. Can it be fixed? Yes. How? Come up with a new rich application delivery solution that works in every modern browser in every modern os (mobile/desktop). EDIT: I partially blame Adobe's hubris for the current situation. They should have made Flash player technology free & open-source and focused on monetizing Flash creation suites. Instead they kept it closed, and that led to Apple dropping it in iOS. After that, for all intents and purposes, Flash was done.
bonestormii_ 6y ago
I'm almost to the point of being indifferent whether companies "destroy the web" through things like a browser monoculture. It would be a tragedy, but you can only ask people to deal with so much, and the web != the internet. We are in an age of webassembly in browsers. For all the complexity of the modern web, riddle me this: What is the difference between a website executing arbitrary web assembly code in the sandbox of the browser, and any TCP connection sending a program which is loaded in a sandbox and executing on the user's computer? The difference seems to me to be simply the fact that it is integrated into the web, web browsers, etc. If we are truly at the point where this is how we want to do things--like, we want to write web apps in Rust and compile for web assembly--The web is becoming less distinct and therefore less valuable as a paradigm. I'm not a user of any document-only web alternatives, but in this model, it would be pretty cool to see a re-separation into a web-of-linked-documents and network-of-sandboxed-remote-applications. Society wouldn't swallow such a thing easily, but if they push the web far enough into a proprietary hellscape, desirable services will likely start to emerge outside of it. All it takes is for those services to be attractive enough to start drawing disenfranchised stragglers, and the next thing you know, your mom is downloading recipes off the new not-web web without a care in the world.
- pavlov 6y ago
  WebAssembly is a red herring because anything useful that these applications do is enabled by the available APIs. A WAsm program can’t magically bypass the browser and access OS services directly. Everything still needs to go through web APIs, and then you realize that it doesn’t make much difference whether your program bitstream is delivered as minified JS or WAsm.
  - anderspitman 6y ago
    I wonder what a fairly lightweight webapp standard wrapped around WASI might look like. Especially if it had a really nice high-level UI toolkit built it.
  - bonestormii_ 6y ago
    Right, it necessarily affect much in terms of the way the program's functionality is written, but hardly irrelevant or a "red herring". The fact that any language can be compiled to a portable assembly language is important for the model we are discussing, because it isn't bound to local machine architecture. If a browser is simply a remote-program-sandbox, it is an important feature that remote programs are portable to the same degree web assembly is. Otherwise you'd have a remote app that people on ARM couldn't execute, and things of that nature. It also isn't strictly true what you say, that "anything useful" is achieved via APIs. There are a number of examples of native libraries being compiled to web assembly with varying degrees of success. Just because what you write is all API based doesn't make it universally true for all programs everywhere.
anderspitman 6y ago
I used to worry about these sorts of questions much more. At this point I'm fairly convinced it's already past saving. The current state of browsers is pretty scary. Combining the text-web and the app-web into one client has caused serious issues. But it doesn't have to be a bad thing. I think the browser will continue its slow death, and eventually be replaced by something new, or maybe a suite of new things tailored to different tasks, rather than a single monolithic application. We've learned a ton from the web, and that knowledge will inform what comes next. These days I'm much more concerned about the health of the internet (ie what's happening with QUIC, net neutrality, fiber rollout, ipv6, NAT, etc). The internet will far outlive the web.
kevindong 6y ago
We're already at the point where Chrome is the modern day IE 6. Infrequently (maybe 1-2 times a week), a website just will not work correctly on desktop Safari for me. As soon as I switch over to Chrome, it works perfectly. It's pretty common for websites to say something akin to "use Chrome for the best experience." Safari is only relevant today due to iOS's popularity. If it weren't for the iPhone, Safari would just be another specialty browser for a tiny slice of consumers.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  As I've said before, the only thing worse than Apple forcing people to use Safari is Apple not forcing people to use Safari.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    iOS browsers still have to use WebKit.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      You're right, that hasn't changed. Edited.
- severino 6y ago
  > We're already at the point where Chrome is the modern day IE 6. [...] As soon as I switch over to Chrome, it works perfectly Well, at least you can switch... for free. In order to install IE6, you had to pay for an operating system license first, and it was only compatible with that OS. Not that I'm saying that I like the browser monoculture we're heading into. But I think there're still some differences. You can look into Chrome's engine source code. I've yet to see Microsoft releasing the source for Trident or EdgeHTML.
- davidwparker 6y ago
  I think you have it backwards. Safari is IE 6 (in that things don't work as you'd expect them to). https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ shows Safari as missing many standard features. (unless you meant IE 6, in that Chrome ships with "ActiveX"-like features no one else is implementing).
outloudvi 6y ago
Google has been screwing up the web stardards for a long time (one infamous example is whatwg/url). Pretty clear what would happen if Chrome controls the web.
- domenicd 6y ago
  The URL Standard is written and maintained by a Mozilla employee.
deleted 6y ago
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hnarn 6y ago
Browser rendering is what a lot of “normal” users equate with what the Internet “is”. With that in mind, it’s obvious that a lack of browser diversity, open standards and democratic process by necessity leads to a less free Internet for everyone.

149 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow Would a single browser make the Web fast? No, it wouldn't. If Microsoft Explorer had won and locked down users and websites, would the Web today be fast? No, the Web would not be fast. Are there fast websites? Yes, I'm typing into one. I think the reason the web is slow is feature creep by both browsers and websites. Diversity is not the problem. Complexity is the problem.

politician 6y ago
The article is talking about the rate of change of the specs, not the speed of loading a page.
- CalChris 6y ago
  Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow It is very difficult to parse that sentence and come to your conclusion. I'll grant you, the author talks about innovation as well, but not in that sentence. You're free to mark it up to bad reading but perhaps it is bad writing.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    Thankfully, the article is longer than that single sentence.
  - frissonlabs 6y ago
    Yes, based on that sentence alone, it would be ambiguous. But the author expanded on this with a whole section clarifying what he meant, which is about the rate of feature development and adoption. Not sure if you missed it, but it starts with "I think the Web platform’s most frustrating aspect is also its greatest asset: it’s slow. It’s not just slow, it’s “it took 10 years1 to ship the <main> element which is just a spicy <div>” kind of slow. It’s glacial."
    - CalChris 6y ago
      If the author wants to conflate speed of the web with speed of innovation, that’s on them.
  - andrewem 6y ago
    I think that sentence is misleading, and also that the author eventually gets around to making their meaning clear in the later section headed "Slow, like brisket." That section expands on the somewhat opaque initial formulation.
- microtherion 6y ago
  Yes, that was my reading of "slow" as well, but ironically, GP's point applies under that reading as well: When Microsoft dominated the web, the pace of spec evolution slowed down as well.
onion2k 6y ago
The difference between Chrome and IE is that IE didn't really benefit Microsoft in a noticeable way. They had no incentive to improve it once they had a monopoly. Chrome being faster, better and more feature-rich makes users stay in their browsers longer which benefits Google directly (which some might argue is actually a bad thing). But still, Google would have an incentive to not let Chrome stagnant even if they had 100% of the market.
- dblohm7 6y ago
  IE greatly benefitted Microsoft: My holding the web back, it ensured the continued dominance of desktop applications.

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vimy 6y ago

Are there Chinese browser engines?

tokai 6y ago
Opera is Chinese now, right?
- chinathrow 6y ago
  Opera Software is a public company now. Opera the browser itself uses Blink and V8 though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software
- gsnedders 6y ago
  And based on Chromium.
- everybodyknows 6y ago
  Before installing Opera, I suggest everyone quack: "opera africa lending"
brianush1 6y ago
They have a whole alternative to the web, it's called WeChat Mini Programs.

tachyonbeam 6y ago

I think it's pretty clear what would happen if Google could controlled the web through a browser monoculture. They would rapidly transform it into something more akin to a closed app ecosystem, with more DRM and proprietary features. They might also give less of a crap about being backward-compatible and not breaking your website. The relative "slowness" of the evolution of the web is a good thing. It's already too fast IMO.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
Chrome Origin Trials (https://developers.chrome.com/origintrials/#/trials/active https://developers.chrome.com/origintrials/#/trials/active) has some of the scent of a closed ecosystem -- Google gets to decide who can use certain browser features (if only for limited numbers of users, right now) If the idea were extended to production features, that's basically a walled-garden model for the web.
- jefftk 6y ago
  If there's an experimental feature you want to test out on your site, you should be able to register for the origin trial. I don't think it's something where Google decides who can register? Origin trials are a reaction to the failure of shipping new features under prefixes, where those experimental features fossilized. By restricting origin trials only to sites that explicitly opt in and making those registrations time limited it's possible to get feedback on whether an experimental feature works without sites becoming dependent on it. (Disclosure: I work for Google on unrelated things; speaking only for myself)
  - etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
    Well, it does require a Google account to register for origin trials. Google could conceivably block access for a domain to use origin trials, if they wanted. It may be fully open right now, but perhaps not in the future. These are hypothetical scenarios but very possible.
- untog 6y ago

chacha2 6y ago

I've been wondering recently if you could classify Mozilla under the Bullshit Job heading. It seems they only exist at the moment to prevent Google from being regulated. Their stances on privacy and an open web don't seem to impact the browser any more than a chrome add-on would. Even this post is all about preventing Google from doing something malicious instead of the value they add. Is this an efficient society, to spend the lives of hundreds of extremely intelligent people duplicating solutions purely to slow down another organization? Isn't there a better solution to this?

tsimionescu 6y ago
Frank Herbert has a few writings [0] about a future galactic state that moves at such speed that they have needed to create an official Bureau of Sabotage, whose purpose it is to allow down the working of government to the point that it can be considered and understood in all its implications by the people. Perhaps we really are at that state in some ways/places, where just slowing down is a net good. Does the web really need all of this progress? Or is it more being dragged at increasing speeds in a harmful direction? [0] I know about "Whipping Star" and "The Dosadi Experiment", but there may be others.
- asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago
  This is a very good question, especially when you consider who exactly is driving the "progress" of the web right now.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> Is this an efficient society, to spend the lives of hundreds of extremely intelligent people duplicating solutions purely to slow down another organization? Isn't there a better solution to this? Monocultures are a Bad Thing, even if it seems inefficient to have multiple competing implementations of a standard. Unfortunately the article does a poor job exploring why, it just rambles about slow-moving standards, so here's a short article from the IndieWeb folks [0]. It's good that we have various browsers, operating systems, compilers, standard library implementations, etc. (Crypto might be the exception, as implementations are very hard to get right, very costly to get wrong, and are highly reusable.) [0] https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages

sthnblllII 6y ago

Most of the web features beyond html 1.0 were 'proprietary' platform specific features developed internally at Netscape and rolled out with no consensus or standardization. Brandon Eich though something was a cool idea so he shipped it, end of story. I wish Firefox and Safari would start solving problems again and let other vendors decide wether or not to adopt their solution or develop their own. As it stands, google's vision is that all webpages are multi-thousand line programs that require full asynchronous network and local storage access just to display a news article. Requiring js for simply getting the user agent string (and increasingly everything else) is how they keep one step ahead of efforts to stop fingerprinting tracking and targeting.

BrendanEich 6y ago
Netscape was behind JS, Sun too (for the trademark license). It wasn't just me throwing up whatever I liked against the wall and seeing what stuck. The <blink> tag, on the other hand, did result from a drunken outing (before my time) of first floor folks. I agree that when there is no functioning, consensus-based standards process, browsers should innovate.

jgowdy 6y ago

Zomg I love standards when they don’t benefit the implementation I prefer, but fuck standards when they benefit the implementation I prefer. Great way to encourage companies in the future to contribute to standards you dumb short sighted hypocrites.

throwaways885 6y ago
Language aside, I do agree. People should be happy that companies are contributing to standards rather than forcing them down people's throats by virtue of having a giant user base.
jgowdy 6y ago
I apologize for the tone of this comment.

yuvalr1 6y ago

Generally, I think that decentralization of power is a really important aspect of our society, and we should fight to preserve it. Just like we fight for free speech. This is because power tends to become centralized, unless we intentionally strive to do the opposite.

ekianjo 6y ago
If the code remains open, the opportunity to decentralize power still exists.
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Not really. There are two problems: 1) Developing and maintaing a modern browser is fantastically expensive and yet does not directly make any money. Few organisations have that kind of money to burn. 2) Chrome's (and Google's) market share gives them effective control of the "standard". You can fork all the code you like but if you ever stop singing Google's tune you've got a problem. Safari is the only browser able to effectively fight back against these two issues, and only in a limited way (mostly by dragging its feet as much as possible). They are only able to do this because the iPhone gives them a captive audience. Other organisations don't have this advantage.
- yuvalr1 6y ago
  However today we have more than just an opportunity. We have a living example for a good competitive browser, and I think we should aspire to maintain it.
- kibwen 6y ago
  It doesn't matter if Chrome's code is open, what matters is that Google controls Chrome's updating mechanism. The ability to fork the code doesn't mean anything if nobody uses your fork, and if you can't prove to site developers that people are going to use your browser then they won't go to the trouble of making their sites work in your browser, which means your fork has achieved no meaningful change.
- saagarjha 6y ago

bilal4hmed 6y ago

If you want to experience browser monoculture just buy an iPad or a iPhone, where every browser is Safari. The platform doesn't even allow proper PWAs

madrox 6y ago
This is not really correct, since I'm writing this to you through Chrome on an iPad. Edit: I stand corrected. I learned something about my browser today.
- katsura 6y ago
  Chrome is just a re-skinned Safari on iOS: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11259152/chrome-ios-is-it-just-a-uiwebview https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11259152/chrome-ios-is-i...
- tomger 6y ago
  Apple requires iOS browsers to use WebKit rendering and WebKit JS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS
katsura 6y ago
Wouldn't this be solved if they would switch to Chrome as well? Note, I'm not saying they should. But this is exactly the kind of problem that a global single engine would solve. The same things could run on every device where that engine is available.
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ChrisSD 6y ago
Ironically this is the only reason Safari has the market share it does. If Apple didn't force its browser on iOS users, Chrome would dominate there too.

ddingus 6y ago

Oh how I wish Mozilla could be forked and a small Netscape type group could pose a great answer to this question!

amadeuspagel 6y ago

> Those features aren’t bad, just not my favorite. “Bad” usually comes in the form of unilaterally shipped features that take a long time to fix, retroactively standardize, or undo (e.g. vendor prefixes, <dialog>, window.event, etc). Again, once shipped, they’re shipped. They linger around in the platform, working in some browsers, never in another, frustrating developers. It produces brittleness. This is a problem created by browser diversity, not one that browser diversity would solve.

xg15 6y ago

> This can be agonizing while you wait for a much needed feature to roll out in all browsers, only to find out five years in the process one browser refuses the entire premise of the feature (RIP HTML Imports). Slightly OT, but could someone explain to me why Mozilla was so adamantly against this feature? Allowing modular and dynamic HTML on the client without opening the pandora's box that is JavaScript seems like a clear value-add.

jhardy54 6y ago
More info here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-component...
zamadatix 6y ago
Some small fraction of less than 1% consider "without opening the pandora's box that is JavaScript" a "clear value-add". The JS method already existed and worked for dynamic content as well. The latter part was Mozilla's reasoning. Also for a while they wanted to see how ES6 modules worked out and apply those lessens before committing to a certain import design for HTML. What they took back was the HTML imports proposal wasn't configurable enough and to make it that configurable you'd basically have the existing JS import method but fossilized and for fewer use cases. Looking at HTML imports it really breaks down into 2 types of use: - I want to import static HTML for the same origin - I want to import static HTML cross origin The former is relatively inefficient, the static HTML for the page should have been served when the client requested it not served as a request for the client to request it. The latter is odd (I'm sure there are use cases though) and wasn't considered worth implementing a new HTML feature for when the JS method gave better control of the import anyways. Mozilla's official musings: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-component... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/12/mozilla-and-web-components/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/12/mozilla-and-web-components...
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  Why not just replace html entirely with a vm? All websites are obfuscated webasm programs that get a frame buffer to write pixels directly to the browser window. You want to be able to select text? Pray the website implements that "feature". Right click to show source? Ha. Good luck figuring out what the code is doing. Im describing taking Mozilla's logic to the extreme to show where it has led us.

coldtea 6y ago

I don't think the reply tweet "We're not going Chromium" from a Mozilla engineer is really re-assuring. The team didn't know tons of people were going to be fired in the first place, so why would they know about such a change, or when it's their turn?

perardi 6y ago

So, if browser diversity is important, how do we keep it? We’re at the point that Firefox’s market share is quite small on desktop, and effectively zero on mobile. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) What will plausibly change that? It’s not privacy. I know we like to pretend people care about privacy, but people don’t actually care about privacy, or they care about privacy in that they pay lip service to privacy, and go right ahead and keep using Facebook and TikTok. Chrome got ahead of Internet Explorer because it was appreciably faster, and had features like tabs. Is it possible to differentiate on features these days? I’d like to think so, but momentum is such a force.

cxr 6y ago
> So, if browser diversity is important, how do we keep it? The same way it happened 10 years ago. If your non-techie family and friends for some reason have desktops or notebooks and not just phones and tablets, then ask them to use Firefox (or install it for them yourself). If they don't want to use Firefox but they have a MacBook, check if they're using Chrome, and if so, ask them to use Safari instead. If they're interested in getting a computer and want a recommendation, suggest they get a Mac instead of a Windows machine, and get them to use Safari or Firefox instead of Chrome. If they're trying to decide between an Android device and something from Apple, tell them that either is acceptable, but if they go for Android, ask them to install and use mobile Firefox instead of Chrome. If a techie friend is thinking about starting a project and there's a chance that they'll choose Electron, ask them to consider building on top of WebKit instead. In general, spread the word far and wide that WebKit exists and avoid feeding into the popular misconception that the only choices are Firefox or Chrome. If you yourself are interested in alternative, non-mainstream browsers, look first for a WebKit-based one, and maybe consider contributing yourself. However, if you're already using Firefox and consider it acceptable, try to keep using it instead of switching to WebKit. If you're looking to switch, try holding on as long as possible, but make sure your criticism is clear. (And it should be well-informed, too; as Frank Hecker mentioned, albeit more politely, there are too many people talking out of their ass when it comes to Mozilla. That goes for detractors and advocates. The level of uninformedness every time Mozilla comes up—including the tweets quoted in the article—is pretty unreal.)

AmericanChopper 6y ago

Framing this in relation to diversity is weird. The real question is what is the value of competition in the browser market. Which has an answer that is much more obvious. Because without it, Google would control the entire internet browsing experience.

madrox 6y ago

Seeing this play out for the last 25 years (a quarter of a century...whoa), I think diversity in the browser space is the only reason we still have an open web. I worked at a large media company that had a stake in the way browsers handled video (ie DRM) when the specs were getting written. The only reason DRM didn't get a stronger foothold was because the spec had to be developed in the open as it was. View source would've been the first to go, though. I still remember arguments about whether that feature would survive back in 2005. I'm sure there were arguments about it even earlier than that.

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m463 6y ago
That's why I see webasm as a bad thing
- Spivak 6y ago
  But we’re already kinda there. JS goes through so many layers: compilation, translation, optimization, minification, polyfills, obfuscation, that the code you see in the browser is only sorta kinda related to the original source which is what wasm would be. JS is already a just a compilation target for a lot of shops, might as well give people a saner target.
  - m463 6y ago
    Might as well as remove 'show source'. then the url bar. ... :)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  WebAssembly is Flash and Java revenge, by the way we are already there. For example, https://platform.uno/ https://platform.uno/
6y ago

CivBase 6y ago

The web is a collection of standard protocols which browsers support because they do not have enough influence to push their own protocol, which would undoubtedly serve the interests of the company who develops and distributes the browser at the exclusion of other would-be browser competitors. IE6 is a perfect example of what happens when a lack of browser diversity allows one browser to push their own, self-interested, proprietary protocols.

remote_phone 6y ago

I use both browsers on my desktop simultaneously. I use Firefox for my Gmail and Facebook, so that my tracking is sandboxed in that browser along with tracking cookies, and most other browsing through chrome. If there’s a difference in speed between the two it’s largely academic, because I can’t tell the difference. Plus I’m on an 8 year old desktop that I’ve yet to upgrade.

wintorez 6y ago

In almost everything, advancement comes from competition, and competition comes from diversity. Without diversity, things will become stale. Between the fall of Netscape and rise of Firefox; Internet Explorer reigned the Browsers, and to be honest web and web development was a boring field. Once Firefox was released, web and web development revived. It popularized things like web 2.0, table-less css layouts, using web browser as an application development platform, etc. Monopoly is never good, even if that monopoly is the best and perfect. There's innovation and strength in diversity. I always encourage people to never settle into one tool and always looks for alternatives out there.

userbinator 6y ago
Internet Explorer reigned the Browsers, and to be honest web and web development was a boring field. Once Firefox was released, web and web development revived. Boring is good. It means a stable platform you can rely on. It popularized things like web 2.0, table-less css layouts, using web browser as an application development platform, etc. ...and now we have sites that would be perfectly fine as static HTML being turned into app-sites that require running megabytes of arbitrary code just to render some static content, consuming resources on every single machine that visits them, every time they visit.
- wintorez 6y ago
  Fair points, but web today is not what web was intended for. It was supposed to be a document delivery network, but it became an application development platform. Why? Because we need a sandboxed, distributed application delivery platform, and every previous solution failed or didn't catch on: Java Applets, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, etc. The business case of developing client-side applications trumps the need for a faster web at the moment. Is it ideal? No. Can it be fixed? Yes. How? Come up with a new rich application delivery solution that works in every modern browser in every modern os (mobile/desktop). EDIT: I partially blame Adobe's hubris for the current situation. They should have made Flash player technology free & open-source and focused on monetizing Flash creation suites. Instead they kept it closed, and that led to Apple dropping it in iOS. After that, for all intents and purposes, Flash was done.

bonestormii_ 6y ago

I'm almost to the point of being indifferent whether companies "destroy the web" through things like a browser monoculture. It would be a tragedy, but you can only ask people to deal with so much, and the web != the internet. We are in an age of webassembly in browsers. For all the complexity of the modern web, riddle me this: What is the difference between a website executing arbitrary web assembly code in the sandbox of the browser, and any TCP connection sending a program which is loaded in a sandbox and executing on the user's computer? The difference seems to me to be simply the fact that it is integrated into the web, web browsers, etc. If we are truly at the point where this is how we want to do things--like, we want to write web apps in Rust and compile for web assembly--The web is becoming less distinct and therefore less valuable as a paradigm. I'm not a user of any document-only web alternatives, but in this model, it would be pretty cool to see a re-separation into a web-of-linked-documents and network-of-sandboxed-remote-applications. Society wouldn't swallow such a thing easily, but if they push the web far enough into a proprietary hellscape, desirable services will likely start to emerge outside of it. All it takes is for those services to be attractive enough to start drawing disenfranchised stragglers, and the next thing you know, your mom is downloading recipes off the new not-web web without a care in the world.

pavlov 6y ago
WebAssembly is a red herring because anything useful that these applications do is enabled by the available APIs. A WAsm program can’t magically bypass the browser and access OS services directly. Everything still needs to go through web APIs, and then you realize that it doesn’t make much difference whether your program bitstream is delivered as minified JS or WAsm.
- anderspitman 6y ago
  I wonder what a fairly lightweight webapp standard wrapped around WASI might look like. Especially if it had a really nice high-level UI toolkit built it.
- bonestormii_ 6y ago
  Right, it necessarily affect much in terms of the way the program's functionality is written, but hardly irrelevant or a "red herring". The fact that any language can be compiled to a portable assembly language is important for the model we are discussing, because it isn't bound to local machine architecture. If a browser is simply a remote-program-sandbox, it is an important feature that remote programs are portable to the same degree web assembly is. Otherwise you'd have a remote app that people on ARM couldn't execute, and things of that nature. It also isn't strictly true what you say, that "anything useful" is achieved via APIs. There are a number of examples of native libraries being compiled to web assembly with varying degrees of success. Just because what you write is all API based doesn't make it universally true for all programs everywhere.

anderspitman 6y ago

I used to worry about these sorts of questions much more. At this point I'm fairly convinced it's already past saving. The current state of browsers is pretty scary. Combining the text-web and the app-web into one client has caused serious issues. But it doesn't have to be a bad thing. I think the browser will continue its slow death, and eventually be replaced by something new, or maybe a suite of new things tailored to different tasks, rather than a single monolithic application. We've learned a ton from the web, and that knowledge will inform what comes next. These days I'm much more concerned about the health of the internet (ie what's happening with QUIC, net neutrality, fiber rollout, ipv6, NAT, etc). The internet will far outlive the web.

kevindong 6y ago

We're already at the point where Chrome is the modern day IE 6. Infrequently (maybe 1-2 times a week), a website just will not work correctly on desktop Safari for me. As soon as I switch over to Chrome, it works perfectly. It's pretty common for websites to say something akin to "use Chrome for the best experience." Safari is only relevant today due to iOS's popularity. If it weren't for the iPhone, Safari would just be another specialty browser for a tiny slice of consumers.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
As I've said before, the only thing worse than Apple forcing people to use Safari is Apple not forcing people to use Safari.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  iOS browsers still have to use WebKit.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    You're right, that hasn't changed. Edited.
severino 6y ago
> We're already at the point where Chrome is the modern day IE 6. [...] As soon as I switch over to Chrome, it works perfectly Well, at least you can switch... for free. In order to install IE6, you had to pay for an operating system license first, and it was only compatible with that OS. Not that I'm saying that I like the browser monoculture we're heading into. But I think there're still some differences. You can look into Chrome's engine source code. I've yet to see Microsoft releasing the source for Trident or EdgeHTML.
davidwparker 6y ago
I think you have it backwards. Safari is IE 6 (in that things don't work as you'd expect them to). https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ shows Safari as missing many standard features. (unless you meant IE 6, in that Chrome ships with "ActiveX"-like features no one else is implementing).

outloudvi 6y ago

Google has been screwing up the web stardards for a long time (one infamous example is whatwg/url). Pretty clear what would happen if Chrome controls the web.

domenicd 6y ago
The URL Standard is written and maintained by a Mozilla employee.

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hnarn 6y ago

Browser rendering is what a lot of “normal” users equate with what the Internet “is”. With that in mind, it’s obvious that a lack of browser diversity, open standards and democratic process by necessity leads to a less free Internet for everyone.