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I work on Firefox and I cannot believe how seriously people are discussing this. At its core, people outrageously under-estimate how complex browsers are. Never

by jdashg 6y ago

I work on Firefox and I cannot believe how seriously people are discussing this. At its core, people outrageously under-estimate how complex browsers are. Nevermind "how fast the web is moving", but even Servo cannot reliably render the wide web correctly, so good luck even writing a clean-slate implementation matching a snapshot of web specs taken today! "It's one browser, Michael. What could it cost? 10 engineers?"

csande17 6y ago
The sentiment isn't, "hardware acceleration presents genuine technical advantages for HTML and CSS", it's "the web is so slow and bloated it feels like playing Crysis without a video card."
chaganated 6y ago
Firefox aside, I think anyone who took that joke as a serious product idea needs to brush-up on how computers work, how software works, and wha good engineering looks like.
throw_m239339 6y ago
A great deal of complexity is due to technical debt, notably HTML/CSS technical debt because "don't break the web". Well maybe we should "break the web" once to allow new browser engines to be easier to craft, after all, the web started rather simple 30 years ago...
- andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  It’s not necessary. CSS 2.1 makes up most of the modern web without other modules and it’s not too hard to implement. It’s just that no one writes compositors. Partial implementation can exist as valid user agents, and most developers don’t even seem to realize you can have a compliant browser that doesn’t render to CSS 2.1 box model specifications.
mattigames 6y ago
The thing is, if you can make it run the top 10 websites (google, facebook, youtube et all) and convince the maintainers of those websites to always test on this thing before each release that would already bring a giant win for most users in the planet, and websites that have features outside the scope of this thing would fallback to standard rendering; in such world (and if it gains momentum) developers would slowly move to avoid features that this doesn't support in order to get the performance benefits it brings.
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
Have you actually tried rendering CSS 2.1 yourself? It’s not hard. Writing a tiling compositor is more difficult.

by jdashg 6y ago

csande17 6y ago

The sentiment isn't, "hardware acceleration presents genuine technical advantages for HTML and CSS", it's "the web is so slow and bloated it feels like playing Crysis without a video card."

chaganated 6y ago

Firefox aside, I think anyone who took that joke as a serious product idea needs to brush-up on how computers work, how software works, and wha good engineering looks like.

throw_m239339 6y ago

A great deal of complexity is due to technical debt, notably HTML/CSS technical debt because "don't break the web". Well maybe we should "break the web" once to allow new browser engines to be easier to craft, after all, the web started rather simple 30 years ago...

andrewmcwatters 6y ago
It’s not necessary. CSS 2.1 makes up most of the modern web without other modules and it’s not too hard to implement. It’s just that no one writes compositors. Partial implementation can exist as valid user agents, and most developers don’t even seem to realize you can have a compliant browser that doesn’t render to CSS 2.1 box model specifications.

mattigames 6y ago

The thing is, if you can make it run the top 10 websites (google, facebook, youtube et all) and convince the maintainers of those websites to always test on this thing before each release that would already bring a giant win for most users in the planet, and websites that have features outside the scope of this thing would fallback to standard rendering; in such world (and if it gains momentum) developers would slowly move to avoid features that this doesn't support in order to get the performance benefits it brings.

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

Have you actually tried rendering CSS 2.1 yourself? It’s not hard. Writing a tiling compositor is more difficult.