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Others may disagree on philosophical grounds, but I don't think it's inherently bad to have only one implementation of the core web browser technologies. That'

by Taywee 5y ago

Others may disagree on philosophical grounds, but I don't think it's inherently bad to have only one implementation of the core web browser technologies. That's similar to what we have with Linux, where the kernel has one canonical implementation, and OSes based on Linux use that, modify it, switch configurations, and build the OS that they need on that core. The problem here and the difficulty, is that upstream Linux is coordinated and controlled by a non-profit consortium and community, and the implementation is developed and controlled by community efforts and the joined efforts of hundreds of companies and thousands of hobbyists. The upstream Blink browser implementation is coordinated, develped, and controlled by one giant advertising corporation, and no control or input is ever in the hands of anybody else. I don't believe that there's harm in having "one implementation", but there is harm in that implementation being completely centralized by a single for-profit entity.

soundnote 5y ago
And the entity has massive incentive to be user hostile because that's how they make their money.
concinds 5y ago
If Mozilla switched to Blink, they'd be maintaining their own version, and it could diverge from Google's. That would be the "trustworthy, community Blink". But they'd also be able to much more easily benefit from Blink's security (already had site isolation for years, apparently a better sandbox, etc) and the contributions thousands of other companies make to Blink (Intel, Samsung, etc), companies that don't contribute to Gecko and Webkit as much if at all. They'd also have better webcompat, and take away one reason to switch to Chrome (i.e., sites that break in Firefox that render fine in Chrome; and sites that rely on cutting edge draft standards that Firefox won't implement for a few months/years). I argued this before[0], and I still stand by it: > I can see that being an issue if the web is centralising around one proprietary engine, but why does that apply to Blink? If Google turns completely evil that won't take away from all the webcompat, optimisations, and security in Blink, and any bad feature (ManifestV3) can be patched out easily. Mozilla could switch to Blink (and I think they should, and Apple too, they clearly don't have the manpower to maintain a whole engine and keep it modern and secure, see my other comment in this thread; there are many more 0days with Safari and Firefox than Chrome) and it wouldn't harm the web in any way, because they can just swap out bad components with their own, and still reduce their dev time requirements by orders of magnitude compared to today. You have Intel, Samsung, tons of companies contributing to Blink, to a much, much greater extent than Gecko or WebKit. > If every browser switched to Blink, that would actually benefit consumers, because right now Chrome basically has the enterprise market on lock, since nobody cares to test internal webpages on other browsers, and Chrome has better enterprise features (though I don't know how much of that is to do with the engine); and many consumers also just switch to Chrome as the first thing they do, because they've run into compatibility issues with Firefox or Safari and they just want to access the web without issues. If every browser used Blink, you'd have a lot more people using Safari and Firefox, just because most people don't want to keep two browsers around (Firefox + Chrome or Safari + Chrome) when websites break (which is not often, but often enough, trust me). I really hope we see this. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941866

by Taywee 5y ago

soundnote 5y ago

And the entity has massive incentive to be user hostile because that's how they make their money.

concinds 5y ago

If Mozilla switched to Blink, they'd be maintaining their own version, and it could diverge from Google's. That would be the "trustworthy, community Blink". But they'd also be able to much more easily benefit from Blink's security (already had site isolation for years, apparently a better sandbox, etc) and the contributions thousands of other companies make to Blink (Intel, Samsung, etc), companies that don't contribute to Gecko and Webkit as much if at all. They'd also have better webcompat, and take away one reason to switch to Chrome (i.e., sites that break in Firefox that render fine in Chrome; and sites that rely on cutting edge draft standards that Firefox won't implement for a few months/years). I argued this before[0], and I still stand by it: > I can see that being an issue if the web is centralising around one proprietary engine, but why does that apply to Blink? If Google turns completely evil that won't take away from all the webcompat, optimisations, and security in Blink, and any bad feature (ManifestV3) can be patched out easily. Mozilla could switch to Blink (and I think they should, and Apple too, they clearly don't have the manpower to maintain a whole engine and keep it modern and secure, see my other comment in this thread; there are many more 0days with Safari and Firefox than Chrome) and it wouldn't harm the web in any way, because they can just swap out bad components with their own, and still reduce their dev time requirements by orders of magnitude compared to today. You have Intel, Samsung, tons of companies contributing to Blink, to a much, much greater extent than Gecko or WebKit. > If every browser switched to Blink, that would actually benefit consumers, because right now Chrome basically has the enterprise market on lock, since nobody cares to test internal webpages on other browsers, and Chrome has better enterprise features (though I don't know how much of that is to do with the engine); and many consumers also just switch to Chrome as the first thing they do, because they've run into compatibility issues with Firefox or Safari and they just want to access the web without issues. If every browser used Blink, you'd have a lot more people using Safari and Firefox, just because most people don't want to keep two browsers around (Firefox + Chrome or Safari + Chrome) when websites break (which is not often, but often enough, trust me). I really hope we see this. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941866