6 ms·

The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. Buil

by Joeri 4y ago

The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. Even microsoft couldn’t afford to keep adding all the standards to their browser engine. Normally the solution for a messy overgrown implementation is a grand reboot. But we can’t do a grand reboot of the web because we cannot get rid of the legacy. The only viable strategy I see to have real browser engine diversity without giving up on compatibility is moving as much of the standards implementation as possible into JS modules, so new browser makers can start with a small engine that loads the publicly hosted standards modules.

mdavis6890 4y ago
Basically - the web is what Chromium source code says it is - no more, no less, and no other.
freediver 4y ago
Normally having one strong alternative would be enough, but in this case we have two - Gecko and WebKit. The problem is not in the lack of browser rendering engines, but the lacking innovation and product features of the browsers running these rendering engines.
guerrilla 4y ago
> It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. A body of web standards that they lobbied for and to be in the form that they are...
- Closi 4y ago
  … and are a member of … holding more seats than Apple and Google combined … and more than four times the vote share of Mozilla … As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I think you meant Apple and Microsoft combined, right[1]? 1. https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/wasm/participants https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/wasm/participants
    - Closi 4y ago
      Oops, yes!
  - gsnedders 4y ago
    > As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything. That's making big assumption: that decisions are made by votes, and those votes are done purely based on participation. And they're not. For decisions within the WG, they're normally done by some notion of rough-consensus (frequently, lack of significant dissent); actual votes within most WGs are relatively rare. For decisions at the W3C level, it is admittedly done by votes, but it's one-Member, one-vote, so in that case all W3C Member are equivalent in power: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla all have their votes count as one. This is pretty normal within industrial standards development organisations: voting happens at an organisational level, representing the industrial members, not based on individuals participating from those members. (There certainly are negatives associated with a disproportionate number being from a single organisation, but that's mostly related to disputes in meetings ending up with one individual arguing against ten.)
- account42 4y ago
  A body of web standards they are still trying to expand right now. The first step in saving the web needs to be to stop adding so many new standards that are only needed for "apps".
xnickb 4y ago
> moving as much of the standards implementation as possible into JS modules Heh. Now you have two problems. One of them is JS, which was a mistake in the first place and now we can't get rid of it for similar reasons.
Gigachad 4y ago
We should convert browsers in to just a basic wasm window responsible for rendering html and running wasm. Then JavaScript and all it’s apis can become a shared library as a wasm package or something.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I'm not convinced that JavaScript is the difficult part. HTML/CSS rendering seems far more challenging.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Servo seemed to have pretty much got rendering working. I'm no expert but I feel like the hundreds of JS apis contribute a lot to the complexity. Just looking at the list here looks like it would take decades for a single person to complete https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
    - replygirl 4y ago
      https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/28777 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/28777
    - postalrat 4y ago
      Decades of work for a single person shouldn't take longer than 3 months for one of these mythical "100x" developers.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    It's the interaction of JS with HTML and CSS, combined with the expectation that all browsers will implement everything in ways that are functionally identical. Current "web platform" specs are in the form of algorithms/pseudocode rather than descriptions of desired behavior.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  So... aren't we kind of coming full circle if we do that, going back to the JVM+Swing except this time it's boxed in a window and is more dynamic...
jakelazaroff 4y ago
Who do you think has been pushing features into web standards at a breakneck pace? From where I sit, it’s mostly Google.
- fooey 4y ago
  Unfortunately, their priority lately has been pushing "features" like FLoC and Manifest v3
i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago
> The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. what exactly is the benefit of having a byzantine set of standards in the first place? Like why not just have a standard and not dick around with it?
- daveoc64 4y ago
  Frustration with the shortcomings of older web standards resulted in the prevalence of browser plugins like Adobe Flash, and non-standard technology like ActiveX. If there are things browsers can't do natively, then someone will build their own way to do it and then you end up with non-standard implementations. It's better to get everyone on the same page and develop an open standard.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Was that all though? I think part of this was just businesses attempting to lock the web into their tech. Microsoft has never wanted the web to be open, first trying to reinvent it with their own MSN. Then trying to lock it in with IE and ActiveX. Adobe / Macromedia started from the designer perspective but Flash soon became a goal of its own because Adobe wouldn't give up that marketshare. Only now all parties realise it's too big for one company to own. Well except Google perhaps.
    - daveoc64 4y ago
      Flash was able to support file uploads, video streaming, and clipboard access long before the HTML and JavaScript specs allowed for this. Users and website creators wanted these features and Flash was the way to do them. Sure, other technologies like Microsoft's Silverlight allowed similar things, but Flash was so widely used it could be relied on to offer these features. Even now things like clipboard access aren't supported in the same way across all of the major browsers.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
ohgodplsno 4y ago
>The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. >Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. I wonder which company grew their browser marketshare through ruthless advertising on their already-a-monopoly search engine, then began to compete with the other browsers by purposefully breaking their websites on other browsers (all by accident of course, hundreds of times), then began to implement their websites with alpha versions of their proposed web standards that only their browser properly implemented, leaving other browsers with a dreadful polyfill that had horrible performance on purpose, only to then basically force their proposals through the web standards body that they had made because they couldn't control the W3C, leaving everyone having to follow such great APIs as WebUSB or other badly-implemented-but-only-by-them flavor of the day API, all the way to forcing dreadful protocols like QUIC and HTTP/3, justified by their need to save up three bytes per request and making the user's experience better while they serve 2MB of tracking javascript and ads through DNS-cloaked servers. I think the name was like... Gogle ? Golgool ? Can't remember.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  > then began to implement their websites with alpha versions of their proposed web standards that only their browser properly implemented That is the standardization process. The W3C won't ratify a standard that does not have draft implementations in the wild.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    No. The standardization process does not call for you to make your public facing, extremely visited website use Polymer/ShadowDOMv0. You can implement your API and make a demo website/offer a beta test on your website so that people can try it out. Making it the default and making the fallback only reasonably accessible by installing an extension that will rewrite your links (that all send back to the alpha-using version), causing every browser that isn't Chrome to slow down to a crawl while you happily display a "Hey, did you know the web is faster with Chrome?" isn't working through the standardization process, it is weaponizing it to sabotage other browsers.
alcover 4y ago
> we can’t do a grand reboot But a partial one, yes. Let's make new 'virtuous' sites using only a core subset of HTML/JS and fast and energy-efficient. (inb4 XKCD) Yes, like a new standard.
- SenHeng 4y ago
  You mean like AMP?
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> The chromium-only web is not google’s fault They got exactly what they wanted, but its not their fault?
timw4mail 4y ago
And Chromes dominance has nothing to do with all the advertising for Chrome on Google's websites...
andrekandre 4y ago
> Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. > We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. could web assembly be a way out? the browser just becomes an execution engine, the current "web stack" becomes a (cacheable) downloadable library, meanwhile other languages, ui frameworks etc can flourish in the browser (now a much more simple thing that anyone can implement) maybe just pie-in-the-sky?
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
  QuickJS (and various others) demonstrates that small teams can create fast and efficient JavaScript engines that comply with standards. Even though v8 is faster, it spends an order of magnitude more engineering effort for that marginal benefit.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    A Javascript engine is pretty far from a browser. It's too much work to write a browser even if you reuse the existing V8.
    - sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
      I agree. The context of this comment is the user asking if Web assembly will make that effort easier. I don't think it will since getting good JS is already reasonable.
      - yencabulator 4y ago
        Yeah, it won't be the wasm itself that makes anything possible. What might happen is that it ushers in technically-unrelated fashions, such as standard WASI interfaces to something slightly less insane than DOM+Javascript. Just Canvas-over-WASI isn't the answer because of accessibility, but something like it might happen.

by Joeri 4y ago

mdavis6890 4y ago

Basically - the web is what Chromium source code says it is - no more, no less, and no other.

freediver 4y ago

Normally having one strong alternative would be enough, but in this case we have two - Gecko and WebKit. The problem is not in the lack of browser rendering engines, but the lacking innovation and product features of the browsers running these rendering engines.

guerrilla 4y ago

> It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. A body of web standards that they lobbied for and to be in the form that they are...

Closi 4y ago
… and are a member of … holding more seats than Apple and Google combined … and more than four times the vote share of Mozilla … As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I think you meant Apple and Microsoft combined, right[1]? 1. https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/wasm/participants https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/wasm/participants
  - Closi 4y ago
    Oops, yes!
- gsnedders 4y ago
  > As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything. That's making big assumption: that decisions are made by votes, and those votes are done purely based on participation. And they're not. For decisions within the WG, they're normally done by some notion of rough-consensus (frequently, lack of significant dissent); actual votes within most WGs are relatively rare. For decisions at the W3C level, it is admittedly done by votes, but it's one-Member, one-vote, so in that case all W3C Member are equivalent in power: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla all have their votes count as one. This is pretty normal within industrial standards development organisations: voting happens at an organisational level, representing the industrial members, not based on individuals participating from those members. (There certainly are negatives associated with a disproportionate number being from a single organisation, but that's mostly related to disputes in meetings ending up with one individual arguing against ten.)
account42 4y ago
A body of web standards they are still trying to expand right now. The first step in saving the web needs to be to stop adding so many new standards that are only needed for "apps".

xnickb 4y ago

> moving as much of the standards implementation as possible into JS modules Heh. Now you have two problems. One of them is JS, which was a mistake in the first place and now we can't get rid of it for similar reasons.

Gigachad 4y ago

We should convert browsers in to just a basic wasm window responsible for rendering html and running wasm. Then JavaScript and all it’s apis can become a shared library as a wasm package or something.

IshKebab 4y ago
I'm not convinced that JavaScript is the difficult part. HTML/CSS rendering seems far more challenging.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Servo seemed to have pretty much got rendering working. I'm no expert but I feel like the hundreds of JS apis contribute a lot to the complexity. Just looking at the list here looks like it would take decades for a single person to complete https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
  - replygirl 4y ago
    https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/28777 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/28777
  - postalrat 4y ago
    Decades of work for a single person shouldn't take longer than 3 months for one of these mythical "100x" developers.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  It's the interaction of JS with HTML and CSS, combined with the expectation that all browsers will implement everything in ways that are functionally identical. Current "web platform" specs are in the form of algorithms/pseudocode rather than descriptions of desired behavior.
guerrilla 4y ago
So... aren't we kind of coming full circle if we do that, going back to the JVM+Swing except this time it's boxed in a window and is more dynamic...

jakelazaroff 4y ago

Who do you think has been pushing features into web standards at a breakneck pace? From where I sit, it’s mostly Google.

fooey 4y ago
Unfortunately, their priority lately has been pushing "features" like FLoC and Manifest v3

i5Aj7PXGjUPy 4y ago

> The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. what exactly is the benefit of having a byzantine set of standards in the first place? Like why not just have a standard and not dick around with it?

daveoc64 4y ago
Frustration with the shortcomings of older web standards resulted in the prevalence of browser plugins like Adobe Flash, and non-standard technology like ActiveX. If there are things browsers can't do natively, then someone will build their own way to do it and then you end up with non-standard implementations. It's better to get everyone on the same page and develop an open standard.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Was that all though? I think part of this was just businesses attempting to lock the web into their tech. Microsoft has never wanted the web to be open, first trying to reinvent it with their own MSN. Then trying to lock it in with IE and ActiveX. Adobe / Macromedia started from the designer perspective but Flash soon became a goal of its own because Adobe wouldn't give up that marketshare. Only now all parties realise it's too big for one company to own. Well except Google perhaps.
  - daveoc64 4y ago
    Flash was able to support file uploads, video streaming, and clipboard access long before the HTML and JavaScript specs allowed for this. Users and website creators wanted these features and Flash was the way to do them. Sure, other technologies like Microsoft's Silverlight allowed similar things, but Flash was so widely used it could be relied on to offer these features. Even now things like clipboard access aren't supported in the same way across all of the major browsers.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago

ohgodplsno 4y ago

>The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. >Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. I wonder which company grew their browser marketshare through ruthless advertising on their already-a-monopoly search engine, then began to compete with the other browsers by purposefully breaking their websites on other browsers (all by accident of course, hundreds of times), then began to implement their websites with alpha versions of their proposed web standards that only their browser properly implemented, leaving other browsers with a dreadful polyfill that had horrible performance on purpose, only to then basically force their proposals through the web standards body that they had made because they couldn't control the W3C, leaving everyone having to follow such great APIs as WebUSB or other badly-implemented-but-only-by-them flavor of the day API, all the way to forcing dreadful protocols like QUIC and HTTP/3, justified by their need to save up three bytes per request and making the user's experience better while they serve 2MB of tracking javascript and ads through DNS-cloaked servers. I think the name was like... Gogle ? Golgool ? Can't remember.

moron4hire 4y ago
> then began to implement their websites with alpha versions of their proposed web standards that only their browser properly implemented That is the standardization process. The W3C won't ratify a standard that does not have draft implementations in the wild.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  No. The standardization process does not call for you to make your public facing, extremely visited website use Polymer/ShadowDOMv0. You can implement your API and make a demo website/offer a beta test on your website so that people can try it out. Making it the default and making the fallback only reasonably accessible by installing an extension that will rewrite your links (that all send back to the alpha-using version), causing every browser that isn't Chrome to slow down to a crawl while you happily display a "Hey, did you know the web is faster with Chrome?" isn't working through the standardization process, it is weaponizing it to sabotage other browsers.

alcover 4y ago

> we can’t do a grand reboot But a partial one, yes. Let's make new 'virtuous' sites using only a core subset of HTML/JS and fast and energy-efficient. (inb4 XKCD) Yes, like a new standard.

SenHeng 4y ago
You mean like AMP?

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> The chromium-only web is not google’s fault They got exactly what they wanted, but its not their fault?

timw4mail 4y ago

And Chromes dominance has nothing to do with all the advertising for Chrome on Google's websites...

andrekandre 4y ago

> Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. > We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. could web assembly be a way out? the browser just becomes an execution engine, the current "web stack" becomes a (cacheable) downloadable library, meanwhile other languages, ui frameworks etc can flourish in the browser (now a much more simple thing that anyone can implement) maybe just pie-in-the-sky?

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
QuickJS (and various others) demonstrates that small teams can create fast and efficient JavaScript engines that comply with standards. Even though v8 is faster, it spends an order of magnitude more engineering effort for that marginal benefit.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  A Javascript engine is pretty far from a browser. It's too much work to write a browser even if you reuse the existing V8.
  - sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
    I agree. The context of this comment is the user asking if Web assembly will make that effort easier. I don't think it will since getting good JS is already reasonable.
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      Yeah, it won't be the wasm itself that makes anything possible. What might happen is that it ushers in technically-unrelated fashions, such as standard WASI interfaces to something slightly less insane than DOM+Javascript. Just Canvas-over-WASI isn't the answer because of accessibility, but something like it might happen.