5 ms·

Is a monoculture as bad as it might seem though? Front end web development is a clusterfuck. Webkit is open source, unlike the almost monoculture that ie6 repre

by panacea 14y ago

Is a monoculture as bad as it might seem though? Front end web development is a clusterfuck. Webkit is open source, unlike the almost monoculture that ie6 represented. It can be forked and evolution can continue. Ditch -webkit -mos and -o. Like when the dinosaurs experienced a mass extinction event and mammals bloomed from a shrew into cats and humans.

WiseWeasel 14y ago
Is that where babies come from?
gcp 14y ago
It can be forked and evolution can continue. Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the dinosaurs anyway.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished. This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough. If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team). Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution, it's life in "life support".
  - gcp 14y ago
    Some species DO get extinguished. Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run. If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does". A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked. This is stopping evolution, not helping it.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      >Some species DO get extinguished. >>Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run. I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future". >Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does". We got the Canvas and AJAX DESPITE the standard (one from Apple, the other from MS) not because of it. Those were only standardised after the fact. Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary". >A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked. Well, it kind of helped that it also kind of did suck. Opera was forever dragging behind the other engines.
      - gcp 14y ago
        I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future". Not at all, it's a phenomenon called "getting stuck in a local optimum" (as opposed to the global one). Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary". You seem to have an incorrect understanding of how W3C standards appear. Browsers implement a new feature (through prefixing), often competitively, and if it's considered generally useful the browser vendors get together and try to agree on a common API that is most useful and sane. After a while the prefix goes away and the standardized API is used. There's been some complaints about WebKit refusing to do the latter, which surely is a contributing factor to Opera's decision. Without this common API, you'd have no chance in implementing the same features independently. Without vendor competition, there's no incentive to standardize the API, which precludes future competition. The current web and especially WebKit itself thank their existence to such a spec.
  - bzbarsky 14y ago
    The point is that a WebKit monoculture would make the Servo project impossible.
  - mikaelj 14y ago
    In a mono-culture you have no predators thus no evolution.
    - zz_james 14y ago
      Not quite, you need 2 elements for evolution, (1) variation and (2) selection. Selection comes from anything in the environment, it can and often does come from climate, geology also, data suggest the rate of change through evolution increases when populations are lower as variation is more significant. Such analysis of natural selection can break down when applied to market forces as the continued existence of an intity is sometimes of secondary interest to the controlling party, which does not happen with species.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
I would argue that competition is healthy. So the question is is a fork "true" competition or more of a "suggestion" for a feature change? Or to put it another way, instead of evolution happening (as in the best win and the worst die) we now have a situation where the winners and losers are decided by subjective individuals (i.e. some project manager somewhere decides to import a forked branch back into their main branch).
nanidin 14y ago
Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing. Instead of having multiple vendors working on multiple competing products, they can now work on multiple competing features.
- gcp 14y ago
  Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing How does one follow from the other? Technical monopolies are good if they're opensourced? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.
  - nanidin 14y ago
    My line of thinking was that it takes X units of effort to implement feature Y. If two companies develop competing products, then 2X units of effort have been used to accomplish 1 feature Y. If both of those companies are working on the same product, then it might follow that 2X units of effort would lead to the implementation of feature Y and feature Z. Or that feature Y is implemented in less time.
    - PommeDeTerre 14y ago
      Those kind of assumptions are highly idealistic and theoretical, usually don't hold true in the real world. It depends a lot upon the talent of the people involved, their past experience, their knowledge, and so forth. It also depends on the systems in question. The amount of effort needed to build some particular functionality can vary immensely between two experienced developers working for the same organization on the same system. It usually varies even more so when multiple organizations are involved, or multiple systems are involved.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    A monopoly is bad for competition, but do we need competition in a market where pricing is irrelevant? It's better to have all vendors collaborating on a standard engine than multiple proprietary ones. What are the negatives?
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
The current monoculture is much worse. It's a monoculture where the developers are not supporting the popular thing because it's popular, but also because it's what they themselves prefer. This is much more dangerous and it spills over to other areas. If you walked into a coffee shop in San Francisco you'd be hard pressed to see anything other than macbooks, iphones, and chrome (maybe safari a little bit). So forget about WebKit, there are plenty of sites out there that specifically target iOS and iOS only. This is not going to get any better.
- Dylanlacey 14y ago
  Nothing is as condescending to your customers as a smug "Sorry, we don't like your browser, go get a real renderer, then we'll talk" where 'real' is defined as "What I like to use". And you're right, there seems to be a strong tendency towards mutual masturbation over the web. "Make what I want" is leading to this tiny little house of mirrors.
bzbarsky 14y ago
The problem with evolution is that it's slow and can never reach parts of the problem space that require too large a leap. In the case of web rendering engines, for example, I don't see "evolution" getting us to a rendering engine that can usefully parallelize over, say, 64 cores starting from the engines we have right now. And monoculture would ensure that we never get there.

by panacea 14y ago

WiseWeasel 14y ago

Is that where babies come from?

gcp 14y ago

It can be forked and evolution can continue. Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the dinosaurs anyway.

coldtea 14y ago
>Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished. This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough. If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team). Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution, it's life in "life support".
- gcp 14y ago
  Some species DO get extinguished. Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run. If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does". A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked. This is stopping evolution, not helping it.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >Some species DO get extinguished. >>Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run. I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future". >Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does". We got the Canvas and AJAX DESPITE the standard (one from Apple, the other from MS) not because of it. Those were only standardised after the fact. Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary". >A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked. Well, it kind of helped that it also kind of did suck. Opera was forever dragging behind the other engines.
    - gcp 14y ago
      I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future". Not at all, it's a phenomenon called "getting stuck in a local optimum" (as opposed to the global one). Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary". You seem to have an incorrect understanding of how W3C standards appear. Browsers implement a new feature (through prefixing), often competitively, and if it's considered generally useful the browser vendors get together and try to agree on a common API that is most useful and sane. After a while the prefix goes away and the standardized API is used. There's been some complaints about WebKit refusing to do the latter, which surely is a contributing factor to Opera's decision. Without this common API, you'd have no chance in implementing the same features independently. Without vendor competition, there's no incentive to standardize the API, which precludes future competition. The current web and especially WebKit itself thank their existence to such a spec.
- bzbarsky 14y ago
  The point is that a WebKit monoculture would make the Servo project impossible.
- mikaelj 14y ago
  In a mono-culture you have no predators thus no evolution.
  - zz_james 14y ago
    Not quite, you need 2 elements for evolution, (1) variation and (2) selection. Selection comes from anything in the environment, it can and often does come from climate, geology also, data suggest the rate of change through evolution increases when populations are lower as variation is more significant. Such analysis of natural selection can break down when applied to market forces as the continued existence of an intity is sometimes of secondary interest to the controlling party, which does not happen with species.

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

I would argue that competition is healthy. So the question is is a fork "true" competition or more of a "suggestion" for a feature change? Or to put it another way, instead of evolution happening (as in the best win and the worst die) we now have a situation where the winners and losers are decided by subjective individuals (i.e. some project manager somewhere decides to import a forked branch back into their main branch).

nanidin 14y ago

Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing. Instead of having multiple vendors working on multiple competing products, they can now work on multiple competing features.

gcp 14y ago
Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing How does one follow from the other? Technical monopolies are good if they're opensourced? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.
- nanidin 14y ago
  My line of thinking was that it takes X units of effort to implement feature Y. If two companies develop competing products, then 2X units of effort have been used to accomplish 1 feature Y. If both of those companies are working on the same product, then it might follow that 2X units of effort would lead to the implementation of feature Y and feature Z. Or that feature Y is implemented in less time.
  - PommeDeTerre 14y ago
    Those kind of assumptions are highly idealistic and theoretical, usually don't hold true in the real world. It depends a lot upon the talent of the people involved, their past experience, their knowledge, and so forth. It also depends on the systems in question. The amount of effort needed to build some particular functionality can vary immensely between two experienced developers working for the same organization on the same system. It usually varies even more so when multiple organizations are involved, or multiple systems are involved.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  A monopoly is bad for competition, but do we need competition in a market where pricing is irrelevant? It's better to have all vendors collaborating on a standard engine than multiple proprietary ones. What are the negatives?

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

The current monoculture is much worse. It's a monoculture where the developers are not supporting the popular thing because it's popular, but also because it's what they themselves prefer. This is much more dangerous and it spills over to other areas. If you walked into a coffee shop in San Francisco you'd be hard pressed to see anything other than macbooks, iphones, and chrome (maybe safari a little bit). So forget about WebKit, there are plenty of sites out there that specifically target iOS and iOS only. This is not going to get any better.

Dylanlacey 14y ago
Nothing is as condescending to your customers as a smug "Sorry, we don't like your browser, go get a real renderer, then we'll talk" where 'real' is defined as "What I like to use". And you're right, there seems to be a strong tendency towards mutual masturbation over the web. "Make what I want" is leading to this tiny little house of mirrors.

bzbarsky 14y ago

The problem with evolution is that it's slow and can never reach parts of the problem space that require too large a leap. In the case of web rendering engines, for example, I don't see "evolution" getting us to a rendering engine that can usefully parallelize over, say, 64 cores starting from the engines we have right now. And monoculture would ensure that we never get there.