3 ms·

Why isn't there a meta-browser?

1 points by datashovel 12y ago

enkiv2 12y ago
Web developers, on the whole, cannot be arsed to even stick to standards and keep their pages from being malformed. There's no reason to believe that they would provide consistent and machine-readable hints for a metabrowser about which browser to launch. Building a metabrowser is trivial. (Moving state and features between the browsers within the metabrowser is not, but if all you want is the default experience, it's not too hard.) Herding half a million cats to convince people to enable some new feature is not (and determining which browser to use when displaying malformed pages that were written by twelve-year-olds against MOSAIC and abandoned in 1995 is worse).
- datashovel 12y ago
  Interesting points. It may not have been clear, but I kind of glossed over the idea that this would be a standard. So, for example, perhaps embedded in HTTP headers like Content-Type values. So, I was being lazy in terms of the details, but to be fair I wasn't trying to be too technical. Also, I may not understand the point, but I get the impression that a meta browser would make it so "cats can be cats" without the need to herd them, and without worrying that non-compliance could potentially disrupt innovation. The meta browser would (in my mind) become the new browser, and all the meat that you get in Chrome, FF, IE would be encapsulated behind the scenes. So it certainly would not be a trivial project (although I agree on the surface having a meta app whose only purpose was to encapsulate another application would be somewhat trivial) the ideal scenario would call for standardized apis that the meta app could interface with the browsers so things like browser preferences could be integrated in the top-level, and each app underneath would be able to read from that same set of options. Of course each browser would need to have name-spaced options as well for things that weren't globally recognized / standardized, but those kinds of problems I think have fairly straightforward answers at this stage.

1 points by datashovel 12y ago

Web developers, on the whole, cannot be arsed to even stick to standards and keep their pages from being malformed. There's no reason to believe that they would provide consistent and machine-readable hints for a metabrowser about which browser to launch. Building a metabrowser is trivial. (Moving state and features between the browsers within the metabrowser is not, but if all you want is the default experience, it's not too hard.) Herding half a million cats to convince people to enable some new feature is not (and determining which browser to use when displaying malformed pages that were written by twelve-year-olds against MOSAIC and abandoned in 1995 is worse).

datashovel 12y ago
Interesting points. It may not have been clear, but I kind of glossed over the idea that this would be a standard. So, for example, perhaps embedded in HTTP headers like Content-Type values. So, I was being lazy in terms of the details, but to be fair I wasn't trying to be too technical. Also, I may not understand the point, but I get the impression that a meta browser would make it so "cats can be cats" without the need to herd them, and without worrying that non-compliance could potentially disrupt innovation. The meta browser would (in my mind) become the new browser, and all the meat that you get in Chrome, FF, IE would be encapsulated behind the scenes. So it certainly would not be a trivial project (although I agree on the surface having a meta app whose only purpose was to encapsulate another application would be somewhat trivial) the ideal scenario would call for standardized apis that the meta app could interface with the browsers so things like browser preferences could be integrated in the top-level, and each app underneath would be able to read from that same set of options. Of course each browser would need to have name-spaced options as well for things that weren't globally recognized / standardized, but those kinds of problems I think have fairly straightforward answers at this stage.