

Why isn't there a meta-browser? - datashovel
https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-browser-204997473c61

======
enkiv2
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
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.

