
While we blink, we lose the Web (a rant on WebKit/Blink monoculture) - soapdog
http://andregarzia.com/2018/12/while-we-blink-we-loose-the-web.html
======
sitkack
Complexity builds in a thing until it becomes too heavy to operate in its
original environment, a lighter thing more adapted to the current ecosystem
replaces it.

You see this in Wikipedia pages on Mathematics, they start small and succinct.
Then the Mathematicians move in and make it correct and thorough. And then
they keep doing this, until only Mathematicians can understand and edit it.

This exactly mirrors browser evolution. It would be nearly impossible to
create a new engine, because the existing ones have accreted over time and
staffed > 10M/Y in salaries. Developers are like complexity sponges. Budgets,
timelines, cpu cycles, memory, latency. Any resource will be consumed by even
a small number of developers on the corporate dole.

The web spec maintainers should have a total complexity budget for the thing
they are specifying.

The next browser that comes out, will run in a browser using WASM and render
using Canvas. It will have to, there is no other way.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
All of that's bullshit when you realize WHATWG and W3C are controlled by
browser marketshare majorities.

Create a browser that people want that sheds 99% of the bullshit APIs and now
you have momentum. It doesn't matter whether or not your browser supports
WebGPU or WASM when no one cares to use it because they enjoy a browser with
built-in ad blocking or resource limits that prevent idiot developers from
offload 10s of megabytes onto them.

Protect users and make them your number one priority and everything else is
bullshit.

Firefox forgot this and lost to Chrome. Microsoft woke up too late and played
catchup, and they're still playing it, too.

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Eridrus
Everyone who is old enough appreciates what Firefox did for the web.

But I'm not convinced that a Chromium monoculture is the same as an
IE6/Trident monoculture.

Largely because Chromium is open source. Apple has successfully forked it to
Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs. Opera/Brave/Electron have used it as
a base for their product.

So I'm left wondering what people expect will happen. Is it that the standards
will no longer be relevant because people only care about one implementation?

In some sense, Microsoft decision is basically irrelevant to that because
we're already there since web developers were not testing Edge, leading to
compatibility challenges for the Edge team.

~~~
pier25
> Apple has successfully forked it to Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs

You mean Google?

~~~
Eridrus
You're right, thanks, I had thought it was the other way around.

That's a slightly different narrative to what I had in my head, but I'm not
sure it matters a lot, since it's basically Apple & Google not being able to
agree on what to do resulting in a split.

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Wowfunhappy
Not to diminish the severity of the problem, but I was under the impression
WebKit and Blink are actually quite different nowadays, even though they were
originally one and the same.

That said, three engines is not all that much better than two, especially
given FireFox's marketshare.

~~~
soapdog
Author here, not assuming they are the same, just they sprouted from the same
tree. And even though they diverged a lot, they are still more similar than
different. I am basically afraid of a monoculture of that family of engines,
specially given chromium dominance in terms of browser vendor.

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omarforgotpwd
We don’t need diversity in browser engines anymore. Not that much. We’ve got
Firefox, Blink, WebKit (Blink was forked off WebKit but is not WebKit. They
also has different JavaScript engines. Chrome is called V8 and I think WebKit
has one called SpiderMonkey). And we’ve also got Opera.

Having less diffferences to code against is good. Yet there are still
different browser engines from different comapanies. If Google did something
stupid Apple could counteract them, etc. Thus I feel the author’s sentiment
but don’t think this will matter at all from a practical perspective.

~~~
megous
SpiderMonkey is from Mozilla.

~~~
omarforgotpwd
Right, my mistake. Apple's is called Nitro.

------
avaer
The argument that you can escape Google monoculture by going with Mozilla
never resonated with me, given that Google ads pay for both.

It always felt like a Pachinko prize situation, where adding an extra step to
the process lets us sweep human incentives under the rug.

~~~
soapdog
If Microsoft drops EdgeHTML, Mozilla will be the only remaining browser vendor
using an engine that is not from that family. It doesn't matter if Google is
paying for it, they pay to be the default search engine, and thats it. They
don't get a say on what Mozilla does.

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IloveHN84
We fought against IE supremacy for over a decade, now we have to fight against
Chrome, which does even worse and evil than IE

~~~
jasonvorhe
It features proprietary add-ons that only work on one platform and can't be
easily implemented in other platforms?

How? Since when? Which ones?

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superinnuendo
Isn't this a paradigm shift more than anything? Both companies will contribute
code to the browser. There will be more eyes on one quality code base. It will
become the standard just like railroads had to standardize. It's about time to
be honest. Now we can all focus on something else.

~~~
undoware
We already did standardize. With standards. By a standards body.

This is more like, "and all cars on the road have a Toyota motor."

Gonna be waiting a while for those figurative Teslas...

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scarface74
In practice, IE has been ignored for years as far as compatibility from what I
can tell.

But I didn’t realize that IEs market share was so small. I would think it
would be larger by virtue of it being the default on Windows.

But without IE, what could possibly drive traffic to Bing?

~~~
Hamcha
Bing is "Google Search but not Google and cheaper".

The cheap bit is easy to understand, Google has APIs for GSearch, Translate
etc but they are quite expensive. Microsoft on the other hands has much lower
costs for services that are usually not that far off.

The "not Google" bit is probably the reason why it will always have at least
some traction though: It's used by Google competitors (eg. Alexa uses Bing,
Siri used to.)

