So the web is now going to be even more Chrome-centric than it is...
I wonder if they thought about picking Gecko instead.
Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
121–130 of 304 posts
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a crucial difference between "working on the code base" and having commit access. The committers are the gatekeepers and the steamrollers. What I'm effectively asking is this: 1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it? 2. If the community opts to steer Chromium in a way that Google finds objectionable, could Google stop it?
> " 1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it? " The answer to that is obvious. Of course not. Google owns Chromium's repository. Even if the "community" decides to fork Chromium, Google owns Chrome, so any fork of Chromium is completely irrelevant. That's because people download and install Chrome and not obscure Chromium forks. And that is why w…
“Obscure Chromium forks” – like Samsung Internet and Edge?
Remember: Chromium itself is an “obscure fork” of WebKit...
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#123I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).
I think the bad state to be in is: * There is a number of implementations of the same platform. * Those implementations are competing and the market encourages them to be in -compatible with each other. You can avoid that bad state by having an explicit standard and applying pressure on all implementations to meet that standard. It usually comes at the expense of slower innovation. But another viable way to avoid tha…
So whether the Web can run on Rust-based parallel engine components should be beholden to the reporting structure at Google?
Let's be clear: that is the future you are advocating.
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#124Honest question: what is the population of committers (not contributors) on Chromium? Is there any significant number outside of Google? Is Chromium de-facto controlled by Google, or more community driven?
Chromium is completely controlled by Google. The key decision makers are all in the Google reporting structure.
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#125Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.
I don't think they can. EdgeHTML is a fork of Trident (MSHTML), and that originated from code licensed from Spyglass.
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. This is already the norm. I use Safari and find many sites have issues. Before that I used Firefox and many sites had issues. Typically the JS works, but styling often looks different (and worse) on Safari and Firefox.
Do you have examples? I use Safari and don’t find this to be true. Given Safari is what people use in iOS, id expect this to be rarely the case (most sites will test on an iPhone).
I have personally experienced this bug https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46309641/what-happens-in....
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#127I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).
I mean, I don't know that I'm afraid of it, in the sense that it's clearly already been here for a few years now. Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies on Earth and decided they didn't have the resources to compete with the web's Chromium monoculture.
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering that Samsung Internet, Brave, Opera, Electron etc is based on Chromium and at least Samsung Internet adding new features of their own to it, there are at least many other people working on the code base. I would guess that Microsoft would keep using Chorus rather than adopting V8, but if they aren’t, then V8 has contributions from eg. Node.js And as states in the article: Edge on Android and on ARM seems…
There's a crucial difference between "working on the code base" and having commit access. The committers are the gatekeepers and the steamrollers. What I'm effectively asking is this: 1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it? 2. If the community opts to steer Chromium in a way that Google finds objectionable, could Google stop it?
1. No.
2. Yes.
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#129Funny that minor side project of KDE is now responsible for the vast majority of today's Internet traffic. Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work?
> Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work?
Why would they? That's not how open source works. If the KDE devs that made Konqueror wanted to capture value or do it for monetary gain they would have made a closed source browser and I doubt Apple would have then picked it to build WebKit.
Apple is what made WebKit predominant, the KDE devs simply did a great job and should be very proud of what they've done, but it doesn't make sense for there to be policy change around open source for recompensating devs when their projects take off.
Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration
#130I feel like I should be happy as a web dev to hear that I no longer have to support a browser engine made by Microsoft (which has been a huge pain and despite this will be a huge pain for a while due to people still using old browsers) but this feels bittersweet. It feels like we're taking the engineering out of everything because companies can make more money by not innovating.
They want short term wins and gives away long term ones.
I guess the Chrome team itself aren’t happy about this. Will make standards work harder for them. Better to have the Edge team build alternative implementations of standards in their own engines than to implement even more stuff in Chromium.
Chrome already has a hard time not running ahead of the rest of the web, they don’t need more people to speed it up even further.