281–290 of 304 posts
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I have personally experienced this bug https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46309641/what-happens-in... .
That's not a bug. "transparent 0" is not a standard way of defining things, and bad use o CSS in production.
Funny 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?
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Wow, easy there. I'm guessing this is a stressful day around the Mozilla watercooler. This is bad news for Mozilla. Web authors will target the behavior supported by a majority of user browsers. With many independent browsers, there is no implementation majority, just a plurality. Majority behavior only comes from a standard and all implementers are incentivized to work with that standard. When there's only a few, it…
> Maybe a couple of commodity web browsers and engineers working on other more important stuff is better for society? How many implementations of CSS does the world really need? Shouldn't users have the best possible CSS engine? If there's only one, and it's beholden to the reporting structure at Google, then disruptive innovations are less likely to happen. People who don't work at Google should be allowed to develo…
Shouldn't they have the best possible COBOL compiler? The best possible VRML renderer? The best possible ICQ client?
Obviously CSS is way less dead than those, but there is always an opportunity cost. It's not a valid engineering argument to say "we should spend resources on X" without considering what else those resources could be spent on.
My initial comment is really just observing that maybe Microsoft's move actually does imply that they believe, no, the world doesn't need another CSS engine. I don't know if that's true or not, but I think it's interesting to ask the question.
We sort of a tacitly assume that the web will grow and grow forever and ever. But maybe that's just because we've only seen the first half of its life cycle. Maybe it is reaching a plateau and becoming a commodity. There are good questions about whether that's true and, if so, whether that's a good thing.
But I don't think it's illuminating to just assume the best way to improve the world is to have as many browser implementations as possible. Like an entire Dyson sphere populated solely by engineers each writing their own HTML parser.
> then disruptive innovations are less likely to happen.
Maybe the disruptive innovation has happened and the disruption was to move off the web. The Internet and HTTP is doing great. What mobile app isn't on the Internet? Maybe HTML+CSS+JS is no longer the optimal user interface language for it.
> People who don't work at Google should be allowed to develop the Web platform, without asking Google for permission.
I guess I don't see what you're getting at. Browsers don't write themselves, so if you don't want to ask one of a couple of giant rich corporations to do something, that means you better have deep pockets yourself.
Even if Microsoft kept their web engine, how does that help? Now instead of asking Google, Mozilla, and WebKit for permission, you have to ask Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and WebKit for permission and then get them to all agree on it.
I am just curious how competitiveness works in FAANG.
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In late 2018, using Rust is a lot more serious of a proposal. But, in practice, I don't think the case for Rust in the browser would be nearly as compelling if we hadn't shown that it can be done. That's one strong reason for browser engine diversity: different engines can try different things. I think it's fair to say that a Rust proposal would have been dead-on-arrival a couple of years ago. It'd be seen as far too…
Rust as a language was significantly less mature a few years ago; I think that's the bigger factor here. It certainly doesn't hurt to do compelling things in Rust in a browser engine, but doing compelling things in Rust in some other project entirely would also be motivating. To look at it from another angle, Mozilla itself had a reason to try to tackle some problems with Rust. It didn't need a competing browser engi…
If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this "startup growth hacking" kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It's very confusing. Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggr…
Microsoft is trying to drive traffic to Bing (and their other services). The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. Microsoft could just bundle Chrome with Windows but instead they are specifically taking the Chromium engine and putting it in an Edge shell. The only reason for that is to maintain control over the user to drive them to Microsoft properties.
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In reality, none of the browsers are quite standards compliant, and developers don’t know the standards by heart, so they often go with what works on their setup, which usually means Chrome.
Any self-respecting and experienced developer who is worth his salt writes his code towards the standards and not toward a browser. If one needs to adjust his code because it doesn't work in a particular browser, then he's adjusting for the browser, not the standard.
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A very nice property of open source software is that you can fork it, "show that it can be done" without having to start from scratch, and if the results are provably better, get your approach adopted. The trickiest part is the proving that the different approach technology is enough better to warrant a switch. Very often, new approaches don't live up to expectations (not saying this is the case for the tech you're t…
1. This is actually discouraged for many projects (e.g. LLVM), because of the possibility that someone does a lot of work and then their results are not accepted. 2. The issues here don't have to do with whether the technology "works" (it does), but rather "developer velocity" and other more social/political concerns.
1. When you're experimenting with a seriously new technology or approach, the most likely outcome is that you'll fail, especially at the market adoption level. Being able to conduct your experiment at a lower cost is still a net positive, except for one point: having invested less, you are more likely to abandon the experiment early, because of the sunken costs fallacy. That doesn't necessarily need to be the case.
2. Developer velocity/productivity is something that you can demonstrate - as long as the difference is consistent, like, not 10% faster, but 80% faster. Other social/political concerns are a different thing, but really, gaining market adoption based only on those is VERY difficult - if that wasn't the case, I don't think we would be having this discussion at all, because Firefox would have a much higher penetration.
So, the point is, how is having a completely separate codebase going to help with having success? It could attract a higher number of idealistic developers, but the additional work required is very likely to negate that advantage.
I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it: stick it to Google [0] I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum ) or WebKit ( https://webkit.org ), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have suffice…
One thing that’s worse than Microsoft not adopting a technology is Microsoft adopting a technology. Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...
Microsoft was 2-5-10x the size of its EEE targets. Oracle, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. these days are equals. And equally ruthless.
Old quotes need to be adapted for the present day.
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Let's not get confused. Blink is a rendering engine and not an API server.
This kind of thing has stopped being true a long time ago. For all intents and purposes, web browsers are operating systems running web applications, taking care of security, etc. And all these Chromium-derived browsers are skins and utilities on top of Google's browser/OS.