Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#31

Post by leoc » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:25 AM UTC

saulrh wrote: post #18

lazyjones wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly useless features th…

> controlled by people with no ulterior motives. Everyone used to think that was Google. Anyway, if by some miracle you do find anyone that matches that description but knows where the lever is to kick everything over to a new paradigm, don't tell anyone about them, because as soon as you do they'll have more ulterior motives then you can count.

Indeed you won't solve the problem by finding people with no ulterior motives. Instead, the least-bad chance you have of solving it is to make the base platform small enough that the Too Big To Fork problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6807380#6810259 is kept under control, so that competing implementations (and the threat of competing implementations) will help to keep the implementers honest, or at least more honest than they would otherwise be. Instead the Web started as an overly large platform, and fell increasingly under the control of its small group of large implementers (partly) as a result; then those implementers, for a variety of reasons, predictably made the platform even larger and more unforkable, which in turn squeezed out some more of those implementers. The strange thing is how many observers were cheering this process until pretty recently.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#32

Post by leoc » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:26 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #17

roca wrote: post #11

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach: Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the…

> A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly useless features th…

It's like the cat who gets too far up a tree, then decides to deal with the problem by going further up the tree.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#33

Post by Fnoord » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:33 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #20

saulrh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> controlled by people with no ulterior motives. Everyone used to think that was Google. Anyway, if by some miracle you do find anyone that matches that description but knows where the lever is to kick everything over to a new paradigm, don't tell anyone about them, because as soon as you do they'll have more ulterior motives then you can count.

> Everyone used to think that was Google. When was that? Around the time they decided to liberate the web from the evil clutches of Microsoft/IE and ... Mozilla/FF (20%+ and growing at that time)?

> When was that?

When people still believed in the slogan 'Don't be evil' [1]. Google even removed the slogan. I guess they don't believe in it themselves anymore. The replacement 'Do the right thing' seems like a variation of Nike's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#34

Post by qwerty456127 » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:38 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #29

qwerty456127 wrote: post #26

The problem with browsers is they are so complex people can't build alternative implementations and keep them perfectly compatible. We need concise well-engineered and precisely-defined web standards a small team can implement in reasonable time. Many people would build competing browsers if there were yet we have what we have and no choice but to stick with the Google engine.

Sure. And then Google will start extending that standard, then sites will start depending on those extensions, and any browser that refuses or is unable to implement them will be extinguished/irrelevant.

How many websites rely on google-specific features not defined by W3C, WHATWG, ECMA etc. today?

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#35

Post by SquareWheel » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:44 AM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #25

Most of the post resonates well with me, but at that point > Ideally, this codebase would not be controlled by any single company. I'd love to see a common browser engine controlled by an independent nonprofit foundation I had a bit of a facepalm moment. This is exactly how Google started out: Chrome(ium) was built based on webkit, so basically there was a mini consortium where Google and Apple would work together. B…

There's a lot you're glossing over there. For instance the split from WebKit resulted in 4.5 million of lines of code that could be deleted, reducing bloat. Apple could then do the same on their end.

It was a relationship which ended on good terms. Your comment makes it sound like it was antagonistic.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#36

Post by petjuh » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:48 AM UTC

The big difference is that IE6 was a PITA to develop against while Chrome is a breeze. Developers wouldn't have hated the IE6 monoculture if it was as fast as Chrome and had developer tools and features as nice as it.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#37

Post by hlkps » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:48 AM UTC

roca wrote: post #11

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach: Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the…

>To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. Yes, this is already true to some extent, but it could get much worse. So fixing bugs would get harder.

If instead of Blink we had Blink AND Gecko, instead of Chromium bugs being the standard, Chromium AND Firefox bugs would be the standard. How is having to implement workarounds for TWO engines worse than having to implement workarounds for ONE engine?

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#38

Post by hlkps » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 9:53 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #17

roca wrote: post #11

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach: Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the…

> A single browser codebase hurts the maintainability of the Web platform. To the extent Chromium has a monopoly, Chromium bugs are the standard and sites will depend on them. It's not the single browser codebase that hurts the web, any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. The main issue is that today, the web as a platform is garbage. It's full of cruft, mostly useless features th…

>Much of this could have been avoided by knocking some sense into the entities that constantly propose new features and those who implement them as native browser elements instead of JS libraries where possible.

That's what Google did with the shadow DOM they used on YouTube: since Firefox had no support for it they wrote a polyfill (which is a JS library to emulate a feature) and the resulting performance was terrible.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#39

Post by Smithalicious » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 10:04 AM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #33

lazyjones wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone used to think that was Google. When was that? Around the time they decided to liberate the web from the evil clutches of Microsoft/IE and ... Mozilla/FF (20%+ and growing at that time)?

> When was that? When people still believed in the slogan 'Don't be evil' [1]. Google even removed the slogan. I guess they don't believe in it themselves anymore. The replacement 'Do the right thing' seems like a variation of Nike's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

Hah, I love that slogan change. "Yes, we do things that are evil, but we also do things that aren't evil sometimes"

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#40

Post by Certhas » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 10:19 AM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #24

roca wrote: post #11

Some major problems with the "let's all use Chromium" approach: Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting. All the companies that use Chromium are using it because they want Google to do the heavy lifting, so that isn't going to change, even if Google decides to put an open governance face on it, and there's no sign they're going to do even that. Should Google really be ceded complete power over the…

As bad as this all is, it seems like an unavoidable consequence to the nature of our economy. Do we really need separate competing: • Office Suites • Search engines • link sharing sites • internet runtimes that all do roughly the same thing? Maybe we do. Maybe Google should be broken up into a bunch of smaller Google's and be forced to interoperate with smaller search companies like DuckDuckGo, Qwant and TinEye. Like…

Maybe not. Maybe these all are more like infrastructure companies rather than service/product providers. But then we should regulate them as infrastructure companies, too.