91–100 of 128 posts
Given history it is also personally interesting to consider Microsoft as a company that could have furthered open web standards.
The premise of Mozilla's Servo is that there are major performance and security issues in all the current browsers that are very hard to fix without a full rewrite. Because we have multiple competing browsers and solid standards, instead of a single widely used reference implementation, it's possible that Servo may succeed at this. If we switch to an open source browser engine monoculture we lose competition among re…
To fix this, someone simply need to build a better browser. Chrome did this when they taking over IE domination. I'm not taking about new privacy conscious browser but something that me and many other people really care. Is it hard ? yes but chrome did it before.
At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…
This is an important point. One thing that led to IE's downfall was its lack of standard compatibility. At the time, there were real web standards. Today, the "standard" seems to be whatever Chrome does. (Indeed, despite good standard compatibility, the pre-Chrome version of Edge suffered in terms of real-world compatibility, and that was an animating reason for the switch to Chromium: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...) So we are very differently positioned than we were when Firefox/Chrome overtook IE.
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…
Not happening. It's likely that Apple spends an inordinate amount of engineering on Safari to lock-out W3C web features that pose a competitive threat to their lucrative Monopoly: the app store. Their strategy has always appeared to be to purposefully cripple Safari to drive developers and users to the app store, and monetize there, both on the $99 annual fee for the developer's ability to publish apps, and that 30% cut on revenues from publishers. Then there's the whole arbitrary bans on certain apps that somehow undermine their control over the device and ecosystem.
If they didn't have a plan to cripple Safari to drive people to the store, why else would they ban browser engines from competitors?
At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…
> However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and vendor. This is an important point. One thing that led to IE's downfall was its lack of standard compatibility. At the time, there were real web standards. Today, the "standard" seems to be whatever Chrome does. (Indeed, despite good standard compatibility, the pre-Chrome version of Edge suffered…
I would agree, but not for the reason you state. IE was the standard back then, too. The difference is that once it was "good enough", Microsoft reduced investment in it and allowed it to stagnate. Others caught up in terms of compatibility and passed it in terms of usability.
Google, on the other hand, invests so much that no on else can keep up, and knows that this is the means by which they maintain control over the web (and web standards).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> any browser with noticeable (maybe 3-5%) market share causes these problems. No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them, they will usually pick an alternative solution that does work in all of them, avoiding the bug in the buggy browser, thus avoiding a situation where their site depends on that bug continuing to exist. It doesn't always work out as well as that,…
>No. When Web devs test in multiple browsers and find that something doesn't work in one of them, I question how many developers do that. Especially for smaller sites if it works in Chrome it's generally good enough.
At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…
Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice today is between freedom and convenience. The reason people flocked to Firefox in the first place was that it was both freedom and convenience.