Gecko is depressingly tied to Firefox and not easily embedded. Blink has somehow become the de facto browser engine thanks to Electron. Even Qt (QtWebEngine) is now based on Blink instead of WebKit. A lot of web apps like Teams only support Blink/Chromium, just like the dark old days of Internet Explorer. Chrome and Edge are basically spyware which people are most drawn to because of being somewhat default and/or well known for their phone/PC.
I do hope GeckoView gets wider support, but at the same time, the competition is already insanely entrenched. People arn't using Firefox because they prefer Gecko's rendering, after all.
This is news to me. When did that happen ?
(and it sucked, because suddenly a Qt application with a web view was several times larger)
For one, there's so many examples to crib from about how to do it.
But more generally, I just feel like every other player in the space has adopted an adversarial stance. For sure, sometimes Safari or less typically Firefox do lead, but it's rarely by much & usually the set of capabilities overall is far far less.
I don't want a monoculture either, but until we get a other pro-web player who can web-forward their shit, who is aggressive about making the web better, there's just zero hope for this conversation. Blink plus two boat anchors isn't good.
The IE comparison is so woefully out of touch & distasteful. Hard pass. Chrome tries. There wasn't the ecosystem of standards bodies back when IE was inventing stuff whenever they felt like, but today there are tons of expectations & reviews happening at multiple levels to try to refine & figure out what makes sense. In some ways it works great & a lot of review happens, but Moz + Apple hate any real power for the web & kick & scream & don't actually review what should be done if we did want to do the capability & reject on principle making a bigger web platform. There's no real debate because 2/3 players actively believe & push for a small web. It's a miserable rock & hard place situation, trying to figure out what to do when there's only one ayer who believes in a web platform at all.
I love the new entrants, but I really worry they'll also be into their own jam & not excited or interested in making a broader better web platform, and just turn the 2 Vs 1 anti/pro web into a 3 Vs 1 battle.
They have a very different vision of the web where users live in a corporate playground and complex browser engines which only a few large corps can manage.
At this point what is making the web a better platform? The web has feature overload, even with features like Server Push which are seldom used. FWIW I think there are some exciting possibilities and new features for the web, especially around the P2P space, but I don't think it's in Google's interests to push for that at all.
I think most no one has any respect or appreciation for the circumstance flocs & topic Api was raised in. The dogfucker skanks at Internet Advertising Bureau were actively pushing government regulators to replace cookies with some gobshit anti user trash, far worse. I genuinely feel for Google. No one sees or knows any of the other context going down at the time, but all eyes are on the team of like 40 trying to find some way to preserve some privacy, in an org & task that is the hugest fucking lightning rod for attention & negativity, being the most visible & one of the most hated companies on the planet.
I agree that Google seems to have kind of lost the will to fight for a lot of good shit. There's still tons of great Google initiatives, but if someone can't tick it off their OKR within 8 months & call it a raring success, the effort & the team has seemingly no backing, no one with real principle intelligence or spine to keep the really really smart good shit going. That's just not a reasonable time frame for adoption. The web's early adopters take 3 years, minimum, for most interesting capabilities, and there's seemingly no one anywhere with that kind of patience for rolling out. Fuck this industry. This is why we can't have nice things.
EME is better than browsers having to implement their own proprietary APIs for DRM. If EME didn't exist DRM would still be used by sites like Netflix.
>FLoC and Topics API
These are better for privacy than learning interests by tracking via third party cookies. These are moves to retain the positive uses of the web while increasing people's privacy.
>At this point what is making the web a better platform?
WebGPU released recently and provided big speedups to GPU intensive use cases.
>but I don't think it's in Google's interests to push for that at all.
What's the benefits to users or server hosters? Will it improve the user experience? Reduce latency? Save costs? If peer to peer features provide value I don't see why they wouldn't be interested. Peer to peel has its own set of drawbacks so there are many uses where it isn't a good option.
Not to say I don't believe you, I'm just curious. In what way(s) does Google uniquely believe in the web as a platform where Apple/Mozilla don't? Can you provide some examples of this?
I'm sorry I really want to find the links & show this off more. It was the most boldfaced & honest admission that basic useful interesting things were not welcome, profiteering off suspicion & hostility while telling users that the anti-feature was undecidedly the only acceptable way.
One can also review moz's standards positions. It's a great effort & I applaud Moz for their transparency & don't want to hurt the effort. There's aot of good too. But there's such a long sordid history of Moz saying no absolutely not this is awful, then eventually having to circle back around & at least make some effort to not be a huge stick in the mud, to at least help figure out at some degree what would fit if this was a goal. And often deciding yeah, we will do it https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
They just don't seem to have any ability to differentiate between what a privileged/permission-ed site should be granted versus what the baseline security model should be. Any potential information leak anywhere seems like cause to terminate effort.
Maybe it is objectively inferior to chrome, but not enought to make me switch.
IOW, I'm not missing anything by staying with FF because all the sites I use work with FF.
In fact, a site that only works on one browser is probably not a site that anyone goes to anyway, objective metrics be damned.
They began a replacement engine 7 years later to address shortcomings, and 3 years after that still aren’t sure if it’s actually better and worth switching over to?
Now that I write this, I kind of get it. But I’ve only experienced this for weeks worth of work, not for years.
I knew Servo was part of Mozilla, but was confused by the article. It said 2013 was in use, but listed multiple major issues with it that I would think would prevent FF from being acceptable by any normal person.
Knowing it was a project and not a part of the current FF engine (as I had assumed) is the context I was missing.
Thank you. I don’t follow FF development closely enough to know this stuff, I just know enough to recognize a few project names.
Servo if memory serves was also experimenting with 3d layouts in VR as the wave of the future at one point. Make your own conclusions.
The really actually useful thing that came out of that effort was the CSS engine which is already incorporated into Firefox.
Is there a demonstration Web browser that can be built with the layout 2020 option enabled?
I'm thinking of something like the very basic one that WebKit had when I used to try these things years ago.
But they’re not, so we all have to more or less guess what the intrinsic algorithms for drawing fundamental aspects of the web are supposed to be.
Such a failure of the CSS specs.
That complexity does lead to bugs (and bugs in Chrome can become part of the de-facto standard if the Chrome devs don't fix the bug fast enough) but the spec itself seems quite complete in most areas. In the few areas that are underspecified, simply seeing what other browsers do usually fixes the problem as there's usually an overlap in behaviour between at least two out of three remaining browser render engines.
The basic algorithms and rendering steps are all laid out pretty well in the spec. Even Quirks Mode has a standard (https://quirks.spec.whatwg.org/), though that's far from complete as every browser has its own compatibility quirks because of browser detection and branded CSS properties.
I know CSS documentation used to be awful, but the current version of the WHATWG spec is quite readable in my opinion and doesn't leave as much room for confusion anymore.
It was a nightmare, and part of the reason (I believe) that Perl 6 got so over-specified. It meant you couldn’t count on the spec, that you never knew if something was a bug or intended behavior.
HTML4 was in a similar situation. Microsoft and Netscape developed competing variations of under-specified features, leading to a decade of the worst Dark Ages for web development.
So if we use Chromium’s CSS engine, then either (a) Google now controls a fundamental part of the web (and there’s no evidence that they’ll behave in any sort of responsible manner), or (b) we now have the same specification problem.
Getting complex code and specs to agree 100% is a Hard Problem, unsolved almost everywhere. Giving more power to Google won’t help.
While that’s not necessarily a capability a smaller not well funded browser might have, certainly they have lots of forums to advertise “hey Google is doing this incorrect thing, this is how we detect existing sites relying on that buggy behavior, and this is how you fix it”. You could even show a banner while browsing “standard confirming vs not”. You leave that banner out for places the standard is underspecified to be fair and reinstitute it once you’ve got it clarified, assuming websites are still relying on those nonstandard paths / Chrome isn’t addressing the behavior.
That being said, it’s no surprise this is the situation when all commercial investment into browser tech is by commercial companies giving it away for free. Think about the hundreds of millions of dollars being pored in. That’s not out of the goodness of their heart and it’s going to be difficult to impossible for anyone else to compete.
For what it’s worth I think a huge regulatory improvement to monopoly laws would be an anti-dumping provisions for software. You’re not allowed to sell something below what it costs you to make (including accounting for R&D) and the only person’s effort your allowed to 0-rate is your own and any unpaid volunteers you convince to join you. It would mean that browsers would now cost actual money that could fund third party efforts (ie if my budget for browsers is X then maybe I want to invest in a browser that treats me better). Of course the challenge with this model is that it makes it hard to actually enforce. Are you giving a feature away for free or are you improving an existing product and it’s part of that overall cost? How do you budget recurring revenues for products that want to amortize the cost over periodic payments instead of upfront ones? Etc etc. I don’t necessarily know what the answers are. There may be none. But certainly Google’s control of the web comes from the fact that they’re poring in huge amounts of money to maintain a controlling interest over the thing that enables a good chunk of their revenue stream. It’s not as important to Apple and we see them not investing as heavily (it’s important for the product but it’s not intrinsically strategically as key hence the historic neglect). Same goes to Microsoft which ceded its spot in the internet ecosystem to Google back in the day.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Google’s control won’t weaken because you cede to duplicate their particular implementation. Their control weakens when you can take away their market share and for a smaller entrant you want to replicate as much behavior verbatim as possible to lower friction for users. It doesn’t matter what the spec says. Aggressively prioritize what is important to customers and serve the market where Google is incapable of doing it. For example, memory usage is a trivial one to get them on. They’ve lost control of that beast and can’t figure out how to get better. Clobber them in the head over that failure. They can’t handle many simultaneous tabs. Make your browser work smoothly and without crashing or using terabytes of memory even if it’s handling 100k tabs. If I were to take on that endeavor, that’s how I would take on Google (and no, I wouldn’t use Blink as a starting point because you’re just picking up all the tech debt and you’re not going to do a better job than Google at trying to shovel shit away - you need to start greenfield like Chrome did and firefox and opera did for a time when they showed what a performance hog IE was and how it didn’t even have valuable features that people cares about). Similarly, ship the browser with adblock and actively fight websites that waste resources. Prioritize aggressively the user’s health and digital well being (meaningful privacy improvements by closing as many side channel data gathering techniques as possible) and respect the well being of the machine you’re running on.
(I'm an engineer on Blink's layout engine).
We've recently finished re-architecting Blink's layout engine, part of the reason why we did this investment was we were concerned that we couldn't fix WebKit era bugs (e.g. too many sites would depend on them due to our shared heritage). This makes other engines jobs (e.g. Gecko) super difficult as they'd need to encode even more quirks than they have time for.
I think we've broadly mitigated a large part of that risk. There are still large parts of CSS which are underspecified, e.g. tables/block/float layout. But its slowly getting better.
I'm not saying Blink exactly matched WebKit anymore, before your re-architecture. But it shared a lot.
If you have a difference in behavior between 2 implementations, then it's easy to see think of it as saying one or the other is right. And which one is right will be partly influenced by the amount of exposure the feature has had, multiplied by market share. Which is not a great criterion to use if you want a spec that hangs together, especially if a reimagining like Servo is going to come along and rub against the grain of every arbitrary decision ever made.
Is there an example of under-specification that sticks around in practice?
Everything they do has to work with the old stuff, or be very explicit that you’re changing the rules (like adding “display: flex”).
I suspect there is also a fair amount of “this is what everyone did so try not to break it” in there too, much like HTML.
I’m not sure anyone could make a clean spec under those circumstances.
HTML6 or CSS4 could have a fresh, clean start and there's nothing preventing that.
Also, Safari is a thing (and personally I prefer FF for webdev, though Moz is certainly working hard to turn me away).
(1) those worth reading anyway, rather than generated content
See also, https://wiki.csswg.org/faq#versioning-css-fixing-design-mist...
But there is a long long long legacy of CSS Acid Tests that have been very well established & expected, that should guide most implementations to success.
I forget what it's called but a bunch of the major browsers get together each year & find a couple things to agree to focus on & make happen each year. Trying to just play catchup & go through the years catching up seems semi intuitive a path to getting to modern. I agree that maybe not all these specs have gotten great test suites set up, but I feel like CSS in general realized this was a problem we'll over a decade ago & upped their game. Maybe the situation has decayed since, I dont K ke, but would love more idea of where we lie atm.
Firefox abandoned it years ago, and now Flow and Ladybird are from-scratch new, efficient browsers.
While you are busy improving the layout engine other browsers are working on features that bring value to users.
However there are still quite a lot of much, mich easier wins Mozilla has either ignored for 20 years or actively walked back on.
I care more about my browser being fast than I do about it supporting WebMIDI or WebSerial and I think most users agree with that. Performance and efficiency are also the reason (as far as I can tell) that macOS users stick with Safari.
I really really hope it pans out & delivers. But it properly & rightly should be an ever shrinking piece of the puzzle. It underpins it all & flexility here would be key, better tech (parallelizable!) very empowering, put to the sword many criticisms, but yeah: it's an ever shrinking factor versus what we can do with the web.
And there are so so so few powers helping us make what we can do with the web better. Even the historic pro-web folk are trying to end the web as we know it. The "Towards a Modern Web Stack" Hixie mentality (Flutter CanvasKit) is to basically ignore destroy & end the contemporary web & html & make the browser a native app delivery platform with zero user-agency, to make it a giant moving picture show. The rest of the browsers have adopted a highly adversarial stance where every possible feature is portrayed as a threat to users, as ruin. There's just so few visionary hopeful excited people left building browsers that do stuff for people. You are so right on.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Thanks for the helpful linking. Was getting a bit sloppy last night with the posting.
