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posted by mrpg on Sunday December 09 2018, @02:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-are-doomed! dept.

Mozilla's CEO is not enthusiastic about Microsoft's switch to Chromium:

When Microsoft announced that its Edge browser would be revamped using Chromium, the internet's response was generally quite positive. Edge is far from the worst browser on the planet, but it's certainly not what we'd call a fan favorite. As such, even the slightest indication that it could be changed significantly would have been welcome news for many.

However, it would seem that "many" doesn't include one individual in particular: Mozilla CEO Chris Beard. In a blog post published today, titled "Goodbye, EdgeHTML," Beard expressed his frustrations with Microsoft's decision.

"By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google," Beard writes in the post. "This may sound melodramatic, but it's not. The "browser engines" — Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla — are "inside baseball" pieces of software that actually determine a great deal of what each of us can do online."

Microsoft's switch to Chromium could be a big boon for Google's own implementation.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Sunday December 09 2018, @04:01PM (13 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday December 09 2018, @04:01PM (#771961)

    I suspect many people have forgotten what a browser monoculture looks like, so let me throw out a few reminders from the time IE was king.

    Does anyone else remember having to load extensions in to Mozilla/Netscape/Early Firefox that embedded the IE rendering engine just to get pages to load because they only rendered/ran properly in Microsoft Internet Explorer(TM)? That is basically what Firefox will be up against if everyone else switches to chrome. Developers will ignore Firefox and design only for Chrome or give Firefox users a lesser experience. Heck, there are already some sites like that out there. In time Firefox will find themselves forced to go the same way as Opera and just become a Chrome shell.

    Unfortunately, the "web standards" as such are a Mt Everest sized steaming pile of hodge-podge shit. The entire idea of manually "coding" documents should have been left back in the 1970s. Even the smallest implementation changes can break pages, and fixes/patches/workarounds for any less common rendering engines will not come fast enough, especially in this day when people expect updates every five minutes.

    When the leading browser vendor decides to assimilate some completely new (usually pointless) technology, less common rendering engines will again either take too long to re-implement/port the new technology or they attempt to do without.

    If the leading browser vendor decides to pull support for an OS, then that OS instantly shrivels up and dies. Open source only protects against this so much. Usually new "technologies" won't be available in backports, and eventually the codebase will mutate too much to work with different tools.

    In a monoculture, the leading browser vendor won't give a flying rats ass about any form of compatibility. Bugs will develop, and if smaller rendering engines are not bug-for-bug compatible then they may be considered unusable.

    Or to put it another way....

    [To read the rest of this comment, you must click this javascript link that only works in Google Crumb v98798769876]

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 09 2018, @04:53PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 09 2018, @04:53PM (#771983) Journal

    Modded up, despite that I don't entirely agree with your vision of the future.

    Yes, I well remember when everything on the web was "engineered" to work with IE5, and then IE6. After 6, things seemed to start relaxing. But, there are too many players involved today. Unlike IE, Microsoft isn't the end-all, be-all authority on Chrome. I don't even think Google can make that claim today.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 09 2018, @05:37PM (2 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday December 09 2018, @05:37PM (#772009) Homepage Journal

    I remain dumbstruck that HTML 5 permits unclosed elements.

    That surely makes rendering engines significantly more difficult to write.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Sunday December 09 2018, @06:15PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday December 09 2018, @06:15PM (#772025)

      I think some don't even act properly when you do close the ones that are "optional".

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @07:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @07:49PM (#772067)

      blame netscape for the madness. they should have been strict in what html they accepted. instead they dumbed it down for the masses, accepted brokeness, and we got the shit show we have today.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 09 2018, @05:40PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday December 09 2018, @05:40PM (#772013) Homepage Journal

    That no one has ever hacked the root nameservers is due in part to each of them running significantly different code from all the others.

    There was a time that while everybody readily agreed that there could be such a thing as a virus, they were never really a problem because there were so many different kinds of microcomputers - Altairs, Commodore 64s, Apple IIs and a whole bunch more.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by stormreaver on Sunday December 09 2018, @08:21PM (6 children)

    by stormreaver (5101) on Sunday December 09 2018, @08:21PM (#772079)

    ...so let me throw out a few reminders from the time IE was king.

    You're overlooking one HUGE, HUMONGOUS, GIGANTIC, GINORMOUS difference between I.E. and Chromium: Chromium is Open Source. Anyone with the skills to make a browser can use Chromium's rendering engine, therefore preventing the horrors that were thrust upon us in the medieval dark ages of Internet Explorer. Standardizing on Chromium is the single best thing that has EVER happened to Web browsers. It can become an inclusive standard: one rendering engine to develop for and test against, but one that, by its very nature, precludes the formation of abusive monopolies.

    Having multiple Web browsers that ALL RENDER IDENTICALLY is exactly what we need. Browsers can then differentiate themselves on non-rendering behavior, while having a single standard renderer. It's what we've all been wanting for over 25 years now.

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @09:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @09:08PM (#772084)

      "Chromium is Open Source"

      whoop-de fsckin' do

      The development money comes from Google

      A spy organization that is not operating in your best interest

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 09 2018, @11:47PM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday December 09 2018, @11:47PM (#772134) Homepage Journal

      Because there are far too many Open Source projects, and far too _few_ eyeballs.

      For every browser to have the very same rendering engine will ultimately result in the Sicilian Mafia, the Russian Mob, the Chinese Tong, the Japanese Yakuza or the Occasional Nigerian Sole Proprietor 0wnz0r1ng every last box that Walks The Earth.

      The only real defense against a world-wide malware attack is a diverse software ecosystem.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday December 10 2018, @12:20PM (1 child)

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday December 10 2018, @12:20PM (#772328)

      > Having multiple Web browsers that ALL RENDER IDENTICALLY is exactly what we need.

      Let's say that amazon, netflix and google collude to require *in the browser* in order to watch their streams. If you want to support users who want to watch netflix or amazon, your browser must support . If there are many browser rendering engines out there, then this is not possible because M$ or whoever don't want to give a bunk up. If there is only one, controlled by , then this becomes inevitable.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by mobydisk on Monday December 10 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)

      by mobydisk (5472) on Monday December 10 2018, @05:38PM (#772436)

      ...therefore preventing the horrors that were thrust upon us...

      Here's why that doesn't work: Not enough people will install your fork. Web designers will continue to develop for "real" Chrome and your voice will be lost to the wind under the weight of the simple fact that every machine out there will have "real" Chrome preinstalled on it.

      The problem when IE was king was not that we didn't have open-source browsers that were better, the problem was that one company had such a large market share that it didn't matter if it was complete garbage.

      • (Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday December 10 2018, @10:42PM

        by stormreaver (5101) on Monday December 10 2018, @10:42PM (#772610)

        It seems that EVERYONE who responded to me is missing the forest for the trees, and missing the trees for the forest. You're all missing the big picture. This has nothing to do with Linus's Law. This has nothing to do with creating a better product through many eyes (although, humorously enough, Blink is the result of forking Webkit, which was the result of forking KHTML [KDE's Web renderer], which resulted in a phenomenal renderer).

        This is about a common RENDERER, and has absolute nothing to do with a Web browser (except that a Web browser needs a renderer). This has nothing to do with amassing a user base large enough to overthrow Chrome (although you have to remember that the thought of Chrome overthrowing Internet Explorer was once considered laughable).

        Everyone (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and browsers that don't yet exist) starts with the same RENDERER (I'm using caps to emphasize the difference between a renderer and a Web browser), then differentiates their WEB BROWSER based upon everything that is not a RENDERER: user interface, plugins and extensions, etc. Firefox, for example, would get the necessary speed boost and additional stability that Quantum didn't achieve (and it's significant when playing Web games).

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:19PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:19PM (#773015) Homepage

    Your hypothesis is unconvincing given that the current state of the art is pulling in dozens of polyfill dependencies specifically to support compatibility with dozens of different browser implementations.

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