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Comment by isomorphic | Hacker News Reader

> I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome...

I understand the sentiment, but to be clear: Ideally we do not want any one vendor with a majority browser share. Otherwise someone will get complacent and we'll have a repeat of the dark times (IE6). Having multiple browser vendors is good for the web.

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In this case Apple does not agree. They force everybody to use their rendering engine on iOS. To be clear, I do not condone this practice.

especially since their render engine is opinionated about how full-screen should work and other weirdness in managing pseudo elements and transform parents in layouts (i.e. anchor for relative is parent of the element they're attached not the element they're attached to)

We're already in complacency. It is not uncommon for me to find a standards-compliant site but which has unfixed bugs in Firefox which make it unusable, so you have to use Chrome.

Ideally we want to support an unambiguous spec, and if a browser has opinions about it let the user suffer until they switch with something more conformant

I can dream, right?

I picked Chrome because it is, as far as I know, the most standards-compliant browser in wide use at the moment. Firefox is quite good, Safari quite less good, and IE 11 and Edge are okay. Nobody really uses Opera... Depending on which set of stats you like, Chrome might already have a majority share.

I just wish that there was one unambiguous spec that they all supported. How many man-hours on aggregate have been wasted tweaking CSS and futzing with javascript to try to achieve identical results across browsers that have all these slight and not-so-slight differences of opinion about the HTML, CSS and ECMAScript specs?

A whole other world of pain is when you get into browsers that are embedded in GUI frameworks, or as extension points in other products. You really have no idea what they support, until you try something and see it is broken. Does this browserPanel object use the system version of IE, or some other version, or an old, forked version of WebKit, or some other Lovecraftian monstrosity?

> I picked Chrome because it is, as far as I know, the most standards-compliant browser in wide use at the moment

you sure? Firefox is ahead in at least 2 of the 3 categories on caniuse (though I will admit, they are _very_ close).

Look under "Summary" on these pages:

* http://caniuse.com/#cats=JS%20API

* http://caniuse.com/#cats=Other

* http://caniuse.com/#cats=CSS

While diversity is certainly good, the major difference here is that Google has an intrisic reason to constantly improve and innovate in Chrome, while Microsoft back then clearly didn't: the whole IE development was driven by trying to get rid of the competition (in particular Netscape), and when that was done, development stopped for a long time.

Do you trust a company whose major revenues are coming from online advertising to improve Chrome for the web or for the companies revenues ? Think to ChromeOS for instance.

I don't want to be too suspicious, but to improve the web I'd rather bet on the Mozilla fundation.

Yeah... but I kinda wouldn't mind if they were all using the same open source rendering engine under the hood.

... But that's exactly what they're saying we DON'T want. A lot of browsers re-used IE 6's rendering engine because it had a monopoly. That only made the situation worse.

A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters, and if anyone has a monopoly that is "bad" because competition helps innovation.

Each rendering engine winds up, for good and bad, with a small group of people deciding what features do and do not get put in. If they simply decide that feature Y doesn't get put in, and that rendering engine has a monopoly then feature Y is a non-entity as far as the web is concerned.

For example, if Google controlled the web's primary rendering engine do you think Do Not Track would be in it? NO! It took all of their major competition to add it before they did, starting with IE.

> A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters

Active X would like to disagree with you. We're currently dealing with a massive (revenue/company) product that only runs under IE < 10 because it still uses Active X.

I don't think a common rendering engine is at all a bad thing. Maybe two to keep them honest. But blink + webkit + trident (?) + Gecko (?) seem like wasted engineering talent.

South Korea has(or had, they may have changed it in the last few months) a law that enforces the usage of ActiveX for everything which needs security (e. g. online banking, online shopping)

That sounds like a prime example of incredible technical incompetence of the lawmakers or incredibly good lobbying by MS. Maybe both.

It made some sense at the time the law was conceived. SSL was crippled to uselessness by US export restrictions. IE 6 had a monopoly. So they built their own much more secure encryption (using ActiveX to plug into IE) and mandated its use for everything that matters.

The incompetence was in mandating a certain implementation instead of writing a technology-neutral law requiring a certain security level.

Interesting! So bad actions by the US gov led to bad results for US companies....

Bad actions by the US gov led to bad workarounds by other govs

Blink and WebKit don't have much overlap.

> A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters,

> For example, if Google controlled the web's primary rendering engine do you think Do Not Track would be in it?

Isn't Do Not Track a pretty good example for a browser feature that is independent of the rendering engine?

What popular browser vendors used the IE6 rendering engine besides IE6? I have many memories of dealing with various Firefox/Chrome differences, but I never once dealt with a popular browser vendor outside of IE that used the IE6 rendering engine.

I don't necessarily agree with your assertion that a browser's rendering engine is the only part that matters. Internet explorer ships with windows by default. Mozilla (firefox) has policies that focus on privacy. Chrome focuses on speed, and, well, serving Google.

These are all things that differentiate the products in the market and aren't necessarily rendering engine related. Yes - if one entity maintained absolute control of the rendering engine, then the needs of each vendor would not be served - but then it wouldn't be open source, either.

A lot of ISPs shipped stuff that were IE shells, like AOL (and we had Walmart Connect for a time when I was growing up), in addition to browsers like Maxathon. Even Netscape (8?) at one point had an option to be an IE shell.

I'd say the JS engine matters quite a bit as well. If Google didn't push the limits with V8 I don't think we would necessarily be in this JavaScript-all-the-things world we currently live in. Whether that is a good or bad thing is still up for debate. :)

Which one? Because we have a supplier's site that doesn't seem to work in post-Blink Chrome.

As a counter, you can pervert the dual sourcing argument here and come up with something similar.

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