This is HUGE!
Microsoft throwing away the IE engine in favor of one more or less standard rendering engine is a huge win for web developers everywhere!
It's also something that would have been unimaginable in the Steve Ballmer era.
Thank you!
Microsoft throwing away the IE engine in favor of one more or less standard rendering engine is a huge win for web developers everywhere!
It's also something that would have been unimaginable in the Steve Ballmer era.
Thank you!
Competition is good. Monoculture is bad.
That said, supporting all of the standards in a way that makes everyone happy is completely impossible. And if you're not in first place, it's just Cost, Cost, Cost for you.
I don't blame them for doing this, but I'm sad about it.
As a customer, meh, less competition.
That said, there seems to be tons of competition on various formats, web competes with podcasts, mobile apps, and I would even say websites like Medium/youtube.
It's a tragedy that companies and standards committees can't give you APIs / SDKs / Standards that just work.
When a company gives up, that's not good.
And a huge loss for users everywhere. Now that Chrome is becoming the main web target, Google (an adtech company) basically controls the internet.
If you want to push competition and choice, encourage everyone to use Firefox (or Safari if they only use macOS).
And still, it was some competition to Chrome and Firefox.
> encourage everyone to use Firefox.
Which can be done while also lamenting the loss of a Firefox competitor, especially when said loss gains Firefox nothing.
We can lament the passing of Edge, but I wonder how people would have felt if instead of Edge they just had this announcement as the replacement for IE. Would we have cared? No one seems to miss IE.
There actually might have been an outcry over this. I'm not aware of any Firefox forks, for example, that aren't focused on privacy. MS would have been the first to fork FF and undo lots of the privacy features in the browser (engine).
With Chrome/Chromium, there's a reluctant acceptance of data-harvesting and (unethical) tracking.
I wonder if MS gave the above scenario some thought...
MS went with Chromium because they want that implicit "best viewed in Chrome" compatibility.
The decision-making process varies based on where in the codebase you are. Blink has a lot of details on this, because it's what impacts the web platform and where we've needed to work with the most external input; you can read the various process summaries on https://www.chromium.org/blink . Things are less well-specified as you move up the stack because there's been less need to specify them. Perhaps that will change going forward.
Employee participation is the same as for Opera, Intel, Samsung, Yandex, etc. today: review and commit code, be an OWNER, participate on the mailing lists. Chromium tries to be a true open-source project.
As for disagreements about direction, I think the existing web platform discussions among all vendors provide an example of how disparate companies can come together and try to agree directionally. People from Brave, Opera, etc. already participate in those forums despite basing their browsers on the Chromium core. Blink sets a high bar for shipping features that have interop risks, so it's already true that the goal is consensus rather than a fractured web. And I'm sure Microsoft would not be keen to use Chromium if they didn't feel like they would have significant directional input where desirable.
Most of the concerns expressed in these comments seem reasonable on their face but also sound like the people expressing them haven't actually contributed to Chromium/Blink. I encourage people to chip in changes and even express opinions on our mailing lists. We try to welcome such contributions :)
MSFT is already contributing to Chrome, e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460
From my position sitting at the crossroads of Clang/LLVM and Chrome (the team I work on developed clang-cl), all the interactions I've seen with MSFT are positive.
This is a blessing for developers but a curse and threat for the web going forward.