Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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There are some differences between Chrome and previous browser incumbents:

- Most of Chrome is open source. This would surely run in Chromium.

- It's cross platform.

- It supports web standards. WebAssembly for example.

Are things really full circle? I mean the situation could be better but the amount of things that work seamlessly between multiple browsers has never been larger. Very advanced web apps are now assumed to work across at least Chrome and Firefox, and probably Edge, with only a handful of exceptions, when in the past most things beyond basic pages simply didn't or required Java or Flash binary blobs. I don't think anyone in the browser space is intentionally making things worse, things have mostly just gotten better. NaCl may be a notable exception, but prior to WebAssembly it seemed like a good idea, and frankly the technology itself still seems pretty useful. NaCl also still has a lot of things WebAssembly doesn't yet.

I see no bad intentions. Just people making the best out of a rapidly moving platform. Someone else in this thread mentioned a WebAssembly port is coming eventually, no reason to doubt it given NaCl is deprecated.

Also, P.S.: The NaCl situation is unideal, but frankly I'd rather boot up Chrome to run something than, for example, installing and using an NPAPI plugin that has full privileges and code I can't inspect. (I am, actually, a Firefox user at home.)

(Disclaimer: Google employee, but nowhere near the Chrome team.)

>I see no bad intentions.

It doesn't take bad intentions to end up destroying an open ecosystem, just a lack of effort to create standard solutions while being the majority market share gorilla.

Microsoft employees likely thought they were doing good by adding non-standard features to IE as well given that "standards couldn't keep up" for them either.

Sorry, I just don't see that pattern repeating here. Nothing like JScript or MSJVM, no ActiveX or BHO or COM.

NaCl solved real problems people had. NaCl allowed secure native code inside Chrome extensions and webapps, before Asm.js and before WebAssembly. It helped with removing insecure NPAPI usages (in the past, a Chrome extension could contain an NPAPI plugin![1])

Nowadays, NaCl is a lot less necessary. Many apps can run just fine in Asm.js and WebAssembly. This is definitely due to cross collaboration from the browser vendors, improving JavaScript performance and solidifying the idea of a cross-platform, safe, portable binary format that could be implemented by all browser vendors. That seems like a fantastic outcome to me, as an end user.

Other browsers could've implemented NaCl if they pleased. I recall Mozilla pushing for pure JS and later asm.js instead. In the end, the solution we really ended up with is a lot like a mix of NaCl and Asm.js. You could argue we would've gotten here without NaCl, but I think the end user is certainly better off without things like NPAPI plugins.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/npapi

> Most of Chrome is open source. This would surely run in Chromium.

That's neither here nor there. For the purposes of this discussion, Chrome and Chromium are the same browser, and the design and development of the Chromium platform is very much dominated by Google, sufficient to call them the owners of the platform.

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