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Comment by PinkMilkshake | Hacker News Reader

Just a hypothetical.

Is it possible the way to fix this issue is to actually have all vendors do the same thing.

Should all the vendors including Mozilla switch to Chromium and then fork it, couldn't we look at this as a "rebasing" of the Web?

If the forks are true hard forks, then we shouldn't necessarily end up in a situation where one vendor has more power than the other.

On the contrary, all vendors would now be on an even footing with the same strong, highly-compatible core engine.

All the issues people have with Firefox and Edge would no longer be relevant, and the only thing left to judge one company from another would be their value-add services or their ethics.

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Similar to problems seen in agricultural monocultures, software monocultures massively increase the risk of widespread failure from a single attack.

The problem isn't really who has the engine itself-- I'd say for most purposes, most browsers are about as good for 99% of workflows.

It's more of the forces and plays each company has around their browser strategy.

IE wasn't the best browser and didn't have the best engine, but it came bundled with Windows and was free. Firefox was a better browser by some metrics back then, in spite of having a company with less resources backing it.

Today, Chrome isn't the best and doesn't come bundled with devices, but Chrome-only sites are starting to appear (YouTube TV notoriously was Chrome-only until just this August [1]. This article lists Google Meet and Google Earth as other Chrome-only sites, at least at launch [2].

Moreover, you hear stories like these [3]:

> "I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life."

So even if all browser engines were to be hard-forks of the same, each one would be developed different, and each company would play their cards differently to try to gain or maintain dominance. Google being such a big web company makes it difficult to compete against.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203192/youtube-tv-google...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

> Today, Chrome isn't the best and doesn't come bundled with devices,

I think you're forgetting the largest smartphone OS on the planet there. :)

Ah sorry, that's true. I take my statement back. Also, yikes, that's even more leverage for Google.

> IE wasn't the best browser and didn't have the best engine.

When IE 6 was released in 2001, Firefox didn’t exist - it was still Netscape Navigator. At the time, it was highly regarded, much like the previous releases. Tridend (it’s rendering engine) was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. Microsoft are in this position now due to massive complacency - the vert same reason that they are not in the mobile market.

Forks diverge over time and then we'll have more or less the same incompatibilities start cropping up. Besides forks prevent fundamentally new ways of doing thinks.

Given that the major engines all implement specs pretty closely, it should be up to web devs to do minimal cross browser testing...

I hold high hopes for servo. So much so, I was surprised that Microsoft didn't use it as the base.

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