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Comment by sime2009 | Hacker News Reader

sime2009

Regarding the topic of browser mono-cultures, I was web developer in the post browser war era in the early 2000s where we had a dominant IE6 and a stagnant browser landscape.

It was bad.

Real bad.

But I'm actually fairly positive about MS getting into the chromium landscape and back into the game. Let's face it MS had lost all of its influence in the browser world before dropping IE and making this move. It is a Google/Chrome dominated world at the moment. But by adopting Chromium, MS can "catch up" on a technical level and also wield significant power inside the Chromium project itself. They have money and they have an experienced browser engine engineering team. They will be able to provide some balance to Google in this ecosystem. If push came to shove, forking chromium wouldn't be an idle threat from MS. They will have some power.

On a technical level it looks like a move towards a mono-culture, but politically it looks like a chance at more balance and diversity to me.

View on HN

I just wish they'd moved to Gecko instead of Chromium.

It's not like Gecko is an inherently inferior engine by any stretch, and it would significantly bolster their marketshare so that developers actually have to test against it.

One huge advantage the Chromium has over Gecko is Google's Security Team (ie Project Zero).

For most users, the web browser is one of the biggest attack surfaces and having arguably the best security team behind the browser engine is a good thing.

Google have certainly done a great job of maximizing the PR benefit from their security researchers. And it’s a great thing they’re doing. But regardless of how well individual companies market their respective security teams, Firefox has a comparable reputation for their browser engine.

Yes some of that might be thanks to PZ, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

Choosing Mozilla’s platform would have been better for code diversity, which has its own distinct security benefits.

I can understand value in multiple browsers for experimenting with new things (see Rust integration into Mozilla's engine), but what are the security benefits?

Like if you have 3 different crypto imlpementations, you have times more teams that have to get a thing right. It seems way easier to try and get it right just once.

Perhaps there's a holistic idea of "if one browser has an issue, at least it doesn't affect 100% of them" but given what CVEs look like in reality (often variations of the same attack across multiple programs) it seems like the cost/benefit would not be in our favor

> what are the security benefits?

Not everyone gets hit with every attack. Biological systems work this way too.

Multiple implementations is a great way to highlight issues in the spec vs reality (assumptions, unspecified behavior, etc). If you only have one implementation, the implementation becomes the spec and you end up with people targeting compatibility for that rather than a specification.

This happened with Cisco routers back in the day, Juniper had to add a flag to make a routing protocol compatible with Cisco because Cisco implemented it wrong but had so much dominance that Juniper had no choice if they wanted to get in the game.

The biggest security benefit is that competition motivates everyone to work harder, to explore alternative solutions, to raise expectations. Competition means investing in ideas like Rust and Servo.

Without serious competition you eventually get IE6.

* Firefox has a comparable reputation for their browser engine.*

Is this really true? someone posted somewhere(can't find it) where it shows Firefox has a worst security record compared to Chrome.

Also, in the past, Firefox was left out from hacking browser competitions because it was to easy to hack.

This is flatly not true. Just dig through the CVEs and you'll see while they have a similar number of bugs Chrome's are mostly in the harmless category (browser got DOSed) where as Firefox's has had like 10x the bad category (code got executed outside the sandbox).

It's not actually clear that they prioritize their own products all that much. Certainly in regards to Project Zero, it seems the point is that they are detached from the rest of the product teams. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Outside of the security teams, I think it's actually that Chromium is much better fuzzed and scrutinized. They just have so many more resources, including those for security.

>It's not actually clear that they prioritize their own products all that much. Certainly in regards to Project Zero, it seems the point is that they are detached from the rest of the product teams. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Most of what I've read relates to Microsoft products - and I'm not saying that Microsoft is better/worse than the rest when it comes to security.

Google is here to protect you from the lovely document reader that they forcibly mutated into a toxic app platform.

So you’d rather live in a world where all the web apps you use every day need to be installed and run with full user permissions?

The web is the safest, most battle-tested sandbox environment to run apps in. It’s so safe that you click random links all day long, running 1000s of apps and never have to worry.

I’ll take web apps over native apps from a security perspective, thank you.

I don't really think this is a problem anymore. It's more that no desktop OS provides secure native execution facilities a la iOS. The web browser was the best solution for sandboxing web applications in 1995-200x, but now CPUs have multiple cores, virtualization extensions, systems with multiple gigabytes of ram, etc.

There are better ways to sandbox applications in 2020.

As an interesting counterpoint, since iOS sideloading became semi-possible around 2014, there have been many more app-based Jailbreaks than Safari-based Jailbreaks.

This is true despite the fact that on iOS, sideloading custom apps without a developer account is extraordinarily inconvenient.

I'm so sorry to respond so late; I would just like to point out "the cloud," and the fact that there have been very few hypervisor escapes. Just because there are more app-based Jailbreaks on iOS has little to do with what is technically possible given the hardware (recent Intel missteps notwithstanding).

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where you could tell a web app from a document before you opened it. No need for apps to be native, but on a different protocol.

Totally. The hell of security issues is what makes IE a terrible product.

I think the biggest reason they went with Chromium/Blink is simply because of market share... most users at this point are using Chrome for better or worse, and MS is going with the safest bet in terms of user compatibility for today's web.

I believe the reason was NodeJS and Electron, wasn’t it? Basically, MS expects NodeJS and especially Electron to become fairly important going forward (MS’s 2 newest and highly successful apps are both Electron based...VS Code and Teams). There is no indication that either of those are moving away from Chromium anytime soon.

The sad thing is that those apps' HTML and JS probably are standards-compliant, so supporting Slack, Teams, VSCode, (Electron) Skype, etc in a Firefox-based version of Electron should be possible and very straightforward - yet it probably won't happen.

What's sad is that Windows 98 fully supported desktop-based HTML+JS apps ("HTA Applications"), with access to native resources (using COM via `new ActiveXObject`) and it works with IE11 still - Microsoft just never pitched it as a serious development platform for some reason. Just imagine what today's world would be like if Microsoft did pitch HTA as a successor to VB6 (instead of the quickly-abandoned WinForms platform, now barely on life-support) (I'm mostly thinking we wouldn't be stuck with excessive memory consumption in Slack, and these apps would be able to use things like native context-menus and accessibility features)

WinForms was never "quickly abandoned" ... MFC has been the defacto standard for Windows UI since Win 3.1

WinForms did not receive any significant updates after .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 - integration with the new User32 controls added in Windows 7 was only through downloaded optional redistributable DLLs. Ever since the .NET Framework 3.0 (and until UWP) Microsoft was selling WPF as the way to build Windows desktop applications without C/C++.

> Just imagine what today's world would be like if Microsoft did pitch HTA

That would have been a security nightmare.

Electron is pretty much the same nightmare anyway. Just because it runs in chromium doesn't mean it preserves the sandbox. All electron apps have full access to your filesystem and os, even from their chromium window context.

Microsoft rightfully decided not to push a garbage app platform. It couldn't know someone else would do so later.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that perpetuates monocultures once they start.

Sadly, that doesn't make it wrong per se, just deeply discouraging. It makes me think we're past the point of no return.

It's a big reason, for sure. To be able to instantly sync everything over, will mean there will be many, many people switching. It's tied to Edge is built in to Windows. Having Chrome installed will be redundant.

Or they could have open sourced EdgeHTML. It's not like it was worse, than Gecko.

Open-source IE would be even more interesting to see, mostly because the early versions ran well even on systems with two orders of magnitude less RAM and CPU power than ones today; especially when displaying static pages and not JS-heavy apps. I remember the Firefox of the time was noticeably more sluggish than IE6 and used more RAM, and know quite a few people who tried FF and went back to IE for that reason.

I could just imagine them looking at the (security) horrors of the IE source code, and with a cold sweat, sticking it in the drawer.

It was worse than Gecko. Gecko is excellent.

Edge still has (had?) so many rendering issues on sites we make. One thing I find really impressive about Firefox, despite the completely different engine I _very_ rarely find FF-specific bugs.

www.just-eat.no

Many (all?) Oslo postcodes start with 0, and their site truncates the 0 when you try to enter your postcode. Their stated solution was to use Chrome, so they don't get any of my business.

From your description, it sounds like they decided to use a "number" typed field for the post codes. This is of course incorrect, post codes are really just strings. While the bug manifests itself on firefox, it is hard to blame it for implementing the field according to spec [1]. Chrome decided to ignore the spec and leave the field more free-form, which in turn enables developers to use it incorrectly without detecting the compatibility bug.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/sec-forms.html#number-state-typ...

> User agents must not allow the user to set the value to a non-empty string that is not a valid floating-point number. If the user agent provides a user interface for selecting a number, then the value must be set to the best representation of the number representing the user’s selection as a floating-point number.

Notably, this type of issue is exactly why it's important to have more than one implementation of web standards!

If Chrome is your only target, the standard ceases to mean anything. The real standard is just whatever Chrome does.

(Perhaps I should have specified "Quantum" rather than "Gecko"? I meant the engine that new Firefox uses, I thought it was still called Gecko but sounds like I might be wrong?)

If you look at long term investments are you confident Gecko will still be around in 10 years? Chromium is the only safe choice they had.

If Microsoft had also gone with Gecko? Yeah, I'm quite confident Gecko would still be around (and maintained by many people other than Microsoft) in a decade.

I think it will be around anyway btw, although I'm perhaps less sure.

Even the guy who literally birthed Firefox (Brendan Eich) picked Chromium for Brave, his new browser.

Yeah, but he also designed JavaScript, so...

Under a 2 week deadline. I challenge you to do better.

Most likely he had been thinking about the project for some time. But the 10-days-execution story sounds much nicer

He was... kind of. My understanding is Eich had been thinking for a while about the idea of bringing a version of Scheme into the browser. He was lured to work for Netscape by the promise that yes, he could do this. Unfortunately the business decision came down that the language's syntax had to approximate Java. So the semantics of the language had probably been settled in his mind for quite some time, but the syntax change still makes the 10 days an impressive feat. (And also explains a lot of the weirdness in JavaScript -- you're writing code and expecting it to behave like a C-like, but you're actually kind of writing quasi-Scheme and you don't know it.)

I've spoken and written about the early days, e.g., here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX3ZABCdC38

Friends from SGI recruited me (second attempt) in March 1995, I joined in early April but in the server group. I thought a lot -- but worked too little due to server commitments -- during the month of April, about "the scripting language" which was suggested to be Scheme when I was being recruited, but which by the time I joined could not be Scheme, due to the impending Java deal between Netscape and Sun.

Java meant either no scripting language, or a kid-brother language, which meant C-like syntax, primitive vs. object types as in Java, and other unfortunate consequences.

When I transferred to the client group in early May, I had to produce a demo very quickly. I chose first class functions and (barefly there at first) prototypes as the building blocks. The rest is history.

So it sounds roughly one month of thinking and researching, then 10 days of coding?

That's what I wrote, yeah. With constraints going from "Come do Scheme!" to "make it look like Java" and even "feel like Java" because interop, via what we hoped would come, and did in Netscape 3, as a JS/Java bridge called LiveConnect.

The Belgium Post built a whole web app+service architecture on LiveConnect.

Think of LiveConnect as "Active Scripting" on MS's platform, which enabled Java components to be developed and glued together by JS.

Thanks!

I joined Netscape on April 3, 1995 but in the server team, due to a temporary requisition shortage. I worked on what would eventually become HTTP 1.1, which we wanted to be more like SPDY or HTTP 2. Therefore I had only spare time to think about what became JS, and I used it to study HyperTalk, Logo, and other languages, not just Scheme or Self.

I finally got transferred to the client team one whole month later, in early May. Then I had ten days to demo-day.

Why do you feel compelled to make up a story? Because it sounds nicer to you to denigrate my work, it seems.

Not that you need it or anything, but I'd like to thank you for your work on Javascript - without it I might never have gotten started with programming.

So, thank you very much for laying down the foundation for a whole generation of new programmers!

> Why do you feel compelled to make up a story? Because it sounds nicer to you to denigrate my work, it seems.

Because randos on the internet (especially business types) love to make stuff up in the name of puffery and deifying. Legends are rarely true.

Thank you for clarifying.

You are a business type?

Yes, sadly. I'm well aware of our capacity for bullshit and cargo-culting

Considering he designed it in about 10 days, it could have been much worse… and now it’s one of the most popular and important programming languages in the world; go figure: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-top-program...

In 2001, Apple could have picked Gecko but forked KHTML instead to create WebKit/Safari because it was smaller and seemed easier to work with.

It doesn’t change the fact that back in the day, high profile companies picked WebKit—Google, Blackberry, Nokia—for their browsers.

In 2013, Google forked WebKit to make Blink and nowadays, Microsoft, Opera, Brave and others have picked Blink/Chromium for their new browsers.

Even as Mozilla is making great strides with updating its engine (was Gecko; now Quantum), nobody else is going on that trip with them.

KHTML was always designed and positioned as an embeddable browser engine. Mozilla deprecated the embedding of Gecko, so you have to fork and change the whole browser instead of just lifting the engine...

I like JavaScript... it’s very flexible and incredibly expressive. Using c# lately, I just feel shackled

Moving for any modern language you know well to any other modern language will feel like that. You need to spend time learning. It has nothing to do with the what the language is capable of.

"I can code in X so I should be able to jump in to any other language and get to speed instantly." is obviously wrong.

What can you express in JavaScript which you cant express in C#?

Serialization for one thing. You can work with JSON extremely freely without creating weird serializable classes for every combination of data you might need to work with - eg, no class named "DoodadList" for when you want to de-serialize a JSON list (maybe that's a Unity3D thing?).

You can nest functions nicely and work with closures when it makes sense, if you like that sort of thing.

The async programming model is also really nice to work with.

You also don't need to create classes for every noun, verb, and adjective in your system either - when all you need is a function, you just write a function, not some weird object to hold it.

You also don't have to write a f after all of your decimal values to tell the silly compiler that you mean for 0.25 to be a float. (this one truly does not matter, but there are a lot of little things like this that add up)

I know you can do a lot of that in C#, but its just so effortless in javascript. You just need to be more disciplined about how you code it

You are right about having to create a class to hold a function, that is annoying. But C# do support nested functions and closures. I don't really understand your other points. A literal 0.25 in C# will be parsed as a double precision. If you want it to be a float (less precision) you use the F postfix. But JavaScript doesn't even have the float/double distinction.

What can you express in C# which you cant express in Assembler?

Looping over properties of an object is painful in C#.

Expressions and functions for example. Assembler is really low level, it doesn't even have control structures. But C# seem to have everything JavaScript has and much more, so I just wondered why the parent post found JavaScript more expressive.

I'm the exact opposite. Having a compiler help you avoid an entire class of bugs is superb.

We started with Gecko in 2015, but it lost on many dimensions in a head to head comparison enumerating gaps vs. Chrome. DRM is just one example. We don't like DRM, but users want Netflix to work, and Google makes WideVine free-as-in-beer; whereas at the time, Mozilla had an Adobe deal that did not extend to non-Firefox Gecko embeddings.

So we switched to chromium/Blink in late 2015. Much later, when I visited Apple in early 2017, a devrel friend asked why we couldn't use WebKit. A WebKit founder in the meeting agreed with me that there was no way for Brave to do so on Windows w/o running out of capital. DRM again was an issue too, without WideVine. Don’t blame startup for not carrying a full engine — that needs deep pockets. While MS does have deep enough pockets, it is starting by using chromium/Blink and slow-forking.

Hey, thanks for everything you've done for open source and open platforms.

The reason you gave here for Brave not choosing Gecko (or WebKit) is interesting – but given Microsoft's deep pockets and tech know-how those reasons don't apply to them.

I think this is a strategic blunder on Microsoft's part and I say this as a Linux user. :)

Microsoft has now warmly embraced Linux – and I think they could have chosen this time to warmly embrace Mozilla. Oh well.

Microsoft was slowly losing browser share with their own engine, felt they needed more web compatibility (including de facto via the WebKit lineage) and extensions sooner. They were not going to play a long game, even if they could afford it. Mozilla may have looked wobbly to them, too.

Didn't see your reply before this, sorry.

I hear what you're saying – but! – a tech giant has to play the long game. The Web is an open (for now) platform and Microsoft, like Apple, like Google, need to have their own web client/server implementation. Makes no sense to be beholden to Google imho.

I'm stunned at how little desktop browser share Edge has (4.6%): https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... – however, changing browser engine is not going to change that, is it? I suppose, if Google and Microsoft end up equally and democratically sharing Chromium development then all's well.

Given the recent layoffs at Mozilla it's a pity (in hindsight – for the benefit of the open web) Microsoft didn't back them :(

Anyhow, thanks for the response.

Surely Microsoft has done their homework: researched everything and weigh the pros & cons. This is a big thing and the next step in their browser strategy. We can only guess their reasons, but clearly in their eyes, Chromium codebase is the better choice.

True, but big companies can sometimes make big mistakes, no?

Waterfox (a rebuild) and Basilisk (a hard fork) are based on Firefox, but they have Widevine.

> I just wish they'd moved to Gecko instead of Chromium.

The usual answer to that complaint is that Gecko is harder to embed. MDN pages on the subject even mention it’s deprecated and that the documentation is obsolete.

Is this something Mozilla could feasibly improve?

It might not be worth the effort, and instead concentrate on Servo[1].

[1]: https://servo.org/

Responding to a reply that was deleted while I was in the process of writing my response:

---

> I don't see why it's Microsofts responsibility to do whats worse for their products, users and business just to bring some sort of benefit to Mozilla which has awfully mismanaged over the past 10 years or so. The browser monoculture didn't happen over night it happened thanks to years of neglect from the other browser engines. I don't like this situation and don't even use Chrome myself but this is the reality of the web today.

I would wholeheartedly agree with you if Firefox Quantum wasn't so damn good.

I didn't use Firefox for years except for occasionally testing sites. Quantum blew me away in terms of rendering speed; it reminded me of Chrome in the very early days. I know that benchmarks say Chrome is still ever-so-slightly faster, and I can't explain that, but Quantum legitimately feels quicker when I use it. At worst, it's certainly not a downgrade from Chrome.

I do wish Firefox's interface was cleaner—the pocket integration and similar stuff just feels like icky clutter to me—but I've been able to mostly clean it up via about:config tweaks, and none of that's relevant to the rendering engine.

That Firefox managed to do all of this with much more limited resources than Chrome, and despite how many sites nowadays are built to target Chrome specifically... it's seriously impressive. I'd love to see what the engine could do with Microsoft's additional resources behind it.

I think Quantum is smarter about what it prioritizes rendering. Time to complete page load may be slower in Quantum, but Quantum makes sure to display key parts of the page so that it appears to load faster.

I'm a noob web dev working in a small shop that sells a niche SaaS product.

We had a customer push us to support Edge.

The dev team (3 dudes) just looked at eachother and laid down the "No, Firefox or Chrome...".

It's just so much pressure to dance around the "this one does this, that one doesn't" and generally we rarely run into any Firefox and Chrome issues. Edge, just not worth it for a small team.

I'm glad we probabbly can direct them to the new Edge now (after some testing).

To be fair, Edge has a good feature support (check caniuse.com). It would be interesting to know what the exact issues your app has with the browser. Otherwise it sounds more like your devs like to use some vendor-specific hacks and blame Edge for it. I know there are some Flexbox things to consider, but nothing a small team can't handle.

IE11 is another story, though.

I'd also be curious to know what features that Edge doesn't support. I know it doesn't do everything Chrome does, but I haven't run into any scenarios that Edge didn't support in a long time.

It's a pet peeve of mine that apps don't support Edge/Trident, Vivaldi, etc. It's easier to write cross-browser code than ever, but it seems like we're in the process of reverting back to the bad old days when IE6 was the only browser people supported, but it's Chrome now instead of IE.

IE6 was closed source and only ran on Windows... Chromium/Blink run cross platform, open source and already 2 forks in. There's some stark contrast, even if it's more of a mono-culture, it's nothing like the IE6 days, even if google does have more power/control than other stakeholders.

IE had a mac version, but it died due to lack of interest/support

The Mac version had a completely different, incompatible, renderer (which was actually better than the Windows one from a standards perspective) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine)

IIRC, the mac version never got an IE6 release, it was 5.x...

Has issue in not printing PDFs correctly. Namely changing text, swapping out fonts and other issues.

It really is getting bad. I use Opera as my 'daily driver' for work, and I get warnings on sites at least weekly where the site will either complain like I'm using some dangerous outdated software, or just plain refuse to work, nevermind the fact that Opera actually uses regular old Blink. Present-day Opera is just a minor reskin of Chromium - and I think Vivaldi is Blink too, right?

People are literally doing User Agent Sniffing again, and even though these browsers carefully craft their UA string to pass naive checks, the sniffers are hacking around that and urging me to "Download Chrome" to use a website.

Notable Offenders: Google Hangouts, and banks. Not impressed, Google.

Yeah, IE needs odd custom CSS designed for accessibility, to make up for the mountains of missing CSS spec in it. And forget it if you use flex.

What are you using that Edge doesn't support?

We treat Chrome/Safari/Edge/FF all as 1st class browsers and haven't had many problems (aside from Safari lacking U2F and exotic CSS props like motion-path).

A few things I’ve been using without EdgeHTML support: #rgba and #rrggbbaa in CSS, <details>, Custom Elements v1. On my personal website, I have deliberately chosen to no longer polyfill these or change my process to avoid #rgba in the final CSS, so various background colours are missing, the light/dark theme switcher doesn’t collapse (it should start collapsed), and a terminal recording will be missing in an upcoming blog post.

mix-blend-mode is another thing that EdgeHTML doesn’t support that I was using for a bit, but I stopped using it because I kept finding critical bugs with it in Chromium, most notably https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398 which was impossible to work around, simply stopping rendering the page after 8192px!

A few issues I have run into with Edge:

1. The :focus-within CSS pseudo-class doesn't work

2. object-fit only works on images

3. These SVG loaders don't work: https://samherbert.net/svg-loaders/

Damn, lacking :focus-within is a big one. That pseudo-selector is very useful when creating custom widgets.

Yeah it would be interesting to hear of the feature that Edge could not support.

I'm having to fix an issue where a user's workstation uses edge to print PDFs. It is bad at it, it swaps out embedded fonts (random ones) and changes some text. A known issue.

Last time I was doing web dev (maybe 2 years ago), I worked primarily in Firefox and Safari. Chrome presented more issues for me than Edge ever did. I don't think I ever had anything work in Chrome, and fail in Edge.

I lived through the IE6 years, so I was never thrilled with any version of IE I had to support, but Edge was actually a good browser. Strange UI, solid engine.

Strange UI, solid engine

...and that's one of the reasons everyone hates Edge. I'm a long-time IE user and that stupid dumbed-down UI is absolutely repulsive. If they'd just put the Chromium engine in the normal IE UI I bet they'd get far more users naturally using it.

Been tacitly supporting Edge myself, but drew a hard line at IE (even 11) for current projects. Without async functions, promises etc, it's just too much extra boilerplate, a separate build setup and a huge payload just to support IE11, let alone older.

I'll be glad if/when Edge (blink) is deployed with a windows update.. the sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned.

> Been tacitly supporting Edge myself, but drew a hard line at IE (even 11) for current projects. Without async functions, promises etc, it's just too much extra boilerplate, a separate build setup and a huge payload just to support IE11, let alone older.

We've been using TypeScript for all scripts longer than ~20 lines for years - so we got async functions for free (it compiles async/await TypeScript functions to IE11-compatible ES5 just fine).

Why force all your users to download transpiled ES5, just to accommodate IE11 dinosaurs?

Not to mention all the issues you'll have if you try to use CSS Flex or Grid.

Support IE11 only if you absolutely must, is my advice, and do that with differential serving: https://philipwalton.com/articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-p...

https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/doing-differential-serv...

Agreed, but I'd just assume avoid dual builds and targets at this point... a project I'm working on started with IE11 support and dual build targets, but broke in IE11 about 3 weeks in, so changed the "legacy" build mode to a page noting the requirement for a modern and secure browser.

TypeScript does NOT shim async functions[1] for you, or give you fetch-api[2]? AFAIK, if you want that functionality, you still need babel and the fills/transforms to support async in browsers without it are freakishly huge payloads. That doesn't count dynamic imports and a number of other features that TypeScript doesn't support.

I'd rather not support a dead browser, that's been dead for years now, that has clear replacements and alternatives. Not to mention security concerns above and beyond development pain..

    [1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=async-functions
    [2] https://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch

TypeScript does shim async functions, you just need to supply your own `Promise<T>` polyfill ( https://mariusschulz.com/blog/compiling-async-await-to-es3-e... ). `fetch` also works fine with a third-party polyfill. Combined, that's about 30KiB extra compared to pure ES6 (before GZip).

Thank you for pointing this out... I just know I've come across quite a few features of EScurrent/next that weren't supported in typescript and found the experience a bit irritating to do both babel and ts (and webpack).

Just out of curiosity, why not use a conditional polyfill using nomodule rather than outright breaking on something like IE11? Because we use nomodule, the script tag will be ignored by modern browsers, while IE will fetch the polyfill. polyfill.io serves this request, and we have it include all the polyfills we require (for our use case, we just request the default plus es2015-16-17-18, plus fetch).

The beauty of the approach is that the big pollyfill payloads are only borne by the users who choose (or likely are forced by employers) to use those browser versions.

> We had a customer push us to support Edge.

Why though?

Because in many large companies, it's IE or Edge. If the company has upgraded to Win10, you're probably required to support Edge.

Many company's IT departments don't find it worth downloading, supporting, and updating external applications just to access the web when the OS provides that functionality out of the box. You could argue that's "wrong," but that doesn't change reality. I even had a government customer remove IE, clicking on the IE icon launched Edge.

I'm glad we probabbly can direct them to the new Edge now (after some testing).

I would be surprised if they still want to be a customer.

>Edge, just not worth it for a small team.

I just can't get behind this lazy "small team" excuse; it's really unnecessary hubris.

I worked on a "small team" of 1 (just myself - I was the only dev) for several years on an enterprise webapp. The kind that does complicated stuff - not a simple CRUD app. [Sidenote: I would have killed for a team of three!!] Yet I supported Edge since the day it came out and never dropped support of IE. In fact, I even supported old versions of IE (7 and up) until the day Microsoft EOLed older version of IE (that was January 12th, 2016, FWIW). It honestly isn't very hard these days. Annoying sometimes, yes, but not difficult.

I don't want to get into technical details except to say some of what we support are/is some legacy stuff customer's use ... that we did not create. It's weird, and faced with the choice of fixing some old products with a lot of unknowns ... and moving customers to something more modern that is more compatible with Edge... we chose the latter.

I suspect the agility of any team is heavily influenced by not just numbers, but tech debt, and other choices.

All future work we do is compatible with Edge, it's not like NOTHING works with Edge, but to say "We support Edge"... customers expect that to mean everything.

Fortunately I don't think we'll have to have that conversation anymore.

Yeah, I worked around technical debt and legacy support too, it goes with the field.

Still not an excuse to alienate your customers who want to use a browser that comes with their OS. Enterprise customers never want to go through the hassle of installing external software company wide just to use your services.

This is a pretty niche area, "enterprise" would be generous to call these customers that even if it technically fits. It's a surprisingly small ask to have them install a browser.

Lots of customers still on Windows 7... that's bad, but we can't change that.

Chromium is open source, Microsoft has published most of their interesting work on Chromium itself. A monoculture is a big problem if the alternative is to write a new browser to compete, less so if you can just fork and have the same start line.

Well they could have picked up one of the other less-dominate browser engines. WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core.

I get that they wanted to use the same browser as Electron, now that they own it...it just sucks.

The general quality of Firefox is worse, the tooling is more fiddly, some of it is written in languages which are not as familiar to Microsoft, it is considerably less straightforward to customize; and on top of this, performance is similar at best. Chromium has an architecture which lends itself to deep integration, and the default UI is much closer to Microsoft's own designs.

> WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core.

If Firefox needs "help" from a big boy like Microsoft, it is probably the worse starting point. If WebKit is a good starting point, why is Blink worse? Chromium is more than Blink, and means that the moment Microsoft started with Chromium, they were already close to done. Whereas with WebKit, they would still have to build and test a shell.

It doesn't suck.

What is Microsoft hoping to achieve? "Starting point" for what?

Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests?

Alternatively, has MS has given up? Perhaps they are content to rebrand Chrome and collect the bing.com seignorage from new Windows installs.

Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.

> Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests?

I mean, "influencing the web" or otherwise, they accept heaps and heaps of patches that aren't about their core business. The Chromium project is really healthy.

> Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.

They can fork, but they probably won't need to. Even if they wanted to maintain an entirely separate shell, it is basically trivial to link such a thing in to Chromium.

That of course is personal conjecture, of which mine is the exact opposite.

> If push came to shove, forking chromium wouldn't be an idle threat from MS

Can almost guarantee this will happen in 2-5 years.

Given Microsoft's history, I don't see Microsoft and Google playing nice for too long.

I also think this will happen. They have very different interests.

Google forked WebKit and it worked out pretty well for them.

I think it will be bad for different reasons. Will Chrome not comply with the spec. Nope because the spec follows what the browsers actually do, and Chrome is the browsers.

Will it have bugs that make the web unusable? Probably not. What makes it bad? The world's biggest ad company is in charge of it, so privacy is at risk.

As more members of WHATWG fork Chromium I think your right that the standard is more like: whatever the dominant fork (Chrome) does.

The spec will comply with Chrome.

Could you elaborate on what made it bad?

I am a web developer too, and for me, the biggest annoyance is feature inconsistency between browsers. Only yesterday, I was cursing under my breath, because webkit-based browsers allow scrollbar styling, but firefox doesn't. In our org, we have embraced CSS grid, but by doing so, made a conscious decision to finally ignore IE11 (rather than to use @supports and write fallback CSS for browsers that are left behind). Even considering the wildly improbable scenario that browser monopoly would lead to feature stagnation - at least you will have a single target with a known set of features to develop against. How can this be worse than what we have now?

Stagnation was the biggest problem. Stagnation is not the problem with Chromium; in fact, it's the opposite, and that's really what's forced Microsoft's hand. They were simply wasting resources playing catch up to Chromium. Why bother?

In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured in the early 2000s while trying to develop apps for IE6.

Just focussing on the browser itself:

* Today's developers enjoy a large and rich platform of (relatively) bug free functionality and APIs on which to build. The hellscape had very limited APIs and were riddled with bugs. For a long time IE and the other browsers didn't even agree on how to compute the width/height of an element w.r.t. padding and borders. (CSS box-models did not match!). We spent a lot of time just working around bugs and keeping up to date on the latest work-arounds for all the problems.

* Today's browsers have high performance JS JITs with very few user visible bugs. The hellscape had slow buggy JS implementations. I remember having to unregister event handlers on page unload otherwise the browser would leak memory.

* Today's browsers have excellent debugging tools built in. In the hellscape, if you had a trailing comma in a JS list on IE, it would give an error message (pop up) with either no file and line number or a bogus one. Yes, that bad.

Even when supporting just one browser, development was often a miserable experience. MS had won the browser war and was trying to kill the idea of apps on the web by neglect. It wasn't until Firefox got going that things improved.

> In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured

I completely agree, but the points that you then make simply show how modern browsers are vastly better than the old ones. I love developing for a modern browser, such as Chrome. I just fail to see how the claim that having competing browser engines that do not have complete feature parity can be in any way considered desirable by web developers. I can understand this argument from end users' perspective (and even then not quite, because remember the days when sites would say that they were "best viewed in Netscape Navigator", or when you could watch Apple keynote presentation on Apple's site only in Safari?), but not from web developer's perspective. Wouldn't a single healthily evolving browser engine be better from web developer's point of view than multiple engines, each with its quirks?

Fair enough. I'll try to tie it back to the mono-culture question.

The primary reason why the hellscape was bad, and remained bad for so long, was because we had a single "winner" of the browser wars. Microsoft won and they immediately tried to strangle the web for years. There were no alternative browsers for a long time to provide some kind of competition which might improve the matter. Sure, we could just test on IE and only support IE, but it was still an awful browser and MS wanted it that way.

The point is that the bad "technical" level situation was sustained by the browser political mono-culture. I'm somewhat positive now about the current situation with MS getting more involved because it will add more diversity to our current political browser situation. This should translate into better results for everyone on all levels, technical, user, privacy (I hope), etc.

So maybe from a pure browser engine point of view there is the same or less diversity, but this situation is very different from the early 2000s one.

scrollbar styling flat shouldn't be allowed.

I agree that this is a good thing.

I also called for it to happen over 5.5 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909383

> It was bad. > Real bad.

Apparently it was not so bad that we needed a multitude of JS to JS compilation stages and instead could just, you know, execute the same JS in the browser that we actually wrote.

Also, MS invented DHTML and AJAX single handedly, against backlash from "pure" web developers.

Please don't argue with others about their experiences and feelings. I was there, and it was intensely bad. I think it's easy to forget how bad it was, even for those who went through it.

Starting mid-2006, I spent almost a year building a full-stack internal SPA for tracking manual and checklist testing at my company. I made the (then brave) decision to target Firefox instead of IE6, which everyone was using at the time - since FF was more standards-compliant.

It was a very good decision in retrospect. But I had to spend 4-5 weeks just getting the front-end to work in IE6. So many HTML/CSS hacks, trying to wrangle the layout engine to do my bidding. Check out the Wikipedia article on the Acid2 test, and the image at the bottom of IE6's rendering, to get an idea how far IE6's layout was from standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

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