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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

I considered other browsers too (Vivaldi, Brave), but they all seem to be Blink/V8. It seems like Firefox is the only other extant, viable platform for running the web. Personally, I'm not one to frequently compromise quality/convenience for some ideal, but the idea that we'll have a future with only one way to render the web is terrifying.

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There's webkit too by Apple. And browsers based on it is available for Linux too. And no, webkit and Blink are not the same engine. Blink is a fork of webkit by Google and while they share a heritage they have different feature set now.

Also worth noting how different the different goals/approaches differ between the WebKit and Blink teams. The WebKit team is very deliberate in their development, only committing to new features once they have some level of assurance that it can be done with minimal negative impact to efficiency, privacy, and user control where the Blink team moves almost entirely in interest of getting as many new features out as quickly as possible with comparatively little regard to negative side effects.

Both approaches are needed to maintain a balance and to preserve real choice for users — there is no practical difference between Chrome, MS Edge, and Brave because their differences are skin-deep at best.

I was thinking of webkit too, but I'm not aware of any browsers expect Safari and the Linux browsers you mention. Neither seem to be cross platform or practical, "viable" alternatives to Blink domination.

Check out:

- Maxthon - https://www.maxthon.com/mx5/features/dual-core/

- Midori - https://www.midori-browser.org/

I'd say the scenario is similar to Firefox/Gecko and Chrome/Blink. Sure there are clones that use the Gecko and Blink engines, but none of these really are as popular as their original.

I am waiting for another Opera / Presto browser platform to emerge. Till it did, the browser market dominated by Internet Explorer was literally stagnant. Opera with a Presto engine was a game changer with their light-weight and super fast browser engine with feature sets that all other browsers copied (and still lack even today).

I miss the plain UI speed of Presto-based Opera. I could cycle between tabs at my keyboard repeat speed - now my PCs are an order of magnitude faster and can't manage more than a couple tabs per second if I hold ctrl+tab.

Just tried this in FF and for what it's worth it cycles through the loaded tabs at keyboard repeat speed when holding down ctrl+tab.

When I do it I can see the URL cycling at my keyboard repeat speed (~30 fps), but the selected tab and page displayed in the foreground refresh about an order of magnitude more slowly. (1-5 fps) (So with a dozen tabs open, the effect is to select/show tabs in essentially a random order.)

edit: FF cycles smoothly (although with a weird white strobing effect with the main blank content area) if I open a bunch of blank tabs, but not if they're actual web pages.

It's the one reason I'm glad that all web browsers on iOS run Webkit.

Now if Apple could just fix their damn flexbox bugs and implement web app features...

and as soon as Blink forked, Apple purged a ton of Google/Samsung specific code from Webkit.

Really? Where can I read more about this?

This Slashdot article has some links to the WebKit mailing list discussing the changes: https://slashdot.org/story/184313

It depends on the use case, but for a lot of modern render heavy sites, I find Gecko to be strictly better, both in terms of overall time to render and giving a user experience with less flashes of unstyled context.

Can you articulate why do you think a single engine is terrifying? KHTML is the precursor of WebKit that was used by Chrome and Safari for a while. It didn’t prevent Apple and Google to drive their products. Google eventually fork Blink out of WebKit. Other browser vendors follow a similar path (Brave, Opera, Oculus Browser, Samsung Internet, Supermedium...) Start with Blink and modify as they see fit and eventually fork if needed. I consider a single good reusable engine a level playing field for new browsers akin to the Linux Kernel for OSs. Engines are commoditized and differentiation comes from browser features.

It means that Google can push technologies that benefit their ad tracking business, or choose to use non-standard APIs to make their apps run faster than competitors. Both of these things they're already doing. While they might not go the route of Microsoft, putting their Active-X plugins in IE, using deprecated and non-standard APIs is pretty damn close.

Furthermore, all these forks result in bugfixes and new features making it back into Chromium. That allows Chromium to evolve faster than other browsers. That's not to say that Firefox hasn't been keeping up and pushing past Chrome on some important fronts (CSS Sub-Grid, for one), but I'm afraid a point will come where Firefox can't keep up with all the new web APIs that developers will want to use.

Another fork of Chromium doesn't lessen Google's influence over the market.

Way better explanation than mine:

> It means that Google can push technologies that benefit their ad tracking business, or choose to use non-standard APIs to make their apps run faster than competitors. Both of these things they're already doing.

That's at the core of their whole thing.

Thanks for asking. I was wondering if I could. I'll try:

> Start with Blink and modify as they see fit and eventually fork if needed

One of the foundational ideas behind the web is that you have a set of open standards that specify the web, and then people can go ahead and implement those standards and provide some unique set of features on top of those standards. For example: privacy.

I believe that Google and other big-tech actors are working to make the scope of these standards so vast and so fast-moving that it becomes impossible for a small or mid-range operation to implement and maintain a web browser. I mean, who was able to successfully fork and maintain a fork of KHTML/Webkit? Google! No small organization is capable of this. These are massive, complicated codebases that must keep up with evolving standards.

Therefore, even though you theoretically have "open standards," we're seeing a future with possibly a single implementation of those standards. And if you only have one implementation, then the whole foundation doesn't hold, i.e. you can't make a privacy-oriented browser because you can't make a browser in the first place. What if some day Google decides to stop contributing to Blink, to fork Blink and only update it closed source, against a set of fast-moving standards that they de-facto control? Or what if, at that point, with total domination, they stop following open standards entirely. I think that would be the end of the web.

Notice that a fork doesn’t have to maintain the whole code base, only your tweaks on top. Cases I know like Oculus Browser, Samsung Internet, Brave or Supermedium (I’m co-founder) have very small teams. They start with Chromium and have total freedom to modify privacy policies, ship remove any APIs or standards. At the same time they can take all Web compatibility for granted that I agree is not tenable by a small org.

> Can you articulate why do you think a single engine is terrifying?

MSHTML.DLL

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