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Comment by stefs | Hacker News Reader

that would be a monoculture disaster. monocultures are not resilient.

Not resilient to disease maybe but I'm sure webdevs will be overjoyed at having a much easier time porting sites. The power dynamic that matters is political not technical. Google doesn't really get to exert control over the web with their rendering engine or V8 it's the actual high-level browser policy that matters and Firefox doesn't actually have to follow any of it.

Firefox gutted all of their internals with project Servo. If they had instead integrated Blink would it have been any different?

I always think it's interesting what things people want to have diverse ecosystems with competing implementations (browsers) and what things people consider that an unnecessary duplication of effort (Wayland compositors).

So you've seen the same person say both of that?

We're on the internet. There's only one other human and the rest are bots.

If you go into threads about Wayland the overwhelming public opinion is that having lots of compositors is silly. And then you go into threads about browsers the overwhelming public opinion is that having multiple browser implementations is sacred.

>Google doesn't really get to exert control over the web with their rendering engine or V8

Just because they're failing at it doesn't mean they're not trying (AMP, needless degradation of Google services in non-Chrome browsers, etc). They only have to succeed once.

We're not disagreeing. Google is absolutely trying to exert control over the web but Blink and V8 aren't tools that can realistically help them with that. Especially in the hands of other teams that are free to carry patches.

If Firefox became a Chrome skin then sure, v bad for the web. But if Firefox internally used Bink and V8 it's not really all that doom and gloom.

Google routinely implements, fails to implement, and fails to deprecate features that align with their company goals (i.e. namely collecting lots of data). AMP, Browser Extension Manifest v3, cookie privacy features, ad-blocking features, file formats, and many more that most people have never heard of.

Happens all the time. Without Webkit and Gecko, the web would simply be "whatever Google wants to do". Having multiple browser implementations helps balance out whatever Google's agenda is at any given time.

Yes which is why Chrome dominance is a problem. This isn’t true for V8 and Blink any more than openssl is a tool for controlling the direction of browsers.

The reason you have multiple implementations of JS and rendering/layout engines is because they provide a specific technical benefit, not a political one. The browser built on top doesn’t have to be anything like Chrome.

Plenty of monocultures exist in the real world and we almost already have a Chrome/WebKit based monoculture. Where's the actual, non-theoretical disaster?

Safari is the only browser that has any significant uptake (~20%) and Chromium was forked from WebKit, so all Chromium browsers already share a good chunk of their foundation with WebKit. You could say that we really almost have a WebKit monoculture since Firefox, the only non-Chromium/WebKit browser only has 3.65% of the market. [0]

Heck, the vast majority of Internet servers and most of the clients are running on the Linux kernel but nobody is complaining about that.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

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