Comment by unknown_error | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unknown_error | Hacker News Reader

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Arguably the engine SHOULD be the standard. The W3C and WHATWG have never been able to reliably document, much less enforce, standards. Add in ECMAScript variances and all the other newfangled web APIs and it's a losing proposition. The standards bodies never could keep up with the pace of innovation. Might as well let the code BE the standard.

That's already the way it works in the real world... the standards are irrelevant and ignored, only caniuse and browserslist actually matter. Like it or not, Blink is the new IE6, and its marketshare is only increasing.

Ideally it would be something not controlled by Google but by an independent third party (hand Blink over to Mozilla, deprecate Gecko?), but good luck with that.

Maybe this system wouldn't be as ideologically pure as building compatible renderers to a set standard, but it would result in far better developer and end-user experiences as the web quickly standardizes to a single renderer. The world simply does not need 10 different ways to display HTML with 90% compatibility.

Yes but its giving too much power to one actor only. What if Google decides to stop supporting an architecture, or decides that it's ok to have 8GB ram as a requirement ? What if they choose to implement a hardware accelerated feature that works only with NVIDIA LATEST-WHATEVER-AI-VR-HYPE ? What if they want to implement "crypto payment" as a standard and, oh, that's GDollars ?

Of course those are just random made up ideas but the point I want to make is that it's giving only one actor the power to define what the future of our only and sole international knowledge network will be.

Yeah, that's why ideally the engine itself would be open-source (which it is, though largely controlled by Google). I wish it were further controlled by a third party, kinda like ICANN or Mozilla, but that also subjects it to political capture.

The thing is, the existence of Gecko never actually meaningfully challenged corporate oligarchies. Mozilla's mission was noble but they were never particularly effective at it... web standards went from IE6 being the defacto standard to the Wild West for a while to Webkit dominance to a Blink/Webkit duopoly. There was never a period where we actually saw a standards-based web ecosystem. It was always renderer-based. In that sense, I'd argue the Gecko contributors (and Mozilla as a whole) would have more influence over the web ecosystem if they abandoned Gecko and focused on the Chromium/Blink project instead, especially if they had override/veto power over questionable commits from any one corporation. As it is, Gecko/Firefox is less than 5% of the web. You can't influence, much less set, any real standards when you're just a rounding error.

Like it or not, Chromium IS the standard. Only when Mozilla realizes that will they actually have a chance to succeed at their mission, instead of being the beloved but always-losing underdog...

Google already does this. Ask OpenPOWER or *BSD users about the fact their patches must live outside the Chromium tree and be merged in manually, for example. Mozilla has been much more friendly to niche systems as long as they don't impact higher-priority tiers; OS/2 survived in tree for literal years because it was self-contained and non-obtrusive.

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