Modernizing the DOM Tree in Microsoft Edge (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Modernizing the DOM Tree in Microsoft Edge (2017)

blogs.windows.com

26 pointsjasim17 comments

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This is an article from 2017 and seems to primarily target the "old" Edge.

Later Microsoft moved to using Edge based on Chromium.

(Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149647 )

(2017)

And then Microsoft gave up on developing their own browser engine and switched to Chromium.

And then there were only two competitors to Google's increasing subsuming of the Web.

There is Safari developed by Apple. What is the second browser not funded 90% or more by Google?

Parent is right: you can see the influence of Google's funding of Mozilla in many areas, such as development and official promotion of "Facebook Container" but never making a "Google Container", despite things like Google Analytics and GTM being the #1 tracker across the web.

I was under the impression that Apple still are a major contributor to WebKit and chromium as they actually originated WebKit?

tasogare is denigrating Firefox, discounting it as a “competitor to Google’s increasing subsuming of the Web” owing to Mozilla being substantially funded by Google.

I'm not "denigrating" Firefox, I'm implying a true fact. If a TV channel was funded at 90% by the Russian Federation, would you qualify it as an independent media?

I bet not, and it would be comically wrong to do so. So I don't get why Google and Mozilla get a free pass, especially given that controlling the web has a way bigger impact on people lives than a mere traditional media.

Strange conflation of "controlling the web" with exerting editorial control here

Chrome forked WebKit years ago (the fork is called Blink), and the two codebases have diverged substantially since then.

Exactly.

People usually forgets this since WebKit is mostly seen on Apple Devices (Safari has a 16-18% user base) and a few Linux browsers. Still it's a test target for web developers with its own quirks and fixes.

So, for the last 8 years, WebKit and Blink components, code, have deviated a lot and they aren't the same.

Chrome forked WebCore (rendering engine of WebKit) into Blink and modified large parts of it.

The Javascript engine is also different (Chromium uses V8 vs Safari's JavascriptCore).

Still, it was sad to see the old Edge's rendering engine disappear.

Thanks for the clarification. Much appreciated.

I think the problem is the lack of deprecation on the web. New API’s get added and over time it becomes effectively impossible to build a browser that supports all the API’s. For a while you could do it if you were a big enough corporation, but now even those are throwing in the towel and joining google.

If we want more competition in the browser landscape, we need to start deprecating web API’s, make it feasible for a small group of people to build a fully functional browser again. We can still use chromium for the legacy web. Perhaps with some kind of browser engine plugin standard so that we can use different engines for different pages.

Sure, let's transform everything into an endless abyss of "this is now deprecated" popup/console warnings. Just like we did with cookie popups. So we have more browsers that all support different things and partially support X% of things and then don't support (1-X)% of others. I'm not a fan either of Google abusing the clout they have with Chromium to force stuff down everyone's throat but there's no way these days a small group of people can build a browser. And there really shouldn't be either.

What web APIs should be deprecated, in your opinion?

The problem is backwards compatibility. If you deprecate something, huge swaths of the web are just gone.

And we can't just use an older browser version for the older web. It means you have to maintain two browsers now. At the very least you'll need to patch security vulnerabilities and you have to make sure they work on new OS versions.

It's a conundrum, and I don't have an idea how to solve it :)

It seems to me that, over the last 5 years, a giant round of deprecation took place, and caused swaths of (older) clients to be gone from the Web: more and more servers have stopped supporting older secure transports (SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0).

Because of that my original Samsung Galaxy S and iPad Mini have very little use these days, beside acting as alarm clocks.

As is the case in politics, the security trump card will win over most arguments and all-too-subtle counterpoints in the "web space", too.

Before reading -

Wait, how they are going to modernise something that is working well?

What do they mean by modernise?

Is the modernise technique really better ?

First read - There is really no modernisation done and no improvements at all until I saw the chart.

Second read - Very carefully trying to understand and found that they removed legacy technique to access a node and replaced it with a node with four pointers - parent, first-child, next, and previous sibling.

Its a neat work because trying to migrate a older technique to newer ones will require deeper knowledge !

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