In December '19 the company that would end up being acquired by Brave did a number of blog posts [0] where they explained the tech. The short answer is 'a lot of word2vec'.
Am I the only one that thinks that this would be a good thing? Like the entire industry sharing the same core open source technology? Write a website once and it works perfectly across all platforms?
Were it a nonprofit trust, I'd be right there with you. But not a for-profit company, and sure as HELL not Google.
Evolution only happens when there is divergence and competition.
Not when we can a have a logic stable and well made standard. Like the metric system. I am pretty sure that I would have a problem with any alternative to the metric system. The more we are to use it the better it become.
Evolution can and thrive through cooperation and mutual aid. I would be fine with having one standard implementation of a browser engine if it was not rule by a greedy corporate like Google, Apple or Microsoft.
I disagree that with the proposition that a single open source project with broad industry representation would hinder evolution.
Companies like Google and Microsoft don't compete on their ability to support the various web specs, but on quality of the web applications they can deliver to customers. Competition in this space will continue to drive innovation even with a single agreed upon rendering engine.
It would, however, limit the ability of a company like Apple to hobble their only-supported browser such that web apps can't compete with native ones.
If there is at least one alternative that is significant, then by definition it's not "effectively a monoculture".
In any case, market share is the least important factor here. As long as we have an intolerant minority (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262240) that does not want be subject to Chromium as the only open source project, we will be fine.
Mozilla is screwing up badly, and I switched to Brave mostly because I believe that they are building a stronger artillery to fight surveillance capitalism (as in, Mozilla gives you wishy-washy feel-good words, Brave gives you money), but this does not mean that Mozilla needs to go away. Quite the opposite: I still hope that we see a "Next acquires Apple for negative $400 million" story. If Firefox builds integration with Brave's network and also adopts BAT, I would go back to it in a heartbeat.
> I disagree that (...) would hinder evolution. Competition in this space will continue to drive innovation even with a single agreed upon rendering engine.
God, no! The worrying thing is not that the development of the web specs would stagnate. The problem is that the development would only happen in the direction that benefits them and that they would be completely unchecked.
Chrome doesn’t even support all platforms. It probably wouldn’t run on my car’s display for example. If the web followed an open standard that wouldn’t be a problem: the car manufacturer could make their own browser.
And not everyone wants to use chrome/blink because the development is in practice entirely run my google who do not have consumer interests in mind.
It's not that having a common rendering engine for everyone would be bad. What's bad is having 1 company (or a few) for-profit companies controlling that rendering engine.
They don't give a shit about you!
Additionally, you lose even more meaningful competition that drives improvement. Obviously you don't lose it all as your different chromium flavors do implement different bells and whistles but those are much narrower in scope.
It continues to be ironic and concerning that Firefox exists at the whims of Google paying to be the default search, but in some ways that helps them with potential antitrust cases as well. I think we have a lot more to lose than gain if we fully collapse into a Blink/Chromium singularity.
https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-05/a-new-search-engine.htm...