Hacker News Reader

Comment by albertopv | Hacker News Reader

I hope so, browser monoculture is really scary, imagine everyone with the same browser with the same security bugs and no way to use something else.

View on HN

We lived it in the early 2000s until Firefox broke the monopoly and it was a dark time to work in web.

Browsers, sure, but I honestly wouldn't mind to only have one major browser engine, or batch of forks stemmed from one like blink/webkit. After all, we only has one web standard.

Having been using Firefox and Chrome side by side for 10+ years, I don't think the difference (or preference) between the two worth the effort putting into making two (mostly) duplicate implementations of the same thing for such complex thing. And my experience in observing the development of Firefox is that they are already too short-handed to keep up.

Wouldn't having one implementation controlled by Google give them the final say in the standard though, and effectively all or most of the power over the standard? Seems like a dangerous road that we're heading down.

Google is already controlling the web now, with the existence of gecko. They control it because Blink/Chromium is much more popular than other choices, not because there is only one choice.

Keep in mind Blink engine is forked from WebKit (an Apple product) and Chromium is created from thin air. Yet it doesn't stop Google to have the dominant position they have today.

My point is, Google controlling everything is bad, but having only one engine (be it chromium or something else) isn't what causes it.

That's not my experience in W3C. Having an implementation gives us a strong voice.

So we all should also drive the same car and eat the same food?

You can have dramatically different cars with the same engine. To most of users, even the power users, their choice of the browser isn't caused by the difference in engines.

Also, I don't say "should", I say I don't mind.

We have a Unix kernel monoculture, and things are just fine.

Uh, what? At the very least there's linux, macOS (mach), bsd, and now windows subsystem for linux.

Don't forget Windows itself (the NT Kernel), which amounts to most of the desktop share.

Right, that's why I mentioned Windows Subsystem for Linux. It's a unix that runs on top of the nt kernel.

*Linux kernel monolithism. It's not a commercial company and anyone is free to fork it for their specific architecture and usecases. You still have different types of kernels which you can use and also different linux kernel flavors which you can try.

As someone who is in the process of moving all of my machines from Linux to BSD, I'm very happy that this isn't actually true.

Why the move? What is it that BSD gives that Linux can't?

BSD definitely makes sense in certain use cases (routers, web, mail, DB servers,...) , but moving everything indicates at some kind of rebellious act or just pure experimentalism. I have no issue with both, since I've personally done the same multiple times....

It's neither -- it's just that I want all of my machines to run the same OS, and I've determined that BSD fits my overall needs better than Linux. It's not about making some kind of statement or experimenting.

Linux has taken an overall development direction that I dislike (systemd is an example of that, although not the only one). BSD is now a better fit with my requirements.

PF and jails come to mind, as someone who uses FreeBSD for the "important" home infra

And you wish for an OS monoculture, too?

This is iOS, right now, and that's a fairly substantial number of users. It's not ideal but we also aren't hearing regular reports of iOS users being compromised en masse despite their browser monoculture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com