Comment by Me1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Me1000 | Hacker News Reader

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Lets step back from the "open" buzzword and look at the empirical facts.

Less than a decade ago you made sure your web sites ran well in Internet Explorer, a closed source browser that was allowed to stagnate. IE took the W3Cs standards as more like "guidelines" and not a specification.

- Today, every major web browser (except IE) uses an open source rendering engine (or the browser itself is open source.

- Every major web framework and library is open source.

- Most of the servers running the web are powered by an open source OS.

- The standards bodies are actually working faster than ever on new version of Ecmascript and HTML.

- IE's marketshare is smaller than ever.

Years ago some guys had a crazy idea to make a browser for KDE. Today it's powering much of the desktop web and almost ALL of the mobile web. Perhaps I just like a good love story, but it seems like this is a pretty great achievement for "open". Now, it seems pretty disingenuous to say "the web is not open" and even more so to say that just because more people are working on the same open source project that it's, "becoming increasingly less [open]."

[edited for formatting]

... and before IE it was Netscape: people didn't like that either, but you (and most people who talk about browser history) seem to forget or ignore that :(. If you go back and read through the W3C mailing lists people really really hated Netscape (the by-far dominant web browser at the time, for which books on HTML would have sections dedicated to optimizing for and would even go as far as to say being Netscape-only was fine) for seemingly making up HTML as they went along (almost all of the stuff in HTML that is deprecated, including all of the markup that was for style and presentation only, were Netscape-only HTML extensions) and refusing to take up the charge of CSS. Microsoft was even occasionally described as the potential savior that would come in with a second implementation that paid attention to them (and in fact you then find a ton of praise on the list from Microsoft publishing open DTDs from IE).

Despite all of this, Netscape (a company whose business model at the time relied on selling web browsers and getting contracts with ISPs to bundle their software with subscriptions) managed to get Microsoft's hands slapped so hard by the justice department for having the gall to give away a web browser as part of an operating system (something we now all take for granted: no one complains that Apple pushes Safari with OS X, nor do nearly enough people scream loudly about the fact that alternative web browsers on iOS are only possible if you use Apple's rendering engine in a crippled mode, defeating the purpose, despite Apple having near-monopoly status on the mobile web) that Microsoft never quite got back the courage to keep moving forward given the new constraints they were under. Thankfully, in the process, Netscape still died, and from its ashes arose the idea that an open-source web browser would be interesting and viable, leading to the ecosystem we have today.

Well, to be honest, why did Opera once had ads?

And on Netscape and CSS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108940

The "almost all of the mobile" part is really bad, and exactly resembles the IE situation on the desktop before. I hope Mozilla will shift the balance there again.

The problem with saying "Webkit is the new IE" is that IE was allowed to stagnate because it was a singular browser with a dominate position in the market. When that position was achieved, it was no longer necessary for the company maintaining it to continue to compete.

Webkit, in contrast, isn't controlled by any one company. The people using it have access to the source, and more often that not are contributing to the project themselves.

I don't think the competition is going to end, It's just going to change form.

Stagnation was only one aspect of the problem. Another big aspect was common bad quality of sites created with IE only in mind. The same often happens with WebKit on mobile.

Honestly, in my view "guidelines" is even a strong word for what Microsoft did with the browser and "standards." This is not to hate on MS at all but honestly, even though you could, I suppose, argue IE has gotten much better, I don't really see a reason for it to exist anymore. It's been such a bad boy and has so few redeeming features that I really think the "blue e" on the desktop should be made to be like simply a shortcut to whatever your default browser is, be it Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or whatever (but not IE because it's development, in my view, should stop).

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