“It doesn’t take much imagination to see newer, more exciting rendering engines appearing over the next handful of years”
Dead wrong. It’s insanely hard to build a modern HTML5.2+CSS3 rendering engine from scratch. Nobody has managed to explain why it’s better to multiple efforts to solve the same problem splitting the pool of available contributors than to have a single open source implementation that anybody can use.
The benefits of multiple implementations (of any protocol, though especially one as widely used as the Web) are pretty well-understood: each implementation helps keep all the others honest and limits the exposure of security vulnerabilities.
The question we should be asking is why the hell has the Web become such a horrorshow that millions of dollars and dozens of developer-years are required to build and maintain a functional browser. If I could magically solve one problem, I would choose that one over Google’s dominance in the browser space any day.
[Nit: HTML is not a protocol; HTTP is the protocol.]
AFAIK virtually all the security issues on the web stem from poorly written JS, poorly escaped input to backends that cause injections or other stuff that has nothing to do with HTML or CSS per se, which simply provide structure & aesthetics to data.
It’s not a mystery why HTML devolved into such a nightmare: it was created as a markup language and we now use it as a platform-agnostic UI toolkit.
The why behind the web’s increasing cost of implementation is less of a mystery if you look at who benefits.
The means are: Raising implementation costs, hiring hackers to publish vulnerabilities in other browsers, publishing performance tools that optimize for your browser to the detrement of others then punishing webmasters who don’t comply, and others no doubt that are less obvious to me.
Because right now a single entity with sometimes questionable or nebulous user policy goals is the main gatekeeper?
Even if Google were the perfect steward, and I’ll certainly agree Mozilla sometimes hasn’t been with Gecko, the engine will still be coloured by their own priorities. Those may not be your priorities or mine. Just because a standard exists, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be implemented in the same fashion, that only the standard will be implemented, or that some portions will be implemented at all. But if Blink has dominance, those decisions will be made for us, and I don’t think that’s a benign outcome.
The fact that Blink is OSS makes it kind of inherently different from Trident, because it’s possible for another vendor to fork it (and not too unlikely, considering that Blink is itself a fork of a fork).
“It doesn’t take much imagination to see newer, more exciting rendering engines appearing over the next handful of years”
Dead wrong. It’s insanely hard to build a modern HTML5.2+CSS3 rendering engine from scratch. Nobody has managed to explain why it’s better to multiple efforts to solve the same problem splitting the pool of available contributors than to have a single open source implementation that anybody can use.
The benefits of multiple implementations (of any protocol, though especially one as widely used as the Web) are pretty well-understood: each implementation helps keep all the others honest and limits the exposure of security vulnerabilities.
The question we should be asking is why the hell has the Web become such a horrorshow that millions of dollars and dozens of developer-years are required to build and maintain a functional browser. If I could magically solve one problem, I would choose that one over Google’s dominance in the browser space any day.
[Nit: HTML is not a protocol; HTTP is the protocol.]
AFAIK virtually all the security issues on the web stem from poorly written JS, poorly escaped input to backends that cause injections or other stuff that has nothing to do with HTML or CSS per se, which simply provide structure & aesthetics to data.
It’s not a mystery why HTML devolved into such a nightmare: it was created as a markup language and we now use it as a platform-agnostic UI toolkit.
The why behind the web’s increasing cost of implementation is less of a mystery if you look at who benefits.
The means are: Raising implementation costs, hiring hackers to publish vulnerabilities in other browsers, publishing performance tools that optimize for your browser to the detrement of others then punishing webmasters who don’t comply, and others no doubt that are less obvious to me.
The ends are: browser dominance.
Because right now a single entity with sometimes questionable or nebulous user policy goals is the main gatekeeper?
Even if Google were the perfect steward, and I’ll certainly agree Mozilla sometimes hasn’t been with Gecko, the engine will still be coloured by their own priorities. Those may not be your priorities or mine. Just because a standard exists, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be implemented in the same fashion, that only the standard will be implemented, or that some portions will be implemented at all. But if Blink has dominance, those decisions will be made for us, and I don’t think that’s a benign outcome.
This argument would be much stronger if accompanied by a list of things Blink has done that are clearly user-hostile.
Don’t worry. Once we have the One True Blink, it won’t matter if such a list of things exists or not.
Besides, the issue isn’t so much Blink, it’s who’s behind it. And I don’t think their list of lapses needs to be enumerated again.
A classic ad hominem.
The fact that Blink is OSS makes it kind of inherently different from Trident, because it’s possible for another vendor to fork it (and not too unlikely, considering that Blink is itself a fork of a fork).