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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand something about many of the comments I've seen on HN regarding Firefox, Edge, Chrome, etc....

Why does it matter if there is one source tree for all browsers? [0]

Is it really a bad thing if Chromium is the base, and then Google, Microsoft, etc push out forks of it?

Isn't that what we do in the linux world already with the kernel? Redhat, Ubuntu, Mint, etc all take a stock kernel from the git tree and then tweak it for their uses, yet we don't complain about that.

[0] - Yes, I know people lost their jobs, and that sucks, especially in this economy. But my question isn't about the jobs, it's about having multiple browsers and why some people vehemently believe that multiple browsers without shared source code is critical to our future. THAT is what I don't understand.

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The difference is that the Linux Foundation doesn't have a side business getting a cut from every install of Apache Server or something. They do not have a strong stake in how people end up using Linux.

Google has a strong interest in how people end up using the web and they have a particular vision for it, a vision that many on here disagree with.

Imagine if IBM ran the Linux kernel. We would be hearing many of the same concerns.

But chromium has submitters from Linux, Google, Microsoft, & Opera.

Why is that a bad thing?

And why would Firefox being a contributor make it worse? It’s open source.

That should be a good thing.

If there's a bug between the specifications and Chrome, what incentive is there for Chrome to change? How do you check/verify the specifications if there is only one implementation?

Given a single implementation, what incentive is there to develop open standards?

How do you innovate (in standards, JavaScript performance, rendering, etc.) if there is only one group working on them?

Case in point: Firefox is the only major browser to provide MathML support. Where is the incentive to get that implemented in the other browsers, especially given MathJax?

Where is the competition to innovate in things like web tools (layout analysis -- esp. for flexbox, etc., accessibility property (WCAG, WAI-ARIA) navigation/investigation) given a single implementation?

This doesn't address the full scope of your point, but it is worth mentioning that Chromium/Blink engineers contribute to and rely on https://web-platform-tests.org/ in order to ensure some level of conformance and interoperability.

In addition to what the other comments are saying, it's not at all clear that maintaining a suitable fork of Chromium would be less work than maintaining a completely different browser implementation. Google is clearly trying to drive the web into an unsavoury direction so the divergence burden of such a fork might increase with time.

Also, it's never a bad idea to implement the same thing twice, from scratch. Working with an existing codebase necessarily puts you into a certain mindset with its own trade-offs and constraints where moving in a certain direction might be much harder than if you are starting from scratch. Would we ever see innovations that Servo brought forth if all we had were Chromium forks? It's hard to say, but it's definitely not obvious.

Remember that SQLite (the obvious choice) was rejected for browser local storage because there was only one implementation.

Would W3C apply the same rule if there was only Chromium?

W3C would cease to be necessary if there were just one browser. That'd be it, end of history, the WWW would now be a Google product served over a Google developed binary protocol (QUIC).

But Edge and Opera are built on Chromium as well. So that makes 3 browsers built on Chromium source.

If Firefox were as well, would that be bad?

If Linux were the only operating system out there, and incidentally was completely controlled by a company that only kept it open source for its own amusement, would you still be singing this tune? I doubt it.

Linux have shown themselves to be trustworthy maintainers of an open project. Google have not.

Chromium is open source. Contributors include more than just googlers. Why is adding more people into the list of source contributors bad?

The problem is that it's not just a base utility layer being shared. It's the entire web-standards stack. Which means that Google would now have pretty much free reign to push the standards wherever they wanted, because if it's in Chrome it's in everything except iOS.

Except that Linux isn't the only game in town, there are the BSDs and commercial alternatives.

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