Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

People always say that, but I don't see why would I want that. I like the idea of a browser engine in Rust, but I actually hope it might theoretically replace Chrome in 10 years, because it's better. Browser Engine is not an opinionated thing, or shouldn't be, anyway, why would I want any "alternatives" for that? I would rather have 1 engine and several good browsers, which are ultimately opinionated. Meanwhile, we do have more than 1 solid engine, and, uh, let;s say 0.8 good browsers.

View on HN

> Browser Engine is not an opinionated thing

Management of browser engines are absolutely opinionated. It's chock full of opinions. Decisions to not deprecate, decisions on which features to add, decisions on which features to refuse to add, all align around the incentives of the people who control the browser engine. For the last fifteen+ years the internet has primarily been driven forward by the needs of Apple and Google. There's no reason we have to continue like this, though.

Third party cookies are a great example of how chrome is actively hamstringing the entire internet with its dominance and control by a for-profit multinational.

> Browser Engine is not an opinionated thing, or shouldn't be, anyway, why would I want any "alternatives" for that? I would rather have 1 engine and several good browsers, which are ultimately opinionated.

Maybe you don’t see the irony in your comment, but that is exactly how you get opinionated engine. If there is only one party that controls the only engine, that is the definiton of ”opinionated”.

The invention of JavaScript, the rise and fall of ActiveX, and the death blow to Flash have all been opinions held by browser engine makers with dominant market positions. Even just Mozilla's pre-Chrome opinion of "our JavaScript engine is fast enough"

Google is no less opinionated with Chrome than Netscape, Microsoft and Apple have been. Google's opinions for the most parts align with our own, but that doesn't make it any less opinionated. And a Servo-monopoly would be better but still not great. Firefox started to stagnate after it took over from IE and vastly improved once Chrome appeared. Competition keeps things healthy

It's not really competition when your paid by the other party.

> Browser Engine is not an opinionated thing

Here are some “opinions”

“The engine shouldn’t allow the user to block select parts of the content”

“Telemetry should always be on”

“The engine should restrict access to a list of websites and domains provided by the government”

“All encryption should have a backdoor”

You don't need alternatives or competition, you just need improvements. But competition spurs improvements and alternatives spur competition.

In my opinion, web browsers have become too popular and widespread. They're an important application on nearly every phone, laptop and desktop computer sold. The pressure to implement pervasive tracking is immense. I don't see a future where companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple all decide to drop this level of tracking and switch to an open-source product.

If another browser engine is good enough they might _fork_ it in order to add these kind of predatory features. Kind of like they already did with WebKit, now that I think about it. :-P

Before browsers was Windows. Microsoft had dominance, and they lost it.

I think browser based Apps took over in business because (1) Windows had shit security and shit App deployment, (2) Microsoft somehow forgot about developers developers developers.

Microsoft never forgot about locking developers in. As someone with trying to fulfill an organizational imperative to deliver cross-platform compatibility, they made my life as miserable as they possibly could.

> [Microsoft] made my life as miserable as they possibly could.

Exactly what I was saying. They had the goodwill of developers and then they burned it. Any developer through the 00's got burned multiple times - like the terrible Kiddie Server 2008. They are still burning us with Telemetry and unprofessional choices like advertising within the OS.

Before that they delivered mediocre but functional software. It worked. Now it doesn't work so well and is a masterclass in ugly graphic design and usability flaws.

It's also worth remembering that developing cross-platform between windows and literally anything else (excepting maybe the xbox? never owned one) is a nightmare. At best managed code will handle some of it, but Windows has many primitives that operate fundamentally differently than other desktop platforms. That alone will ensure I'll never touch that market except potentially as a secondary effort if a product takes off. (I also haven't had to use windows for anything since like 2009, which helps.)

My favorite example of this is to look at all the hoops Wine has to jump through to get decent performance for locks. Apparently many developers writing for Windows default to using a locking primitive that can wait for a list of locks (specified by handles), and those locks can be shared between processes. That primitive frequently gets used even for waiting on a single lock confined within a single process, but Wine usually still has to go through the incredibly expensive emulation to handle the general case.

The NTSYNC driver lands this month with Linux 6.14. I've been following the Wine MR the last few weeks eagerly waiting for it. Especially for Nvidia users this should help close some of the performance gap between Windows/Linux while the GPU drivers catch up.

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/7226

> and those locks can be shared between processes. That primitive frequently gets used even for waiting on a single lock confined within a single process

And why not use a cheap primitive and if a lock is detected to be shared between multiple processes then upgrade it to the "expensive emulation"?

Most obviously because that one engine is guided by Google's goals, so ex. it has deliberately-inferior support for adblocking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com