> Will everybody abandon Safari and give Google a total browser monopoly
This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think that IE was a backward browser and MS forced it upon people but what actually happened is that IE was very innovative until Microsoft diverged from the standards and lock people into it. When the ecosystem(websites) integrates enough that your platform(the browser) is the only way to run all that(through Google services for Chrome?), they stop innovating and start monetising.
The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the rendering engine are open source as Chromium). So they can't lock anyone into anything. If they try that they'll just get forked. Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork.
Which isn't to say that Safari and especially Firefox aren't important drivers of competition. But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.
There is lock in it’s just more subtle than the IE situation. Have you seen the chromium codebase?
It may be open source but no individuals or small teams would be able to manage a competing product, you’d need huge investment to compete. There’s a barrier to entry all the same.
Plus keeping up with the constant updates while trying to build a competitor…
Yes, but in the case of both Mozilla and Linux, they had a huge running start and have developed their moats (for what they are) over a long period of time.
A new organization coming in fresh and thinking, "hey I know what, let's fork Chromium", does not seem like a very long lived effort. I also don't see any new operating systems coming out from an unknown team anytime soon.
The open source projects you use as examples are entrenched, and it's going to take a major shakeup and/or cracks in the large organizations for something new in the browser or operating system space to emerge.
Firefox is great, but it’s barely hanging on at ~4% marketshare. That might skewed by Firefox users having tracking mitigations set up, but the result is the same regardless: devs and the suits above them calling the shots will see the tiny usership and ask why they’re spending anything on supporting it. It’s barely competing at all.
The standards and functionality that are required in a modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual or small team" could build from scratch.
The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if Chrome was entirely closed source.
Anything forked from Chromium can’t be significantly different from Chromium, because any change of that nature increases divergence from Chromium and makes it more difficult to keep pace with the firehose of changes being pumped out daily by Google’s massive Chrome/Blink team. It means that forks can never be anything but mostly-cosmetic reskins unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed.
> unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed.
I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would also depend on said fork having a big slice of market share before they even try to drift away from Chromium, otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die exactly because of said differences.
There are several chromium forks that do more than just "cosmetically reskin" the browser and they definitely don't have teams as big as Google's.
Additionally, nothing forces a company/group to merge that "firehose of changes". If google ever oversteps sufficiently, there is always the possibility that companies that are maintaining forks will stop integrating those changes.
> There are several chromium forks that do more than just "cosmetically reskin" the browser and they definitely don't have teams as big as Google's.
Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink, which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
If forks don't keep up with Google's changes they're putting their users at risk of getting hit by 0days and other vulnerabilities.
> Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink, which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
That’s because they don’t need to because there’s nothing wrong with chromium. In the hypothetical situation where Google goes rogue and messes with chrome to the point that forking is required, this would be done differently.
Google going rogue isn't the only concern. It's also that in a Chromium-dominated world, there is no room for other parties' voices in shaping the web. Google gets what Google wants, regardless of whatever protests Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, or any other organization might have.
Have you ever seen a serious "fork war"? Open Source may be possible to fork, but that isn't a guarantee that everything will be hunky dory after a hard fork. The drama and chaos of "we need a trustworthy fork" after a bad actor does something unsociable can be awful (especially if that bad actor remains in play). Security/safety/IP audits of past code pre-fork after a major fork has become necessary isn't free or cheap and takes resources. Drama can draw weird boundaries between project attempts and create a lot of internecine fighting among the "survivors" of the "upstream crash". There's so much sociopolitics that may be involved. Open source projects still involve a lot of people, at the end of the day, not just code. Open source applications have died in a fork war.
The situation is different from IE, but there's still a lot of similarities and open source isn't necessarily the balm it appears to be. They code may still "be there", but code still needs people to believe in it/trust it/work on it.
Of course they can, it's about the marketshare and not the code. They can make some part of the browser running in their cloud services and no matter how much you look into the Chromium code the websites which support this will run in Chrome only.
Why would websites support this? Well, it can provide good rankings in search or some other goodie like speeding up the loading times through Google CDN or something and works for %90 of the people(because they use Chrome). Once enough websites integrate this, it's over.
> But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.
Google isn't trying to kill the web and grow desktop App development, so yes it's different. And also people weren't complaining about Internet Explorer while it was innovative and competing against Netscape Navigator with annual releases. It was after 5 years of stagnation, not supporting new W3C standards, and unfixed bugs.
Google learned from Microsoft's mistakes. They participated in standards, they update often, and resolve bugs quickly. Everything Microsoft didn't do.
They also implement new features outside of standards but just as temporary experiments mind you. If developers happen to adopt them and implement them on their sites, well Google's hands are tied and y'all might as well make them standards (e.g. SPDY, QUIC).
Or, because the control the standards process they can propose a change to a private list, push it to WHATWG and get representatives from Apple and Firefox to pull it into the "living" standard without any public discourse or feedback (e.g. removing alert();).
This isn't to say everything they're doing is bad, but that doesn't mean they aren't working in their own self interest.
About as relevant as the parent... Not very relevant, but since the parent gives a short overview of browser engine history, we might as well point out that it started with the then-excellent khtml from the KDE project, that powers konqueror. That's little known, and a very interesting history tidbit.
Just pointing out there's a whole family of HTML engines, and Webkit wasn't the origin. It's also likely that it's the reason why Webkit is GPL, and we're able to have this discussion.
In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-source friendly - I know working with them there's a rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build process if they're GPL3+.
I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from scratch it would use a different license, and the entire landscape of browsers would look very different today.
I'm the OP. I'm questioning the relevance, which is in response to the assertion that "The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the rendering engine are open source as Chromium)". My aim is to point out that WebKit is also open source, and that the engine being touted by the GP is actually a fork of Webkit. Its provenance in this case irrelevant.
Chrome got popular because IE grew to be terrible and Firefox became bloated and slow over time. Opera was a decent alternative but their alternative renderer couldn't keep up.
If Apple keeps their browser compatible, I doubt they have much to fear. Linking users to the app store because your site doesn't work is a great way to drive them away from your website, I doubt there will be much push for installing Chrome.
Currently, Chrome for iOS has a slither of the market share that Safari has. Most people don't even know you can install another browser at all. Unless Apple makes/keeps their browser uncompetitive, they won't lose a serious amount of market share.
If I recall correctly, Google was paying 1$ per install, so everyone was promoting Chrome and Chrome was actually better than Firefox.
Firefox then made a lot of missteps, tried to make a push open video and audio codecs for idealistic reasons and lost. They also failed to catch on Chrome's performance for quite a long time. They spent a lot of resources into experiments that went nowhere.
Safari is just as bad about not following standards though. I could sympathize a lot more if your argument was between Firefox and Chrome/Safari. In my mind Chrome/Safari are the hegemony.
I don’t know why you think that, it certainly sounds wrong to me. Like, not just wrong in a technical sense, but like, crazy wrong.
Did you live through the IE5 and IE6 days? Does the term “quirks mode” mean anything to you? Do you remember how Mac IE was completely different from Windows IE? Internet Explorer, back in the early 2000s, was a serious support burden for anyone doing web development at the time. Around 2010, Google dropped support for IE6 (in apps like GMail + Youtube) and a ton of other sites followed suit. It made a big splash across all the news sites and all the web developers breathed a sigh of relief, because they could say “we’re dropping IE6 support because Google did.”
Meanwhile, there was a parallel world of IE-only sites. Some of them were built on future widespread web technologies like DHTML, others were built on stuff like ActiveX. ActiveX ended up in the trash bin (where it belongs) and DHTML became normalized. It was… common, and annoying, to deal with corporate sites that only worked in IE, and then build your own site and fight to get it working in IE. It was not a fun time to be a web developer.
Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I remember that Safari was missing some of the newer features that Chrome or Firefox had, but when I investigated, it usually turned out that I was using some future/experimental feature in Chrome or Firefox, and it wasn’t a problem with the standards-compliance of Safari per se. Or sometimes I was relying on behavior that was not part of the standard at all). Nowadays, my sense is that Chrome tends to have more experimental stuff available and a better set of dev tools, but otherwise, most stuff works in Safari or Firefox with little to no modification.
Things work but all too often the page renders differently. On top of that Safari only supports the part of web standards Apple agrees with. It may look like Safari supports something and then you get into it and they support like 10% of the standard, or the full standard but only on Tuesdays. It is rather annoying.
I agree that Safari should do better but Embrace, Extend then Exterminate is a real thing and lacking functions is not the same as having alternative "standards".
"You need to download Chrome" is the scariest thing these days, especially if you see it in Firefox.
> what actually happened is that IE was very innovative
We remember things very differently, then.
IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, and the ActiveX which their blatant attempt to tie the web to Windows.
The other thing IE was known for was missing, incomplete, or out-right broken support for extremely basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality that other browsers had no issues with. Leaving web developers to scatter their code/markup with IE-specific workarounds. Compounding this problem was lack of regular releases and updates. Except for security fixes, Microsoft considered IE to be part of the OS and refused to issue updates for it between OS releases, for the most part, which is why IE stuck around so long.
Nobody _wanted_ IE. It was just there as part of the OS at the same point in history that Internet access became a mainstream thing.
IE 4 and 5 were innovative (IMO as someone who used both at the time - 1998-2000 - and actively converted family members to IE) compared to Netscape: it had a cache which worked consistently (important in 28.8 modem times) - Netscape would ignore the cache in some situations, i.e. resize the browser window and it would re-download images, even though it had them in its cache, and also IE had things like smooth scrolling which helped make things "nicer" to scroll and feel better from a UI perspective, and things like "make favourites available offline" feature, where it would download a bunch of full pages (whilst you were dialed up), and you could browse them after you disconnected.
After IE 6, things when downhill fast with the stagnation, but before that point, IE was a good browser.
The biggest issue with IE is it was HEAVILY integrated into windows. That in turn made it really slow to move. To get IE 6, you needed windows 2000, to get IE 7/8, you needed XP, to get 9+ you needed Vista.
That particularly became a problem because the time gap between XP and Vista was huge (and a lot of people skipped it and went to 7/8/10). In the meantime firefox and chrome came up and started innovating rapidly. Chrome started it with the evergreen model and FF quickly adopted that model.
You used AJAX-based websites, right? That was first available in IE. Initially, IE unto version 6 was extremely innovative. Then Microsoft won, and they stopped trying.
They innovated on the side of the user. Not the rendering engine. I loved the IE interface.
But if one window crashed, the whole IE crashed. Then Firefox tabbed browsing took over hungry for system resource. But at least it didn’t crash, right?
I remember IE research pane. Innovation in the browser became from a toolbar thing. Remember google toolbar? It was the number one bar in many countries.
But then Firefox extensions took over hungry for system resource, but not like Chrome hungry.
IE had addons. Some of them slowed the browser. And it had plug-ins.
It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”. No one understood what that was then anyways.
And where ie could not innovate on the web, they used active X plug-ins. This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves.
"It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”."
But it didn't had an open source core and was windows only. The vision was microsoft only (forever).
"This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves. "
So the argument is, "yeah, Microsoft is a big monopolist who do everything they can, to lock people on their system, you cannot blame them for it, this is just the way they are"?
Either way, in this case luckily their monopol strategy failed and IE died because of it.
Also `box-sizing: border-box` was how IE designed CSS box sizing (to be simpler to math for the CSS writer rather than simpler math for the Renderer programmer). The fact that it is now just about "required" boilerplate in most CSS reset/normalization steps to throw in a `* { box-sizing: border-box; }` rule to opt in to "do it the IE way" is a massive, vestigial, lasting testament to IE's innovation in CSS in the early CSS standards.
Allowing a dominant OS to foist a bad browser on all of us is not a good way to prevent a dominant internet search company from potentially foisting a bad browser on all of us.
Two different contexts here: Google still has a major dependency on the web so we cannot pull its money out of the platform that easily. Also, everyone nowadays understands how important platform control is and MS made a significant mistake before. If Google abandons the web then some other random corp will pick it up. Why would Google allow that? A market monopoly is not something passive which can be retained that easily.
This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think that IE was a backward browser and MS forced it upon people but what actually happened is that IE was very innovative until Microsoft diverged from the standards and lock people into it. When the ecosystem(websites) integrates enough that your platform(the browser) is the only way to run all that(through Google services for Chrome?), they stop innovating and start monetising.
"Works with Chrome" is the new IE, not Safari.