[HN Gopher] The Era of the Trident Engine
___________________________________________________________________
The Era of the Trident Engine
Author : ttepasse
Score : 250 points
Date : 2020-01-25 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (schepp.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (schepp.dev)
| teilo wrote:
| Every one of these "innovations" was invented by Microsoft alone,
| without any dialog or input with or input from the standards
| committees. Their intent was clear: to subvert web standards in
| any way they possibly could in order to force people to Windows.
| And in large part they succeeded.
|
| Treating them as advances that were, sadly, not adopted by the
| rest of the web takes a lot of chutzpah.
| gruez wrote:
| Sounds like what chrome is doing now.
| Rexxar wrote:
| That's was the standard way of doing things at the beginning of
| the web : Let browsers experiment things then standardize
| what's working. Every body was doing this.
|
| The problem with Microsoft was aggressive pricing and forced
| default installation, it was not the technical side of the
| browser.
| teilo wrote:
| This is not true. It was only Microsoft's innovations that
| were tied to a specific operating system. Other browsers were
| cross platform. Even Microsoft's short-lived IE for Mac was
| not really IE.
|
| ActiveX nearly destroyed the web, and as recently as a few
| years ago there were still enterprises digging themselves out
| of the proprietary mess they developed themselves into.
| mianos wrote:
| Having the width include the border because that is how a
| physical box works has to be one of the all time stupid design
| decisions of all time. What sort of management structure would
| lead to something like that? It suggests there was some guy/girl
| who were supreme dictators who made lots of these decisions.
|
| While committees often make crazy decisions this is the other end
| of the spectrum. Similarly, orders from the office team for
| extensions.
|
| The stories behind these things would even better reading.
| ksec wrote:
| >MHTML was proposed as an open standard to the IETF but somehow
| it never took off.
|
| I had always wished MHT replaced PDF. But due to the rivalry at
| the time Firefox refuse to support MHT ( even to this day ).
| Webkit has WebArchive which as far as I know isn't support
| outside of Apple's ecosystem.
|
| I dont actually buy the argument it was Vista that slows down IE
| development. IE 7 wasn't that much difference to IE 6. It shows
| Microsoft had very little incentive to improve the Web. I dont
| know how many actually hate them for not complying with ACID
| "Standards". I certainly dont. But at the time the Web has so
| many low hanging fruit a lot of people ( or just me ) were pissed
| Microsoft didn't even bother improving while holding the web
| standard hostage with its IE dominance. Along with the crap
| called Windows Vista.
|
| Luckily we got the first iPhone, 2 (?) years later. And the rest
| is history.
| [deleted]
| wbl wrote:
| MHT does not do what PDF does. Web text rendering remains
| abyssal in comparison to what 1980's computer technology can
| achieve.
| felixfbecker wrote:
| But it would do a lot of the things people use PDF for much
| better.
| amelius wrote:
| Why did Microsoft choose Chromium, and not Firefox?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| A lot of it boils down to codebase quality. I know some
| hardcore browser developers, and they prefer Chromium.
| yedpodtrzitko wrote:
| Current portability potential of the engine. The codebase of
| Firefox has some legacy burden in it plus Rust as a dependency
| for building.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| The rust part is actually an improvement as it is not in
| addition to but instead of. Building any rust component
| together with all its dependencies is one step and fully
| modernized. That's one of the benefits moving away from
| legacy components with competing build systems duct taped
| together.
|
| Additionally, pure rust dependencies (which is the ultimate
| goal of the effort) are all statically linked and different
| versions of the same library can be used multiple times
| without symbol remaining voodoo, etc solving all sorts of
| typical DLL hell issues associated with adopting a huge
| foreign component into a project.
| notriddle wrote:
| Yes, yes, I like the new libraries, too. The Quantum team
| is following the Boy Scout rule -- when they refactor code,
| they leave it better than they found it.
|
| But Microsoft needs to release New Edge today. And today,
| Gecko is not made from a bunch of reusable, standalone Rust
| libraries. It's built from a couple of good libraries, plus
| a lot of ugly, tangled legacy. Some day, Gecko might be the
| best choice for software that wants to embed web
| technologies, but that's not today.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I never commented the viability of Gecko for MSEdge; I
| merely rejected the notion that Rust was part of the
| reason why it _wasn't_ viable.
| Macha wrote:
| Gecko is apparently a pain to embed. Other browsers built on
| Gecko such as Epiphany and Flock later moved to Webkit.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Market share. Many web developers these days are bad at their
| jobs (or are ordered to be by their bosses) and only test
| things on Google Chrome, causing many websites to have issues
| on Firefox (the same happened to Trident) . Using Chromium as a
| base allows them to ride Google's market share and have almost
| all websites work with their browser.
| miohtama wrote:
| Here is another theory:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058923
|
| Microsoft was somewhat already vested in Chrome tech before
| starting, so skill and knowledge was there.
|
| I would love to read an official interview though.
| dwb wrote:
| I remember using page transitions as a teenager to emulate
| PowerPoint in a programmable info-screen thing for the school
| library. Baby's first PHP. Lots of copy-and-paste cos I didn't
| really understand the fuss about writing functions. Good times,
| RIP.
| Keverw wrote:
| Oh yeah, Powerpoint Jeopardy! I remembered we did that in high
| school science class once. Totally forgot about powerpoint
| being able to link buttons to different slides but in that case
| I do think it was a lot of copy and pasting.
| FreakyT wrote:
| Really enjoyed the overview of all the ahead-of-their-time
| features introduced by IE!
|
| I feel like many people forget that, back when it completed
| against Netscape, IE really _was_ the best browser on the market.
| The problem was that once they had "won" the browser war,
| Microsoft just completely abandoned development, allowing the
| product to languish and become the terrible abomination many of
| us remember having to write ridiculous workarounds to support.
| zerotolerance wrote:
| Having more features does not make a browser superior. IE had a
| universe of memory leak and CSS rendering quirks. Their
| rendering was so overly permissive that "anyone" could put a
| mess together and it'd render. That permissive client almost
| single handedly slowed web development progress by a decade.
| Because nobody wanted to produce a browser that failed to
| render some web pages that could be rendered in other browsers.
| Nobody cared that the pages in question were gibberish. If
| anything all these IE only features did more to harm web dev
| than help it. They're why we're in the situation where all this
| enterprise software still requires old versions of IE to
| operate.
| berkut wrote:
| I'd say it depends on the features: smooth scrolling was
| pretty cool at the time (1998/1999), so to me, a nicer and
| faster UI made a huge difference given other user experience
| improvements as well.
|
| Also, Netscape was extremely buggy as well: I remember moving
| friends and family to IE as it was a much better experience
| in general. For example, one very annoying bug (given the
| slow downloads at 28.8) was Netscape would often not use its
| cache for certain code paths and would re-download files
| again, even if it had them in its cache. In particular window
| resizing would cause it to re-download files for no reason
| (this was obviously well before anything like responsive
| layouts, or imgsrc), and you'd often wait 30-40 seconds to
| see the page again.
|
| Similarly, I seem to remember IE's "offline mode" worked
| almost perfectly from the cache and you could revisit pages
| when not dialed up, but Netscape often would not show
| anything. (Obviously there were other ways of handling this,
| like Teleport Pro to download entire sites, but it was
| convenient IE's features generally just worked from a user
| perspective).
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I would argue that in 2005 the best browser was Opera. A lot of
| things we now take for granted in browsers were pioneered by
| them. I was sad they cancelled development of their engine
| instead of open-sourcing it.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Opera was amazing back then. Ran rings around IE in features
| and was super fast. It's definitely too bad they didn't open
| source it and build a large community around it.
| nradov wrote:
| Opera was probably using licensed third-party code internally
| which they couldn't legally release as open source.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I believe this comment is talking about a time prior to that,
| closer to 2000.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I was using Opera as my chief browser in 2002..2010 period,
| so 2005 was Opera's peak, around versions 8-9 and a race to
| pass ACID2 test.
|
| I finally switched away to chrome because Opera became
| unbearable on Ubuntu, it slowed down and a lot of graphics
| issues appeared.
| shdon wrote:
| Although I can see the advantages for Microsoft, I don't think
| it's a good thing that the browser engine landscape is going to
| get even more homogeneous. Firefox is now the only web browser of
| note that is not based on a WebKit/Blink/Chromium derivative.
|
| Sure, it's one fewer target to test against, but it saddens me to
| think that this is going to make it even more likely that web
| developers target Chrome and its ilk only and that the layout
| bugs in it are becoming the de-facto standard, just as happened
| with IE6 for ages. This is actually bad for Firefox even in the
| parts where it adheres to the standards when other browsers
| won't.
| akho wrote:
| If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser
| market, they would have done just that -- perhaps bundling
| Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction of the cost of
| continued Edge development.
|
| Trident was not much of a contender in 2010s. It's formal death
| does not decrease diversity. Now that Microsoft _embraced_
| Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not
| less.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| > perhaps bundling Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction
| of the cost of continued Edge development.
|
| I think that would have been a preferable outcome, for it
| would have pushed at least some fraction of users towards
| Firefox, potentially helping to shore up the only browser
| using a (significantly) different engine. Instead we have
| another Chromium-based browser, which doesn't add anything of
| significance to the browser landscape.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the
| browser market, they would have done just that...
|
| With all the coupling with other Windows subsystems and some
| features just to enable a Windows-only PC ecosystem, I'm not
| sure that IE/Edge/Trident/EdgeHTML can be open sourced in a
| whim.
|
| > Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser
| market to become more diverse, not less.
|
| Internet explorer just became a OS vendor backed version of
| NeoPlanet browser. Just the same thing, in different shell.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Former Internet Explorer SE here: it's not the coupling
| with Windows that makes it impossible (MSHTML is actually
| really self-contained). The main reason Microsoft doesn't
| open-source legacy code is because there a huge chunks of
| licensed third-party source code that cannot be publicly
| disclosed.
|
| While those portions could be stripped-out, it would be a
| mammoth task to go through the source code history and
| identify what belongs to who and stub it out if necessary
| (let alone replace it with first-party code).
|
| Whereas MS' new projects (like .NET Core) were made open-
| source from the start and made in the open (Cathedral and
| the Bazaar) - so there's no mean ol' lawyers from LCA to
| stop people having fun.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the information. That's really
| enlightening. Now I know better.
| spankalee wrote:
| Another way of looking at this is that we lost 0 open source
| engines, and all major engines are open source.
|
| A huge benefit from that is that companies like Igalia are able
| to push features forward across all engines via OSS
| contributions.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It seems to me that having a single pervasive open source web
| rendering engine is actually the ideal state of affairs. How is
| fragmentation helpful in this area? It's duplicated effort and
| it makes Web development harder (and less efficient) for the
| millions of Web developers out there. I personally don't see
| people taking this approach to, say, Linux; generally people
| are happy that it's dominant in the server realm and that they
| can learn one thing and use it everywhere.
|
| IE used a proprietary rendering engine. It's now being replaced
| with a free and open source one. This seems like a strict
| improvement. It's the opposite situation -- a single
| proprietary engine being dominant -- that is the doomsday
| scenario, and that's what we saw a decade and a half ago with
| IE. The farther we get from that being a possibility, the
| better.
|
| For related reasons, I'm not happy that DRM has become part of
| the standard Web feature set.
| pcwalton wrote:
| The monoculture around Linux is actually a problem. Linux'
| design is suboptimal in many ways, particularly how drivers
| run with full privilege. (For a sobering look at how this
| impacts security, watch [1].) It's unfortunate that the
| monoculture of Linux is going to make this very difficult to
| change.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBVXxZDVQY
| zzzcpan wrote:
| But it's not monoculture that's the problem here, it's
| architecture. Different OS with similar architecture, like
| FreeBSD, can't solve those problems.
|
| The same way reimplementing Chromium in Firefox can't fix
| anything.
| pcwalton wrote:
| There are significant architectural differences in
| components of Blink, WebKit, Gecko. For example, the CSS
| style recalculation is very different--Blink uses a
| single-threaded engine in C++, WebKit uses a C++ JIT, and
| Gecko does multithreaded style recalculation in Rust. It
| would be hard to do WebKit or Gecko's approach with the
| current Chromium governance, because WebKit's CSS JIT
| uses parts of JavaScriptCore (per my understanding) and
| because Chromium doesn't currently allow Rust code.
| zzzcpan wrote:
| Sure, but not impactful enough to matter in practice.
| FreeBSD can claim a lot of architectural differences too
| and yet they don't solve the problems you were talking
| about. And the actually different OSes that can help with
| those problems are not really usable except for some
| niche use cases.
| mintplant wrote:
| > It seems to me that having a single pervasive open source
| web rendering engine is actually the ideal state of affairs.
| How is fragmentation helpful in this area?
|
| Because the Chromium monoculture has allowed Google to
| dominate the web standards process. They can veto any feature
| or force one through by shipping it and pushing sites to
| depend on it (including their own).
|
| There is an army of Googlers whose job it is to keep tacking
| on new web standards. And Google will implement the features
| before proposing the specs, so their competitors--well, now
| it's just Mozilla and Apple, I guess--are kept playing
| constant catch-up. Meanwhile, anything that comes from
| outside of Google will have to brave the same army trying to
| smother it in committee.
|
| Just ask anyone who's dealt with web standards politics from
| outside of Google. It isn't fun anymore.
|
| (Oh, yeah, and because there's essentially no accountability
| now, plenty of these new features rushed through the door are
| buggy and introduce security holes. It's like IE all over
| again.)
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Apple's WebKit is kept in-sync with Chromium - whenever
| Google adds something then Apple gets it for free within a
| couple of months - though Apple tends to disable or vendor-
| prefix new features it doesn't like.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| This hasn't been true since Google hard-forked WebKit to
| Blink in 2013.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's about governance and dominance, not implementation.
|
| It doesn't matter if the code for a single web rendering
| engine is available if the standards process is closed.
|
| Although in fact there are also implementation issues.
| Nowhere has it been proven that open source implementations
| are optimally efficient, secure, and robust. In fact the
| various debacles around SSL etc strongly suggest otherwise.
|
| The fact that development is either open source or
| proprietary continues to be a huge problem. They both have
| strong points, but they also have obvious weaknesses.
| Realistically _neither is optimal for critical public
| infrastructure._
|
| Currently Google has far too much over influence over
| infrastructure - rather like Microsoft did in the late 90s,
| but even more so.
|
| Open source won't fix this. Anti-trust action - which is long
| overdue - might.
| Keverw wrote:
| I hope they bring the Chromium based version of Edge to the Xbox
| too. I was playing some Babylon.js demos and it kept freezing up
| once I had to force restart the whole thing. But webGL + the
| controller API means you could ship to the console directly.
|
| Not sure if Playstation browser could do this either, but be nice
| since console's are more locked down but seems they are opening
| up since Fortnite I believe is the first cross platform game
| where your Playstation and Xbox friends can play together. Then I
| think if you created something like a virtual world where dynamic
| content is allowed, I think the console makers might not be too
| thrilled about that, so really like the idea of being able to
| publish console games as just a web app directly.
|
| I also think Microsoft is more open too when it comes to
| consoles, for example you can go to Walmart and buy a Xbox and
| then turn it into a DevKit while I believe the others make you
| buy a expensive DevKit hardware that isn't the same as the
| console already shipped, but maybe this is because of Microsoft's
| PC background. So from my understand it's easier to publish to
| the Xbox if making a native game compared to the other consoles,
| can get started faster but still need approval to ship - while I
| think with the PlayStation you have to spend a lot of money just
| to license the tools before you even write that first line of
| code.
| aikah wrote:
| I never use EDGE on my computer because I found it to be slower
| than Firefox.
|
| But I still use IE11, ironically, because I like to develop quick
| HTA tools for enterprise in HTML and Typescript powered by excel
| documents or access database using COM instead of having to
| download Electron and what not, which I don't need since I'm only
| developing for Windows.
|
| it's unfortunate that everybody lost nearly 10 years because
| Microsoft stopped taking Webtechs seriously in order to focus on
| Silverlight and what not, which they later abandoned anyway.
|
| I need to find an alternative to HTA though that still support
| COM since eventually Windows will stop supporting HTA apps.
| uallo wrote:
| > it's unfortunate that everybody lost nearly 10 years because
| Microsoft stopped taking Webtechs seriously
|
| Yes it is. It is also unfortunate that some people refuse to
| upgrade their browsers and engineers have to jump through hoops
| in order to still support them... ;)
| leeoniya wrote:
| the webkit monoculture is saddening.
|
| just yesterday i ran into chrome's 2016 img/flex-basis bug which
| works properly in firefox but requires an extra wrapping div as a
| work-around in chrome.
|
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560
|
| what possible motivation is there to fix it when you're not
| competing with anyone?
|
| hopefully microsoft can help fix it now?
|
| also yesterday, i was writing some ui tests that use
| getBoundingClientRect() at different media query breakpoints. not
| only does chrome intermittently fail to deliver consistent
| results between runs (even with judicious timeouts), at different
| screen pixel densities its rounding errors are _several_ pixels
| off and accumulate to bork all tests in a major way. on the other
| hand, firefox behaves deterministically across test runs and
| there 's a _single_ pixel (non-accumulating) error in one of
| several hundred tests.
|
| somehow, i made it through the dark ages of IE6 without permanent
| hair loss, but i dont have fond memories of those years in my
| career.
|
| now manifest v3 is starting to roll out in Chrome 80. once uBlock
| Origin stops working, i will use chrome even less (i try only to
| use it for its devtools currently)
| MR4D wrote:
| Why does nobody say "the TCP/IP monoculture is maddening," or
| "the HTML monoculture is maddening" ?
|
| Seriously, I need somebody to explain it to me because I don't
| get it.
|
| Having one core base of code is not a bad thing to me.
|
| What am I missing here?
| jandrese wrote:
| There are definitely people pushing back against TCP. QUIC is
| one example. IP is a bit too low level for most people to
| care about. Also, pretty much every other thing we've tried
| at that layer has been worse for general internet traffic. I
| still remember the days of ATM networks and what a constant
| headache they were to keep working.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| There's a fundamental difference between a standard (eg
| TCP/IP, HTML...) and an implementation
| (Chromium/Blink/Trident...).
| recursive wrote:
| Specification vs implementation.
|
| And there certainly are people that say the HTML monoculture
| is maddening. Perhaps you've heard people complaining about
| Electron being used for desktop apps.
| Uehreka wrote:
| TCP/IP is a protocol and HTML is a format. The reason that's
| OK is that lots of people have built different TCP/IP stacks
| and HTML renderers, and so no one person/organization can
| control them. They aren't "one codebase".
| rst wrote:
| There is no single TCP monoculture codebase -- even among
| Unix-alikes, the Linux networking stack is a
| reimplementation, with no common ancestry with the BSD stack.
| (To say nothing of routers with their own implementations,
| often including hardware assist at the high end.)
| bdcravens wrote:
| You're conflating standards with products.
| tuespetre wrote:
| Chromium and WebKit are not synonymous
| leeoniya wrote:
| ok, it's Blink now.
|
| nuances aside, the fact that 75-80% of the landscape will be
| blink-based is unfortunate.
| onion2k wrote:
| _what possible motivation is there to fix it when you 're not
| competing with anyone?_
|
| Considering the bug hasn't been fixed in 4 years with
| completion from Firefox and Edge, I think your assuming that
| competition drives bug fixes might be a bit off. It clearly
| doesn't.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > I think your assuming that competition drives bug fixes
| might be a bit off.
|
| i guess phrased differently, dominant market position (which
| Chrome has had for those 4 years) is not conducive to
| "boring" tasks, such as bug fixes - at least those for which
| workarounds exist. but this is also what happened with IE6 -
| devs found clumsy workarounds for its bugs, so they never got
| fixed because even if end users switched to firefox, it's not
| like devs could suddenly ignore the 800lb gorilla with 90%
| market share, their sites had to continue to work everywhere,
| greatly reducing the incentive to switch (users will say "it
| works fine in both browsers!"). it becomes a self-fulfilling
| prophecy.
|
| that being said, i've had some positive experience with a
| rendering bug i've reported getting fixed:
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=899342,
| but that bug was relatively simple since it did not affect
| layout, just paint.
| monoideism wrote:
| Warning: article is excellent, but contains rapidly flashing
| colors that could trigger a photosensitive epileptic reaction.
| adev_ wrote:
| I find the article to be pretty lineant, or amusingly silent, on
| "why" IE technologies never got adopted or standardized.
|
| I am old enough to remember the time where VML and the others
| were invented. And at this time "Open Source" was still called by
| Microsoft a "cancer", and Linux users frightened for patent
| violation every 2 month by MS.
|
| It would have been insane to re-implement or standardized
| anything coming from Microsoft at this time, leading you for sure
| in front of a judge for patent infringement...
|
| Anything coming from Microsoft was radioactive due to stupid
| political decisions and aggressive patent & IP attitude.
|
| This is sad, and cause us to loose 10 years in the web evolution,
| reinventing the wheel many many times.
|
| Without even consider the millions of hours of engineering wasted
| to fight with broken HTML compatibilities, locked-in technologies
| (flash, Sliverlight, ActiveX, Vbscript) and continuously
| deprecated proprietary APIs.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| > One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was
| that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs
| and had no computer degree.
|
| Personally, I'd say it was mainly because we were tech geeks who,
| back then, actually believed in a web that should be accessible
| to as many different platforms as possible using as many
| different browsers as possible, not just Windows and IE users.
|
| In a sense, that notion prevailed: the web is ubiquitous, browser
| lock-in is considered a douche move and you can still access some
| really worthwhile sites even with rather simple means.
|
| In another sense, we all failed, lending our hands to help create
| the current privacy-invading, dark-patterned UX nightmare we're
| still trying to pass off as a reasonable way of making the world
| a better place.
|
| I never thought I'd lament the day Microsoft stopped making their
| own browser core. As a web developer, one less rendering engine
| to GAF about is nice. As a netizen, the Google dominance is going
| from unsettling to scary.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > As a web developer, one less rendering engine to GAF about is
| nice
|
| I started out using Mozilla Communicator Suite, Phoenix, and
| now Firefox as my primary browser. I never defaulted to IE and
| never to Chrome but I have always strived to make everything I
| wrote work across as many browsers as possible.
|
| Something funny happened around IE 10, the HTML, CSS, and
| JavaScript all started running correctly on the first try on
| all browsers, even mobile.
|
| It was glorious for about a year or two then everything started
| to diverge again and with Mobile versions of browsers we're
| starting to head back towards the hell that was developing for
| the Web around 2004.
|
| There are certainly more platforms to juggle today but they're
| more similar than different at this point.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| If the web's reliance on the Chromium code proves to be a
| hindrance, it will take a monumental effort to correct. Brendan
| Eich, speaking of Brave, said something to the effect that it
| would take hundreds of engineers years to build a new browser
| equivalent to Chromium in capability. For a free piece of
| software.
|
| I think it's more likely that a new communication paradigm will
| supplant the web than that a Chromium competitor will replace
| Chromium, just as the new smartphone/cloud computing platforms
| finally broke the Windows stranglehold. PCs are still dominated
| by Windows.
| stilisstuk wrote:
| I don't get it. Firefox works great, maybe better
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Firefox is built on a similar level of effort. Brendan Eich
| is talking about the effort required for a company to
| develop a new, full-featured browser engine to complete
| with Firefox and Chromium.
| zamalek wrote:
| Mozilla is rebuilding much of an engine with Servo and
| related (e.g. the CSS bits that are now actually
| integrated into FF) projects. I can really see them
| replacing more and more of FF with Rust in the future,
| because Mozilla really seem to be doubling down on trust,
| in all forms. For example, they recently announced that
| the UI is web component based - which means that using
| Servo for the window chrome is in the realm of
| possibility.
|
| Edit: at that point I wouldn't really consider it "FF of
| yore." A rewrite is really a new product.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| It may be true that starting from scratch would be
| impractical, but it might be practical to take
| Firefox/Chromium and make deep changes, to the point that
| it's effectively another browser.
|
| Mozilla themselves have been doing this with Firefox.
| They've been replacing C++ by Rust (with the Servo
| rendering-engine project). They've replaced the
| JavaScript JIT more than once, if I recall correctly.
|
| We've already seen WebKit give rise to two divergent
| major browsers: Chrome and Safari.
| acdha wrote:
| The problem is keeping pace with the upstream: it's not
| that it's impossible but that it's very expensive -- when
| Google forked WebKit they dedicated a large and very
| talented (i.e. expensive) engineering team to the
| project. The same could be done again but you're looking
| at companies like Microsoft, not startups.
| rapind wrote:
| The fact that this software is so complex is the problem imo.
| The focus at this point should be on cleanup and
| simplification instead of feature bloat. Every design
| decision should consider "what can we delete?"
| nradov wrote:
| Complex software is what customers want. A rendering engine
| for clean, valid XHTML could be very simple. But everyone
| wants to be able to see web pages created by technically
| incompetent designers with "tag soup" HTML. There's no
| point in complaining, that's just the reality of the modern
| web.
| ripdog wrote:
| The complexity in modern browser engines has nothing to
| do with parsing invalid HTML and everything to do with
| the vast, absurd feature set of the modern web platform,
| and the complex interactions between the components.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Yeah, if you were to design HTML, CSS, and JS from the
| ground up today they'd likely look very different.
|
| The bigger issue is backwards compatibility; the web has
| bent over backwards to maintain it, which is a blessing
| and a curse. On the one hand it makes the feature set
| absurd, but on the other hand the web is (relatively)
| easy to archive since format interpreters for it are
| widespread, and pages can be built and then forgotten
| about because they still work.
| amelius wrote:
| > Yeah, if you were to design HTML, CSS, and JS from the
| ground up today they'd likely look very different.
|
| I'd like to see that experiment done.
| acdha wrote:
| > A rendering engine for clean, valid XHTML could be very
| simple. But everyone wants to be able to see web pages
| created by technically incompetent designers with "tag
| soup" HTML.
|
| The HTML5 parsing algorithm is not _that_ hard:
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110113/parsing.html
|
| Do you really think that the complexity of a full XML
| implementation of the half dozen specs required to
| implement XHTML would really be that significant a
| savings compared to the actual features browser
| developers actually spend their time on?
|
| You're correct that complex software is what people want
| but that's complex as in an advanced document layout
| system with advanced language support, rich media, forms,
| etc. rather than the format those features are
| implemented in.
| nradov wrote:
| There will probably never be another complete new web browser
| developed from scratch. Browsers are already being supplanted
| by native mobile apps, wearable devices, voice interfaces,
| and (just starting) AR / VR. Browser use is still growing
| worldwide but the trend is toward slower growth. No one will
| invest hundreds of person years to build a product in a
| market with declining growth and entrenched competition.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| doubtful claim, with all the operating systems being brewed
| as insurance policy against google pulling a google on
| android. they will all have their browser too.
| nradov wrote:
| Modern browser engines are reasonably portable. When a
| new OS arrives the developers will just port Firefox or
| Chromium to it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think the article missed the part where Microsoft basically
| went to sleep and stopped doing anything with the browser.
|
| Just like the 1st edition of Bill Gates book, Microsoft decided
| the internet thing wasn't as interesting as whatever they had
| cooked up. To their credit, they figured out they were wrong.
| untog wrote:
| It's in there:
|
| > The final nail in the coffin was that after the release of
| Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft decided to tightly couple new
| Internet Explorer releases to Windows releases. So they
| dismantled the Internet Explorer team and integrated it into
| the Windows product team.
| brnt wrote:
| I recall obtaining a new version of IE was a happy
| occasion, from IE4 to 5 was such an improvement! Then 5.5!
| And then 6 came with XP and it was... the last release
| anybody really was eager for. I recall switching to Firefox
| not long after and I've not switched since.
| wayneftw wrote:
| Just because a common open source engine has been decided upon
| doesn't mean there's no competition or that no innovation can
| happen.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| No, it doesn't. But with Microsoft, Google and Amazon all
| relying on Chromium, there's going to be massive pull in that
| direction no matter what. Together, these three companies
| will now, basically, control the desktop OS market, the
| browser market and the cloud market. I'm not exactly giddy
| with excitement about that.
| bluedino wrote:
| It just goes to show how tone-deaf most of Microsoft is, and
| always has been.
|
| They have a handful of products that dominate the market and
| everything else is a joke. And it seems like every good
| idea/invention they have, gets turned into a mess by
| marketing/management.
| arcticfox wrote:
| Most tech companies have 1-5 successful products and the rest
| are all "jokes"
| _pmf_ wrote:
| > we're still trying to pass off as a reasonable way of making
| the world a better place.
|
| Outside of the SV bubble, this is seen as the creepy
| grandstanding that it is.
| sayhello wrote:
| Disclosure: I work at Google on Chrome. Opinions are my own.
|
| Using chromium as a base, browsers will have to differentiate by
| offering a better product.
|
| "Better" is less likely to be better performance, compatibility,
| or accessibility.
|
| By using much of the same code as another browser implementer,
| any browser vendor [hint hint] that still makes their own engine
| could reduce the resources they put on the foundations and web
| platform and put more of it on the product itself.
|
| Perhaps we'll have more groundbreaking innovations to move
| browsers forward. The last few big ones: multi-process
| architecture, tabs.
|
| In effect, by using the same foundations, the browser wars could
| in fact be reignited and the users could be the winners.
|
| On the web platform side, I.e., the stuff you see on MDN and w3c
| specs, using the same "base" doesn't mean the browsers won't have
| different implementations of future APIs if the vendors' opinions
| diverge strongly. Case in point: Chromium used to use WebKit as
| its renderer and now uses blink, a fork of WebKit.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Open browsers have been around for decades, Chromium didn't
| offer anything new there and as you say it even started off an
| open browser itself. If everyone did what you suggest there is
| a net loss for the user as where there used to be competition
| in browser backends there is now whatever Google considers in
| it's interest to merge into Chromium for others to also adopt
| (until the point someone manages a fork and we're back at the
| part where you say companies should drop their engines for what
| is popular instead).
| sayhello wrote:
| About web APIs, didn't want to imply that blink was used
| instead of WebKit for that reason, it was just an example that
| rendering engines could still evolve independently.
| pcwalton wrote:
| > By using much of the same code as another browser
| implementer, any browser vendor [hint hint] that still makes
| their own engine could reduce the resources they put on the
| foundations and web platform and put more of it on the product
| itself.
|
| In other words, throw out all the advantages that come from
| using Rust in the browser in favor of a codebase that has a
| policy forbidding any use of that language. No thanks.
|
| Furthermore, I have to note the irony that you say nobody else
| should implement their own engine when your team is the one
| that forked Blink from WebKit in the first place.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Let's not celebrate embrace extend extinguish, but let's also not
| celebrate MS handing the keys to google so they can do the same
| with Chrome. Why help your competitor? They should have gone with
| Firefox.
|
| Around 2012 when all 3 major browsers had similar market share
| [1] is what we want: everyone can make try extension but no one
| can ram them down our throats.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
| city41 wrote:
| I'm not sure this article is celebrating EEE, just more
| celebrating innovation in general. Regardless of the goal of
| these features, in isolation these features are interesting and
| fun to read about. And not to mention they did lead to things
| like SVG, fetch, etc, so it wasn't all bad in the end.
| jknew wrote:
| For others who weren't aware, "embrace, extend, extinguish" was
| an explicit strategy discussed internally at Microsoft for
| gaining control of the internet
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
|
| Though I think there are real innovations discussed in the
| article, the portrayal of Microsoft being an altruistic actor
| trying to get others to adopt their tech is downright dishonest
| with what we know about their internal discussions of their
| motivations and strategy at the time.
|
| I found the article really interesting, but I could do without
| the rose colored glasses.
| jfoster wrote:
| In adopting chromium they're not just helping their competitor,
| but their competitor is now also helping them.
|
| At the end of the day, the default option for most users would
| naturally be to stick to Edge, but they instead have been
| installing Chrome. Why? Because Chrome was better. Now Edge is
| like Chrome.
|
| There's much less of a reason for users to install Chrome as a
| result. Microsoft are likely to regain some marketshare with
| this approach. If Bing is good enough, that may also mean
| billions in revenue.
| stOneskull wrote:
| That's it, and everything syncs across easily. Installing
| Chrome is now pretty much redundant.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > If Bing is good enough
|
| I've actually noticed it is better in some kinds of searches,
| and worse in others. Thanks to Edge, it's my default and to
| be honest, I don't even realize it's not Google most days.
| acdha wrote:
| This is generally good but the conclusion is mostly wrong
|
| > One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was
| that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs
| and had no computer degree. Instead we were so busy learning
| about semantic markup and CSS that we totally missed the rest.
| And finally, I think too few people back then were fluent enough
| in JavaScript, let alone in architecting complex applications
| with JavaScript to appreciate things like HTML Components, Data
| Bindings or Default Behaviors. Not to speak of those weird XML
| sprinkles and VML. > > The other reason could have been a lack of
| platforms to spread knowledge to the masses. The internet was
| still in its infancy, so there was no MDN, no Smashing Magazine,
| no Codepen, no Hackernoon, no Dev.to and almost no personal blogs
| with articles on these things. Except Webmonkey.
|
| People were building complex JavaScript apps back then (the term
| DHTML was coined in 1997), and there were plenty of experienced
| software developers and people interested in really learning how
| to code well. Similarly, there were many sites where you could
| learn techniques -- not just A List Apart but many personal blogs
| and sites like Philip Greenspun's
| https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ (1997). If you look at the
| first A List Apart entry in the Wayback Machine, they list many
| well-known resources:
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/19991005040451fw_/http://www.alis...
|
| (There is, however, a quite legitimate argument that back then
| English fluency was a very significant barrier)
|
| The main problem was that 1990s Microsoft was all about "cutting
| off their air supply". They threw huge amounts of money into
| building out tons of features, exclusive bundling agreements and
| promotions with various other companies, etc. but they were not
| nearly as lavish in spending on QA or developing web standards
| even before the collapse of Netscape lead them to pull most of
| the IE team away. If you tried to use most of the features
| listed, they often had performance issues, odd quirks and
| limitations, or even crashing bugs which made them hard to use in
| a production project and many of those bugs took years to be
| fixed or never were.
|
| In many cases -- XHR being perhaps the best example -- going
| through the process of cleaning the spec up to the point where
| another browser would implement it might have lead to the modern
| era dawning a decade earlier with better than weekend-hackathon-
| grade quality implementation in IE. I look at that era of
| Microsoft as a tragedy of management where they had some very
| smart people but no strategy other than "prevent competition".
| Theodores wrote:
| We missed out in using these features in part because we were too
| concerned with making pixel perfect copies of designs that had to
| look exactly the same in every browser because that is what our
| clients signed off on. This was in the days before responsive and
| all our time was spent fiddling with margins and padding to get
| things pixel perfect. There was no scope to take a step back and
| play with some of this Microsoft technology.
|
| Invariably the cast in stone designs were PDF drawings from
| Photoshop where the art was in second guessing what the designer
| was thinking of and where they stole their influences from.
|
| You could not implement a table in a cool way on MS IE and in a
| more boring way on the other browsers, knowledge was just not
| there or the space to experiment.
| uncle_j wrote:
| This is a shame in some ways. Internet explorer was always very
| strict on how it works.
|
| Anything before 8 was a challenge due to some atrocious bugs.
|
| This had it problems but it really taught you not to write sloppy
| CSS and JS as it would usually just wouldn't work.
|
| Versions After 7 basically anything that wasn't in the spec
| supported wasn't implemented so you had to write code pretty much
| bang on the spec.
|
| Just this Friday I solved a rendering problem with IE where SVG
| TEXT elements weren't being rendered correctly, I was calling
| _element.innerHTML_ to set the text which was incorrect. I should
| have been _element.textContent_. Using _element.innerHTML_ is
| incorrect as SVG elements shouldn 't have a innerHTML property
| (they are not HTML). IE11 was actually working correctly, where
| the latest Chrome behaviour was incorrect.
|
| So spending time making it work in IE has improved my code.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Totally agree with your conclusion. I remember generating a
| JavaScript array in a server-side loop, and the code wouldn't
| work (at first) because of a trailing comma on the last element
| before a bracket. Firefox would ignore it, but IE 8 wanted a
| perfect no-extraneous-commas code.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| >Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't
| have a innerHTML property
|
| Is that definitely the case? Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all
| return a value for the innerHTML property of an element in an
| SVG document.
|
| This W3C spec [0] specifically mentions XML documents in
| addition to HTML documents. And as I understand it, it seems
| like embedded SVG elements also inherit from the Element
| interface which includes InnerHTML.
|
| IE11 might also be correct, following an older spec, but I
| don't think you can jump to the conclusion that Chrome is wrong
| just because the property is called innerHTML.
|
| [0] https://w3c.github.io/DOM-Parsing/#the-innerhtml-mixin
| uncle_j wrote:
| That is interesting.
|
| I assumed that innerHTML must have been wrong because
| textContent works in all the browsers I have tried it on
| whereas innerHTML doesn't work. A cursory search textContent
| vs innerHTML seemed to suggest textContent was the correct
| way.
|
| It looks like it isn't a simple case of IE11 (I haven't had a
| chance to test on 9 & 10 yet) being correct and the others
| being incorrect. Thanks for the info.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That introduction is why tech journalists shouldn't dabble in
| amateur history. I sounds like something from a 1960s highschool
| textbook: oversimplified and dripping in passive-aggressive
| politics.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Your comment is needlessly insulting and very patronizing
| without actually providing any substance or even a single point
| of contention.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I don't like IE. I never have. But this part rings true:
|
| "Internet Explorer already had many of the things that we came to
| reinvent later and that we now celebrate as innovations."
|
| It happens all the time in tech, and IE probably reinvented some
| things from Hypercard or whatever came before it.
| OliverJones wrote:
| Yes, the Redmond Middle School science project called Internet
| Explorer prototyped some excellent concepts. For sure. You can
| get a LOT of cool concepts for a hundred megabucks a year from
| people of the intellectual and creative firepower hired by
| Microsoft.
|
| But, why did it fail?
|
| Of course, as the article says, one reason was the Ballmer-era
| tsunami of bureaucratic confusion that inundated Microsoft and
| stymied the release of the Windows versions that carried IE.
|
| Another was security. Cybercreeps love IE. Drive-by malware? IE.
| "Internet Exploder."
|
| A third was the cost of compatibility. It necessary for web
| developers and later, web app developers, to develop and test
| once on all the browsers and then again on each version of IE. It
| didn't help that it came bundled with Windows: large-org IT
| managers often forced their users to use an atrocity like IE6
| years after it upgraded. This bogus standardization shackled a
| ball and chain to third-party developers.
|
| A fourth was, paradoxically, the whole ActiveX Control subsystem.
| Apartment threading, anyone? Monikers, anyone? It was just barely
| good enough that DICOM and other high-end imaging systems could
| use it. That took away incentives to get <canvas>-like stuff
| working well.
|
| Other companies have done similar things. DECNet, GM's MAP/TOP.
| Apollo Token Ring. SysV vs. BSD. But none of those things hobbled
| an industry quite like IE.
|
| Trebuchets are cool tech too. But imagine if every UPS truck had
| to carry one to place packages on peoples' doorsteps.
| cstross wrote:
| I was __really __disappointed that the OP wasn 't talking about
| the UGM-133 Trident:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II
|
| (Alas, I think they'll be around for a few decades more, unless
| someone is wicked enough to use them.)
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| This is what I was thinking as well, until I saw the ".dev" in
| the URL.
| ribs wrote:
| Ditto. As I understand it, that program largely put me and my
| sister through college...
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Thought the same - always think of this when I hear Trident -
| the nuclear Missile Harrods would sell
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyJh3qKjSMk
| spsrich2 wrote:
| Yes he's not talking about Trident missiles.
| vardump wrote:
| I thought about Trident VGA cards... thinking "they're still
| around!?".
| rudolfwinestock wrote:
| I thought of the Trident missile, as well.
|
| Anyone who's either a member of the Baby Boom or Generation X
| will bear witness to the Cold War for most of the rest of this
| century.
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