Which brings me to the crying “wolf” part of this post, how much control you want to have over your digital life? How much profiling are you comfortable with? We used to have a very diverse Web with many engines and no one in clear control over everything and now we’re seeing a Web that is divided between very few players (check this cleverly written post by Andre Staltz to learn more about it). Google is controlling too much of the Web stack We already lost the mobile world for a duopoly of Apple and Google, now we’re losing the desktop most used application, the Web Browser, to a monopoly from Google again, how much control do you want that company to have over the future of the Web? All this not counting the many Electron based apps we use in our daily lives such as VS Code, Atom, Slack, etc, which are all Chrome engine again. It is like as if they were building cars, there is a lot they can do without actually changing the engine itself, and thats what the Web Browsers are becoming, everyone is working on parts of the car but all the engines are now Chrome and believe me, you don’t want all the engines to be the same, not even if they are all Gecko or if somehow we resurrect Presto, we want diversity of engines and not monoculture.
How much progress will stop by choosing a single road forward.Įven though Opera, Beaker and Brave are all doing very good work, it is still Chrome engine behind them and that limits the amount of stuff they can build and innovate. Mozilla is making lots of incredible progress with its Firefox Quantum project that is picking parts of Servo and reworking them into Firefox, stuff such as the first parallel layout engine happened there for example. How does that work in a world where engine diversity is non-existent? Talking about standards, so far, to ship a new standard you usually need multiple independent implementations of some spec, for example Chrome and Firefox both shipping the same thing. Everyone working “kind of together” to make sure the Web works the same and that we have standards. This was possible because of the astounding work of multiple stakeholders that range from the W3C to the browser makers to many of the large web properties. You can be using FreeBSD and Firefox and someone else might be on an iOS based device and you both can use the same Web.
One of the main claims to fame of the Web is that it is interoperable across engines and systems. Now, if Microsoft adopt Chromium as a base, there will only be Mozilla left building on a different base and this is terrible for the Web. It is safe to say that between the major five browser vendors, most of them are using an engine in the Blink/WebKit family.īesides them you only had Microsoft building EdgeHTML and Mozilla building Gecko. While there is still an others category in the graph above, we can’t be sure about their engines.
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