Re:Browsers
by pcwalton on Sunday December 16, 2018 @10:21PM
(#18696707)
> Sure, Google may be at the reigns of where the project goes, but then differentiate on features, or fork it and make it different.
And if the fork diverges, then what? This is not a theoretical concern: Blink and WebKit are now quite different, and it's best to regard them as two different rendering engines. Is that bad?
> Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows?
This presupposes that the Linux kernel is at an optimum point in the design space. It's pretty clear to me that it isn't. In fact, I think the monoculture around open source kernels has been bad for OSS. I look forward to Fuchsia providing some much-needed competition, much in the same way LLVM provided much-needed competition to GCC.
And if the fork diverges, then what? This is not a theoretical concern: Blink and WebKit are now quite different, and it's best to regard them as two different rendering engines. Is that bad?
> Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows?
This presupposes that the Linux kernel is at an optimum point in the design space. It's pretty clear to me that it isn't. In fact, I think the monoculture around open source kernels has been bad for OSS. I look forward to Fuchsia providing some much-needed competition, much in the same way LLVM provided much-needed competition to GCC.