Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents

Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by Ajedi32 on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @12:01PM (#22606226)

Nonetheless, its still mildly concerning that smaller players in the browser space are finding it difficult to keep pace with all the new APIs being introduced to the web these days. Even Microsoft sort of gave up and killed their browser engine in favor of a Chromium fork.

It's a tricky situation with no obvious solutions. The Pale Moon dev's plea to slow down isn't going to work; devs want these new features and they're not going to stop using them just because a smaller browser developer with no significant market share can't keep up.

There is, perhaps, the beginnings of a solution with the Extensible Web Manifesto[1], which aims to shift the focus of browsers from implementation of many high-level features to instead focus on smaller, simpler low-level features which high-level features can then be built on top of. (Though ironically, web components are a part of this movement.) CSS Houdini[2] is one such feature which seems like it might be relevant in this specific situation (though whether it's helpful I have no idea; in the short term I suspect it might just translate to a lot more work).

[1]: https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Houdini

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Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by esarbe on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @12:32PM (#22606682)

All the more reason to cherish Firefox.

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Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by stjohnswarts on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @03:50PM (#22609494)

firefox is in the sites of Google, don't worry about that. They will find a weakness and exploit it to try and become the only "true" browser.

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Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by SickOfSlowSites on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @08:28PM (#22612304)

> devs want these new features

Devs wanted Flash and real-player plugins pack in the day too. They wanted ActiveX plugins too. No-one else wanted them and it was ultimately the downfall of IE.

> Microsoft sort of gave up and killed their browser engine This will be the downfall of chrome. Google will ultimately be fined under anti-trust, chrome funding will dry up and browsers will stop supporting these absurd features. Have a nice time rewriting all your webcomponents in javascript in 5 years.

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Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by untog on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @11:54PM (#22613464)

> Devs wanted Flash and real-player plugins pack in the day too. They wanted ActiveX plugins too. No-one else wanted them

The idea that users didn’t want Flash is laughable. It was enormously popular and enabled all kinds of multimedia presentation that the web couldn’t come close to rivalling.

> Have a nice time rewriting all your webcomponents in javascript in 5 years.

Web components are JavaScript. And it’s a standard agreed upon by all the major browser manufacturers. They aren’t going away, no matter what happens to Google.

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Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by pjmlp on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @02:31AM (#22614166)

Had it not been for iPhone, and we would all still happily using Flash, instead of waiting 10 year to still catch up with what was possible in 2011 regarding 3D on the browser.

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Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by jhare on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @05:16PM (#22610548)

Small players were never viable in the space. If they were people would care about, for example, Opera. Instead, probably 12-ish people care about Opera.

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Re:Please consider not adopting Google WebComponents by smnthermes on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @03:49PM (#22609477)

> devs want these new features

Except that they didn't asked for them, as shown there (and note that Google removed <style scoped> from Chromium):

1. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/552#issuecomment-17810...

2. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/bl...

Also, even Mozilla is having problems with Google WebComponents. There are 100 bugs open in Bugzilla about it.

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