Re:Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust
by ahupp on Saturday August 15, 2020 @06:43PM
(#24173071)
"They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement."
One example is XHR, which is probably the single defining feature of the modern web.
Good standards simply codify whatever "proprietary" features we've found are useful.
Re:Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust
by mulmen on Saturday August 15, 2020 @04:26PM
(#24172088)
Microsoft broke the web in more spectacular ways than Google. Even IE6 itself didn’t always work properly.
But Google has done more lasting damage I think. The effects are more subtle, things work. ...The way Google wants. We may never know what was crushed or lost by submitting to Google’s will. So the harm will be less visible.
I'm not sure that's really true. Do you remember the bad old IE days? Half the web was simply broken on non-Microsoft operating systems, because Microsoft refused to follow standards.
They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement. And despite all that effort, we often never managed to do it - cough _ActiveX_ cough.
The situation back then was much, much worse than today in terms of open standards and cross-browser (let alone cross-OS) compatibility. And that was pretty much Microsoft's fault.
Google and Chrome have lots of problems. But they build on top of Chromium, which is completely open source. It does not have 100% of the features of Chrome, but from a practical perspective that seems to be mostly a non-issue, at least for me.