Doing HTML and JavaScript are commodities. Given the existence of standards, there's not a lot of room for innovative behavior. Any developments (faster, new HTML standards, etc) won't impact the market unless they're in one of the major browsers. Competition is good, but there's only room in the market for a handful of rendering engines. Maybe 3-5, tops.
Conversely, UI and human interaction with the browser is a place where there's room for an unbounded number of players. This is where the competition can actually be happening. And it's where I think the competition should be happening.
The idea of a browser as something that just renders HTML and executes JavaScript is kinda lame. I use Opera because I think it's also the browser's responsibility to include tab organization and search functionality and mouse gestures and flipping CSS in and out and synchronization. (And I like my mail integrated, but that's a personal thing.) And I want it to Just Work, instead of having to manage a half-dozen extensions.
I am guardedly optimistic about Vivaldi, because it's what I actually out of a browser. (Specifically, an updated version of Opera 12, which Opera 15+ is not.)
> Given the existence of standards, there's not a lot of
> room for innovative behavior.
Servo is a research project for a future version of Firefox. That's the definition of a major browser. No web developers want a new browser with incompatible features to test or build against, but Mozilla/Google/Microsoft experimenting for future versions is expected.
The original point is that independent browsers using established libraries and adding new UI concepts is great for users and doesn't make extra work for web developers. I'm looking forward to what they make of it!
Then why have I begun to see "This website only works in Google Chrome, upgrade today!" messages all over the web?
I suspect a "This site only works with chrome!" message only applies to older versions of Internet Explorer.
Crying wolf is so boring these days.
edit: Also i find it hilarious that you think Google would risk rejecting all users who aren't using Chrome. Talk about a great way to give your Search competition a legitimate case.
edit2: The downvoting is cute, and i hope it's because of my tone and not me calling out lies. "Anything but Chrome!" he says - absurd. By all means, downvote my tone, but i should hope outright lying gets similar treatment.
I see it often on Firefox, I have the latest Firefox on linux (35.0.1). It's a blue bar along the top of many Google properties that are decently cross browser. Go to Inbox without chrome and you'll see the "only works with chrome" crap.
The biggest difference is probably NaCl in Chrome right now.
It shows on old Opera (Presto), new Opera (Blink) and IE 11, so it's not just old versions of IE.
(Not saying that it isn't important that people work on new, different engines as well in the long run)
But then I saw the part that said the browser's UI was Built on Web Technology, and then I read your comment, and my dreams were crushed forever.
Disappointing.
Seriously, I can't understand how they expect this to be any faster when everything on the homepage (which is still mostly content-free) says otherwise.
In ten years, people will be looking at the next next big thing because it has none of the cruft that <Servo> has.
It looks like this browser is a continuation of classic Opera, which pioneered a lot of stuff we take for granted today:
- Speed Dial — the start page you get in every browser these days
- mail client with filtered views, later known as "folders like in GMail"
- page modifications with user-supplied JS and CSS (later known as Greasemonkey and basis for browser extensions, which ironically Opera didn't have for a long time)
- address bar history based on full-text search of visited pages
- bookmark sync across devices
- pages rendered by a proxy server (like Amazon Silk browser)
And they've tried plenty of things that didn't catch on: built-in Torrent client, built-in web server (like node.js) and Widgets.
There's plenty of UI R&D to be done.
I have like 20 reasons why I miss the old Opera and I currently don't have any browser I feel comfortable with. All of them have to do with the UI. None has to do with the engine.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA
A re-made Firefox in Rust could be not just much faster but also much more secure, even than Chrome, if combining Rust's safety features with Electrosis/a similar sandbox and multiprocess system.
This new browser isn't just replacing Chrome's images with its own. It has new UI code, apparently using web standards. In other words, it's about as far from a skin as you can get.
When you replace images it's a skin. When you write code it isn't - it's a new UI.
Anyway, I think the TL;DR here is, "A new browser for our friends". To me, this implies they're building a new browser for the everyman, not a bunch of curmudgeon-y developers on HackerNews.
People outside of HN couldn't care less about new JS / rendering engines. They want to Google things, check their email / InstaTwitterVineBooks and generally just kinda meander around the web. To that person, new interface features is really the only thing they see. Honestly this is kinda refreshing to see in a weird way.
As a developer, I don't have to think about browser specific coding.
As an user, I can use same technology with favourite UI skin and additional features.
I was actually struck by its honest at first and wanted to try it.
Chrome on iOS is rubbish.
...because the Chrome guys are daft? Nope. ...because it's Apple's playground, and they don't want to play, so they've deliberately ('not deliberately') made it so anyone using their engine is a 2nd class citizen, and can only build a poor user experience.
(https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=423444 for the meta bug if you're interested)
What makes it rubbish? I remember using it when it was released and I switched to it as my main browser instantly. At the time I felt it was better than Safari, if not only for the top bar being smaller and/or hidden, something Safari did not do at the time. It also had the "request desktop" which is invaluable at times.
Currently I use Safari but it's because I haven't bothered since I use the iPhone browser for almost nothing.
and its not Chrome's fault. Apple do not allow any other web browser on iOS, so Chrome is just WebKit except you don't get the same javascript engine as Safari does.
I stubbornly continue to use it because I want my history and bookmarks to match my desktop.
I also use my devices jailbroken, and there are fixes for the Javascript engine. That being said, I mostly used it without them, and even when I did I noticed no difference. Again, probably because I use the iOS browsers very little.
This is very similar to what Windows Phone is doing as well. You can't download FF or Chrome on their phones, just other poor IE clones. Granted, IE has come a long way and is pretty decent on Windows Phone, but if I could use one browser across all my devices, I'd be a bit happier.
Windows started the war when they locked out native third-party code development on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Then in subsequent findings, Chrome lamented they can't get enough privileges with Metro app development to make it work and Mozilla knows MS doesn't want to further their platform - so a sort of stalemate at this point, and a loss to Windows Phone users.
Sources:
Mozilla: No plans to release Firefox for Windows Phone 7 (March 2010)
http://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-no-plans-to-release-fir...!
Google Has ‘No Current Plans’ to Bring Chrome to Windows Phone (August 2014)
http://www.omgchrome.com/no-current-plans-to-bring-google-ch...
You can use UIWebView, the older interface. The biggest problem is that its JavaScript engine is slower than Safari's, and does not JIT compile code (according to Apple, this is for security reasons). I've also seen complaints about scrolling performance.
You can use WKWebView, the newer interface. Its JavaScript engine does JIT, and it boasts 60fps scrolling. Unfortunately, it's missing several features detailed in the bug, including a way to clear and manage cookies, custom URL handlers, POST request bodies missing in certain cases, etc.
One would hope that the WkWebView bugs and omissions will be addressed in future iOS versions, but today is not possible to make an iOS browser that works as well as Safari.
Its not a new rendering engine.
So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That's cute, but its not a new browser.
It's the same browser with a slightly new UI.
Count me as skeptical and unexcited.
I am similarly unexcited by the 'it's browser' webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they're dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use.
(Servo, by comparison, is a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)