[spinningslate]

Agreed. Browser diversity might be a pain for developers, but concentrating 2 of the 4 dominant end-user computing platforms on the same browser engine doesn't sound like a positive step for users [0]. Particularly when the engine in question is developed and maintained by one of two primary surveillance tech firms on the planet.

Perhaps I'm too jaded, but there's an unmistakable smell of the fishy about this. Dominant mobile + dominant desktop OS vendors decide to cosy up together...

I never thought I'd see the day that I mourned IE's decline having lived through the zenith of its hegemony. Like parent, I similarly would much rather have seen MS link up with Firefox for the sake of diversity. Perhaps that's too fanciful.

Perhaps a more interesting pairing would be Apple and Firefox, given that both are increasingly playing the pro-privacy card...

[0] I'm not counting Safari since WebKit and Blink diverged some time ago afaik.

[metildaa]

Apple will likely stick to Safari based on their Webkit fork. Look at their stewardship of coreutils and the graphics stack on MacOS, its plain to see that they just don't care if MacOS is 5+ years behind the curve on features and performance if its not hurting battety life for most users.

Gaming on MacOS has become a much more limited experience than on Linux (blame Valve for this) or Windows. Apple wields a big stick with each of these choices, kneecaping HTML5 PWAs, pushing forward their own graphics stack (hence the crap OpenGL support and lack of Mantle support)

[qalmakka]

I think the blame for the insignificance of macOS as a gaming platform chiefly lies on Apple's shoulders and their staunch refusal in creating adequately powered desktops at reasonable price points. As long as the majority of Macs are laptops with Intel iGPUs porting anything more graphically complex than Dota 2 is pointless. I think there are more people with custom <$900 builds with decent mid-tier AMD or NVIDIA GPUs than people with extremely expensive Macs with Vega or RX580 cards.

[ninedays]

I do not agree Valve should be to blame if Apple decided that gaming wasn't important for them. I am the first one to say when they do amazing things but the reality is that gaming never was/is a priority for Apple. Take a look at the history of OpenGL on macOS and it will become obvious that the only reason Linux today has a better support for games than Apple is Apple's fault only.

I truly wish it was different.

[metildaa]

I was blaming Valve for making gaming on Linux have such a broad library of titles. They've made Wine very easy to use, to the point that users barely know that it isn't a Linux native game.

[bwat49]

So you meant 'Thank valve for this'? :)

[bobbylarrybobby]

Yep, WebKit and Blink are very different not least because of their different JS engines. Lots of developers have trouble targeting safari, whereas chrome is a breeze.