Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by IfOnlyYouKnew 2445 days ago
You must have lived in a different past than me.

IE was far more dominant, and browsers actually had meaningful differences back then. Porting CSS written for IE to Firefox could easily take 50% of the initial implementation time, if not 100%. Today, it's not completely uncommon to have something developed on Chrome working in Firefox and Safari without any changes.

And the most significant problem with IE was obviously that it wasn't FOSS, and was only available for Windows. Neither applies to Chrome.

1 comments

Yeah all those Web sites that are Chrome only must be a product of my imagination.

It doesn't matter if Chrome is open-source, when it is technically owned by a single corporation.

Update your beliefs.. Microsoft is now a major contributor to chromium.
[citation needed]

They are now a major user of chromium, and may contribute, but they do not have any say in what goes into chromium. That is still controlled by google employees. If said google employees do not like microsoft patches, they will reject the proposed changes, and microsoft can then at best push them into their own fork.

Google rejecting Microsoft changes has not yet been observed, it could happen.

Most people think that Google agenda could conflict with Microsoft agendas. I have read a LOT of chromium issues. I can tell you that the higher management at Google does not dictate chromium changes as they are too technical for them. The truth is, except for maybe a few exceptions, chromium evolve through the decisions of engineers that want to create the best possible product. They are not different to Firefox or edge engineers. Thus they should collaborate pretty well and a Google and Microsoft team should not have more "conflicts" than between two Google internal teams. As you said for the exceptions, Microsoft can maintain a fork, it's still order of magnitude more economic and smart than to constantly duplicate work in a redundant browser (firefox)

You can see a list of their merged pull requests here: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/author:*.microsof...

BTW I really wonder when Apple will switch back to chromium.

>I can tell you that the higher management at Google does not dictate chromium changes as they are too technical for them.

Tell that to the webRequest API that ablockers use.

>As you said for the exceptions, Microsoft can maintain a fork, it's still order of magnitude more economic and smart than to constantly duplicate work in a redundant browser (firefox)

Chrome is the redundant browser. Firefox was here first.

webRequest API Well maybe it's an exception, but they have technical reasons mostly. Webrequest v3 is not stable so wait and see.

Chrome is the redundant browser. Firefox was here first. Well Chrome is based on khtml which is not that new but yeah Netscape navigator precede it. Indeed it would have been better if chrome was based on gecko (FF) at the time. But now Firefox can be thought of the redundant browser because of both marketshare and being technically an inferior product on most metrics.

If mozilla worked on improving chromium, think of the massive progress it would bring to the World! Website would have no limits on what is possible to create. Everything would be fast, etc.