Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by antifarben 1532 days ago
Internet Explorer but hear me out before you cry:

The current browser ecosystem has more or less two engines: WebKit based browsers and Firefox. We have basically WebKit monoculture. If you'd find a fundamental flaw in WebKit, you'd be able to break most browsers. If Internet Explorer would be open source we would have the chance to get a third engine running. Browser engines aren't trivial and IE also had some good sides after all these years.

I guess if IE would become FOSS this would bring some fresh air to the ecosystem.

5 comments

WebKit and Blink are two different engines. They split off 9 years ago. There’s no such thing as a WebKit monoculture. There may be a Blink monoculture depending on how much you care about mobile browsers, mobile Safari is still very popular especially in the US.
iPad Safari is close enough to desktop Safari now that it switched to the same user agent as desktop Safari. That surely helps to bump Safari’s marketshare.
We already have Firefox and few people use it compared to chrome. A third engine does not matter.
Yes, but not the IE. Opera Presto! Source code even leaked after Opera switched to webkit, and some Russians tried patching new things, but legal status made unsustainable :(.
DuckDuckGo are building new native browser apps for Mac and Linux. Not sure how far along they are, but I know they have teams working on each.
It is for Mac and Windows, not for Linux. They also are using WebView/WebView2, so they aren't building an engine.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/21/22848133/duckduckgo-brow...

Those are just wrappers around the platform WebView I think.
I would be happy enough if Dillo parsed the video and audio tags as <a> links.