If I may impose further: Can you opine on (or link to something intelligent which you agree with) the health of the browser engine ecosystem?
Obviously you've chosen Chromium/Blink, which I assume was for practical reasons in a fledgling startup. I.e. the relative simplicity of embedding vs Gecko, the at-the-time performance superiority, confidence in upstream maintenance, etc.
I was surprised initially, because obviously you knew Gecko better than anyone. You also know the arguments against a browser engine monoculture.
I'm coming around to the idea that (Blink has won, and) that's not so bad. Because there are so many browsers embedding Blink now (and V8, but no one complains about that!) ... some of which have serious development teams behind them. I remain concerned about a single steward of web standards, but I think that Blink is really good and I hope that there are enough other browsers that rely on it, so if Google were to push Blink in a direction that didn't match the broader goals of the web, that the individual browser teams could fork and maintain it cooperatively.
Is this a pipe dream? Am I bargaining with the reaper?
I've been a Firefox user since before Firefox was Firefox, and Mozilla and Netscape before that. I think I'm abandoning my opinion on the importance of browser engine diversity. Gecko-Quantum has some advantages still, but they're becoming less important -- and more relevantly, they might not matter if Firefox grows increasingly obscure.
(FWIW, every time I try Brave, I bounce off because of the way sidebar/vertical tabs are handled. I need layout density and memory-efficiency. It's been a while though, so I will try again.)
Blink is a fork (April 2013) of WebKit, and Apple keeps Google from monopolizing the engine market.
"If there's no solution, there's no problem." - James Burnham, IIRC (sounds cruel but it's a brutally pragmatic, no-moralizing, epigram about where to focus strategic attention)
If I may impose further: Can you opine on (or link to something intelligent which you agree with) the health of the browser engine ecosystem?
Obviously you've chosen Chromium/Blink, which I assume was for practical reasons in a fledgling startup. I.e. the relative simplicity of embedding vs Gecko, the at-the-time performance superiority, confidence in upstream maintenance, etc.
I was surprised initially, because obviously you knew Gecko better than anyone. You also know the arguments against a browser engine monoculture.
I'm coming around to the idea that (Blink has won, and) that's not so bad. Because there are so many browsers embedding Blink now (and V8, but no one complains about that!) ... some of which have serious development teams behind them. I remain concerned about a single steward of web standards, but I think that Blink is really good and I hope that there are enough other browsers that rely on it, so if Google were to push Blink in a direction that didn't match the broader goals of the web, that the individual browser teams could fork and maintain it cooperatively.
Is this a pipe dream? Am I bargaining with the reaper?
I've been a Firefox user since before Firefox was Firefox, and Mozilla and Netscape before that. I think I'm abandoning my opinion on the importance of browser engine diversity. Gecko-Quantum has some advantages still, but they're becoming less important -- and more relevantly, they might not matter if Firefox grows increasingly obscure.
(FWIW, every time I try Brave, I bounce off because of the way sidebar/vertical tabs are handled. I need layout density and memory-efficiency. It's been a while though, so I will try again.)