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0 pointsmakeitdouble5mo ago0 comments

I partly agree. Firefox moving to Webkit or Blink isn't as bad as people put it, but under one critical condition: Firefox still keeps the capacity to steer away from Google's roadmap and shoulder a competitive and full implementation of the engine on its own (100% maintain a fork that can deviate from Blink as much as needed, including becomming fully incompatible).

Under that specific scenario, we would get the best of both worlds. There would be less engine variety, but it would save Firefox and offer an out of a Google owned ecosystem.

Now I think that's absolutely not trivial, and if Firefox could pull that out it could probably as well push its own engine way more forward right now.

For instance Apple played that game, ended up basically alone on Webkit, and I'm not sure Safari is more competitive to Chrome than Firefox is. Safari keeps some market share, but the reasons are elsewhere.

0 comments

pseudalopex5mo ago

A fully incompatible Blink fork sounds like Gecko with more steps.

calvinmorrison5mo ago

I would like to see the browser be the Users Agent. IE: "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue. I really care less about the interpreter/VM than I do say, how we built a browser on it (which is why webkit is great, and I had my own webkit GTK browser that did exactly what I wanted, and why so many webkit based apps exist!)

lxgr5mo ago

> "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue.

It was neither, it was a legal issue. As I understand it, EU law (or its most common interpretation) did not actually allow websites to just defer to a browser preference. Fortunately, the EU is about to fix this:

> The amendments will reduce the number of times cookie banners pop up and allow users to [...] save their cookie preferences [...] in browsers and operating system. (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...)

makeitdoubleOP5mo ago

IMHO rendering engines can be ignored for restricted use cases or if it's fine to work 98% of the time. What we're expecting from a mainstream browser is a way higher bar, so having no control on the engine is a no go. Tomorrow Firefox having to wait for Google to implement a new sandboxing approach, or not able to override deeper DRM or tracking integration would be a pretty bad situation.

As I understand it that's exactly why Apple took webkit and ran with it.

> Cookie Banners?

People really viscerally hate those, do they. That anger should be pointed to the site pushing them IMHO, but aside from that, dismissing the banner is in itself a legal choice (whatever the default was) that isn't only bound to cookies despite the name. Whatever happens on the backend or service can also be bound to that choice.

I look at it the same way we have newsletter checkboxes. They're a PITA but I wouldn't trust an automated system to make the right choice on every single form, and not sign me to some super weird stuff just because it thought the checkbox was a newsletter optout (imagine a site pushing a "bill me every month for the extra feature" clearly explained option, but with an html input id close to "opt_out_of_free_plan" and it's automatically checked by your browser)

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