Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

We do still fortunately have three (more or less) independent popular implementations: Google with Blink, Apple (and now Microsoft) with WebKit, and Mozilla with Gecko.

These are still three strong and independent voices; Chrome has substantial control on desktops, Apple has a stranglehold on their highly popular platforms, and Mozilla has both the hearts of the tech community as well as wide regard in bleeding edge technology with Rust, Quantum/Stylo, and Servo.




I'd put the count at 2¾: Blink counts for ½ since it's an ex-fork of WebKit. While a lot of the new feature development of the two are independent of each other, they still largely share a lot of the same architecture, which means there's going to be correlation in things like ease of implementation. The extra ¼ comes from Servo, which ends up having the opposite edge of the dichotomy from Gecko; it's effectively a ground-up re-implementation of the layout engine stack, so its internal architecture is quite different from everybody else, but it's goal isn't to drive new feature development in web standards.


Microsoft will use Blink not WebKit. Teams and VSCode are already Electron apps.


Right, the point being made is that Webkit/Safari are often the slowest of the bunch which is fine when you have three others but now each browser effectively has veto power and the expectation is that Webkit will wield it often.

It's saying "oh no, now Webkit can block things", not "oh no, we don't have enough strong implementations"


Since when WebKit is the "slowest of the bunch"?

WebKit's JavaScriptCore is the best performant of the big 4.


Slowest to implement things.


WebKit was the first to fully implement ES6.

https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712?s=21


"often" slowest of the bunch




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: