alt Hacker NewsPart of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
Replies
>You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
Blink is very modular. Merging your changes is easier than you think. Exponentially easier than creating a whole other browser engine.
There are more layers, if you'd like to look into it.
- Web developers don't support older browsers because they lack the skill and economic motivation for it.
- The managers of web developers will not support them, because there is no money to be made in supporting older browsers. Nor are there career benefits in maintenance projects. No developer or manager will get promotions for it.
- The actual management of the companies will not promote or compensate engineering managers or developers for maintenance projects since it doesn't contribute to "line goes up"-economics.