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Paul Buchheit posted a message

“Here's an idea not everyone will like: Firefox and IE should drop their rendering engines and switch to Webkit (used by Safari and Chrome). Then we wouldn't have the added annoyance of targeting three different DOMs.”

Tuesday at 1:53 pm - Link

sohin, Alex Borodach, Igor Poltavskiy, Torsten Eckert and 79 other people liked this

I'm sure someone will say something about "competition", but since it's open-source, they can continue to compete, just as Google has with their new JS engine, V8. Since everyone would be starting from the same point, they would all have the burden of not breaking compatibility. - Paul Buchheit

Microsoft would embrace and extend, creating WebKit Expression '09, and Firefox would only use WebKit 520 for the next 3 years, complaining that Apple and Google won't slow down their development to accommodate an 18 month development cycle. - Mark Trapp

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NO -- webkit is at least poorly studied for security vulnerabilities, I don't want to live with swiss-cheese-alike crap from fruity company JUST because some few entrepreneurs want to make their life easier!!! - silpol

if only they would - Robin Barooah

Mark+++ - Rahsheen(isSoAwesome)

Extending the product is a good thing -- it's how the platform advances. As long as it's all open-source, we all win. - Paul Buchheit

It's not that everybody should like it. It's that they should all do it. - Louis Gray

Actually, that's already been discussed as part of the Gears' strategy... simply make Webkit a plugin for Firefox and IE. It's actually not *that* outlandish. - Chris Messina

Paul, the problem is WebKit is licensed under the LGPL; Microsoft could merely create a plugin to WebKit that did all of its extra features. They really wouldn't receive all that much flak about it, either. - Mark Trapp

That makes sense. It will never happen. - Khürt Williams via twhirl

@Chris - I recall that being mentioned at google code. I wonder what it would take to make a plugin for IE or firefox to use complete chrome processes as an 'accelerator' - Robin Barooah

Yeah, an IE "plugin" is the way to go. That way users don't even need to change their habits or UI, and it could potentially fall-back to IE for sites that still don't work with webkit. There's just no advantage to having different rendering engines at this point. It's high cost, low benefit. - Paul Buchheit

Didn't Netscape 9 allow users to choose which rendering engine they wanted to use? - Tony Ruscoe

@Tony: Netscape 8 did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...) . You'll need to manually type the closing bracket, it is being excluded as part of the URL and I can't manually fix it. - nadim

for you all dearst proponents of single engine - go read "1984" book... dependence on one engine (or any subsystem, when it comes to that) for whole world is dangerous... and utterly stupid when it is done for sake of small group's convenience :-/ - silpol

Yes, it would be just like 1984 :) - Paul Buchheit

@slipol - that would be true if we were talking about one engine developed by one company, but with an open-source project with many developers, I don't see how this could be a problem. Do you think that hundreds (maybe thousands) of developers worldwide will all collude to do something evil? Well, if so, some other people will come along and create a fork. In fact, WebKit was forked off of khtml. Let's not forget to thank the KDE folk for the good engine to begin with. - Robert Felty

Why would the two most popular browsers in the world change? - Globecode

Crazy talk! - Andrew Badera

Rob, the problem that silpol is presumably saying exists with a monoculture is that everybody is vulnerable to the same diseases. This has happened in the past where security vulnerabilities in compression and encryption libraries have made huge amounts of unrelated software vulnerable. But Paul has a good point that a dominant platform certainly makes things easier for the developer, which is why there are millions more apps for Windows than any other platform. - Gabe Schaffer

You are making a big discussion out of nothing. The hypotesis that if they all use the same basis, that will have the same DOM, they will be interoperable. That has been proved wrong: all the web browsers out there already have the same working basis (Web Standards) and still they messed things up. What makes you believe that this would be different? - Marcos Marado via fftogo

Marcos, the difference is that they all started from very different places and IE and Firefox both have a lot of historical gunk. Web standards wasn't their working basis, the browser wars of the 90s was. The browsers have been converging for years now, which makes web development a lot better than it used to be, but that only emphasizes the uselessness of having multiple rendering engines. The monoculture argument is of course nonsense. Having three engines isn't going to make the world any safer, especially since they use the same base libraries. - Paul Buchheit

I agree!! - Wayne Sutton

This would definitely make life easier on the web developers - however monocultures usually result in a mediocre product. - Josh Smith

I agree - Roberto Bonini

@Paul I can only assume that you proclaim monoculture argument as nonsense only because you've never seen domino effect on large scale, with species of slightly different nature still staying... I've heard same kind of argumentation from Opera people as they were bragging on idea of "one proper engine under one proper standards" only to show them a bunch of weak points in their cardboard architecture, granted I had apropriate tools. But... Whatever. - silpol

The monoculture argument is based entirely on analogy, which makes for nice stories, but is a very weak form of evidence. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, but if they really wanted to interoperate, i.e. If the browser wars were really over, then they would just stop the last few years nonsense and go for standards compliance. Why did Apple fork KHTML? Why does IE insist in not adapting standards? Ultimately what matters for both end users and web developers is that each browser sees the same page in the same way. It's fictitious to say that the way to acomplish this is making them use the same code (why not use your argument for Javascript?): the way to do this is simply to follow the rules - in the web case, standards. - Marcos Marado via fftogo

Why bother with HTML, JS and others such standards then? Let's close up those shops and just standardize everything through Webkit. Which is great, unless if for whatever reason Webkit doesn't work on your device (or until the great Webkit fork). Let's standardize DOM instead, ne? :) - David Lee

Standardization is hard because there's a large amount of pages crafted specifically for quirks particular browsers. Going standard breaks them. - 9000

it sucks that it doesn't work on Windows Mobile yet.... ugh, I'm stuck in the stone age with IE6... - Harold

This conversation is so all over the place, I don't even know where to begin. All I can say is that 1985 wasn't as bad as I would have thought, seeing as it came after 1984. - Chris Messina

LOL hehehehe! - Susan Beebe

What's the point? You're still going to have to support IE6 for a decade anyway, and any new browser has to not break old apps. It's like those people who suggest that MS just replace the Windows kernel with Linux, as if all old apps will suddenly disappear, leaving the slate clean for all the glorious new apps to come. - Gabe Schaffer

that's one idea i love! standardization, baby! - stefan

Until someone decides that engine is crap and writes their own? - Robert Konigsberg

Paul Buchheit liked a story on Reddit

This family thought they were building a playground for the kids.This is what they saw from the upstairs window the next morning[PICS]

May 26 at 2:44 pm - Link

Evan Parker, Ihar Mahaniok, Steve Craft, Bruce Williams and 13 other people liked this

Playmates for the kids! - adventureran

Dare Obasanjo posted a message on Twitter

“The difference between amateurs and pros. Compare Twitter devs recent blog posts to http://tinyurl.com/3jsgfn”

May 24 at 1:56 pm - Link

possible248, Robert Scoble, Mark Allanson and Kenneth LeFebvre liked this

Great post... - Kenneth LeFebvre

Indeed. - Mark Allanson

Loic Le Meur posted a message on Twitter

“Let's be honest. I do not get 30 comments on a post of my blog that often. I get that almost everyday on Friendfeed http://snurl.com/2a1f3”

May 21 at 10:26 pm - Link

Eula, Roberta Murphy, Sarah Perez, Hutch Carpenter and 11 other people liked this

What would be useful is a way to auto export FF comments back into the blog post. - Ranjit Mathoda

@ranjit i saw it on inquisitr.com - David Adewumi

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did you received my demand about an interviewover Seesmic ? - Damien Van Achter via twhirl

DamienVanacheter can you resend on loic AT seesmic.com please - Loic Le Meur

well that is because friendfeed is so lightweight and easy to use... much more hastle leaving comments on a blog - Mark Allanson

@Ranjit That's totally what I was thinking... only not just for blogs but for everything. I wish I could take on that project. It'd be cool! - Dan Delphin via twhirl

Comments need time stamps and permalinks. - Steve Rubel

friend feed is cozier. - George Donnelly

@Ranjit, @Dan someone raised a similar question a couple days ago http://tinyurl.com/5njfga. Basically wanting to tie the services that FF aggregates together. - John Duff

Perhaps Google might index the links here as trackbacks. Now that would be interesting. - Todd Jordan

Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter

“@scottoraw Twitter isn't a free service. We invest our time in it. My time isn't free. Is yours?”

May 22 at 2:07 am - Link

Nikpay, Mark Allanson, Michael Lehman, Dobromir Hadzhiev and 6 other people liked this

I kind of like where you're going with this, scoble. But I'm not sure whether *everyone* "invests" their time. I think it rather gets "sucked". - Brad McCrorey

Actually, I agree. We provide Twitter's content, and they have the opportunity to monetize the resulting traffic. It's an exchange of value, which is why I was saying earlier that we "owe" Twitter nothing. That doesn't mean I don't like it, or take the service for granted. - Chris Baskind

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@Chris - now THAT is a good way of presenting it. Ok, I'm being swayed :) - Brad McCrorey

Everyone has a limited amount of time here on earth. That "costs" something. You get to decide where you spend your free time, but if you, say, wrote a book instead of Twittering, maybe you'd turn into the next great author. So, your spending time here is an opportunity cost and is one we all are definitely "investing" in. - Robert Scoble

How about using Twitter to research that book and become the next great author. Two birds and all that ;) - Colin Walker

you just read my mind... was just writing something on this. Been getting annoyed all day about people stating it as a "free" service... while I don't use it myself for my job as some, I still don't see it as free. Free if you only count money, but time is just as costly. - Philip Evans via twhirl

If we don't think our time has actual value, we should stop billing our clients. And point well taken, Robert, that we are allotted a limited number of hours in this life to achieve whatever it is we aspire to do. ;-) - Chris Baskind

I guess I'll call up BMW and tell them if they give me a car, I'll "pay" for it with the time I spend driving it. At some point Twitter has to make money. Our time doesn't pay for bandwidth bills. - CJ Kloote