At least there was a distinction between web of documents (WWW) and shipped apps with custom canvas. Rendering apps with web’s DOM is stupid. It makes websites a mess and relies on everyone using the same monoculture of browsers (like we now have Chromium, WebKit and Gecko, all nearly identical).
If browser does not support one feature (like CSS’s transform), the whole house of cards breaks. It’s like making ASCII art in notepad and then expecting everyone to use the same notepad app with the same font and style, to not break our art proportions.
We need to split web into websites and webapps, with webapps being browser dependent or full custom canvases and websites being immutable human-readable and editable format.
Flash did too, though? Nevermind the gaping hole that is security.
Browser compatibility is generally not an issue since most people target for Chromium. There are polyfills, preprocessing, and whatnot to ensure maximum compatibility with the minimum amount of effort, but in the end if a webapp doesn’t behave the way you want it to on Konqueror, maybe hop over and use it on your preferred flavour of Chromium, or just don’t use the app.
Definitely an unpopular opinion but I can one-up you; I think Mozilla and Apple should give up on their respective platforms and move to Chromium. A unified web would be better, so long as no corporation has complete control over it. Mozilla hopping on and commandeering a part of Chromium would go a ways to safeguard that.
Now THAT is an unpopular opinion.
Google is trying to lock down the web with WEI, and they might get away with it since most browsers are Chromium.
We need more browser engines, not fewer. There are standards, there should be NO differences. Google is doing what Microsoft did with internet explorer and their waving around their big dick of a monopoly over the user base to create breaking changes that push competition out.
Fuck Google and fuck Chrome.
Yes, but this is not possible when having multiple browsers :). So this is the point, HTML, CSS, JS… all should obey standards, but websites should not expect that every part of the standard is implemented. Sites should not break if browser does not have one function for example.
Google is currently trying to kill the open web via Chromium. I’m not at all convinced Mozilla could change that, and giving up their foundation in favor of Chromium would only give Google more leverage.
Oh no I agree with you, I don’t think a single company could change it, but the truth of the matter is that Google is winning. I think the best bet is legislation, and I think Mozilla could be useful in that regard. Google is in a similar position now that Microsoft was in the 90s/00s, only difference being that I don’t think Google will sleep on their laurels as the web is a lot more established now, and the web is Google’s entire business.
What better way to get data than to own not just the way people discover websites and information, but also the way people access it? Google is dangerous.
One Fediverse software, one notepad software, one SMS-capable phone, one http server…
One standard - nice. One implementation - kill for any innovation and creating rigid systems impossible to build upon when they start to rot (look at targetting IE11 compatibility to this day).