Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
ITC seems to be heading towards a Stalinist Nanny state of affairs. Imagine if every motor car had the same drive train, but there were Toyota only, Volvo only, and Chevrolet only, etc roads; as well as Nissan only, and BMW only, etc fuel pumps and chargers.
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Interesting analogy, though I suspect it would work out a bit differently, especially in the notion of different roads.
A good chunk of what we're seeing comes down to basic economics. A new market opens, and a bunch of players enter it. Competition occurs. Some folks succeed and grow bigger. Some folks fail, or get acquired by a larger company. Eventually, you get two or three big outfits, and some smaller players serving niches too small to be profitable for the big boys.
The browser market has been an example. I've looked at a large number of the years. Very few still exist.
One of the reasons is the continual advance in web standards. Consider the current state, where HTML5, CSS3, and a current version of JavaScript are essentially required. HTML5 is still a work in progress.
Rendering engines are increasingly large and complex and take a lot of time and effort to develop and maintain. Google and Mozilla have large teams of developers working on Blink and Gecko. Following Mozilla bugs in Bugzilla is fun, because it must be triaged and confirmed to be a bug, then a determination of just where the bug is must be made (because the underlying problem may not be in the code where it blew up), and then the developers must be found who know enough about that section of the code to make the fix.
The sheer effort and cost involved in supporting and extending rendering engines leaves few outfits available that
can. Opera gave up on their Pango engine and moved to Webkit, and when Google forked Webkit to become Blink, Opera followed. IE abandoned the Trident engine used by IE and developed a new one called Spartan that was used by Edge. Now they are abandoning Spartan and moving to Blink. Webkit is still around, supported by Apple in Safari and used in things like the Falkon browser, but what else is there? Very little.
Another factor is increasing coordination in what is supported. There was already alignment between Chrome, Edge, and Firefox in terms of APIs and what JavaScript was permitted to do, to the point where it was possible to write extensions that could be installed into Chrome, Edge, or Firefox with minor code changes. The demise of Edge doesn't change that.
I'm unhappy because the changes mean less configurability and less power, and various things I used to do can't be done now, but I'm stuck with it. My biggest objection is that I think there are things that
could be done if the user was willing to accept some risk and knew what they were doing, and a power user setting where sophisticated users could say "I understand the risks, and upon my head be it. Do this!" would be nice. We'll see if that happens.
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Dennis