Why every browser switching to Blink could be bad news for the web
Microsoft has recently been the latest company to announce that their browser would put away its own engine to switch to Blink, the Google-driven fork of Webkit that powers Chrome, and, turns out, most of the available browsers these days. Edge used its own engine, and, while it worked all right, Microsoft decided that it just wasn’t getting the job done.
Wether the engine was the reason of Edge’s alledged failure is not the point here, even though I feel the slow adoption of that browser was due to its graphical association to Internet Explorer (as in “its logo looks exactly the same”), its lack of support for extensions, and its lack of features, plus the fact that it was not update-able separately from the OS, and was shipped in a very hard to use state, thus tarnishing the first impressions of that “New Microsoft Browser”.
What is more important to discuss, I think, is the fact that as of today, you only have two viable choices for browser engines on most platforms: Firefox, with its Gecko engine, and everything else, based on Blink. Mac users have the option to use Safari as well, based on Webkit. That’s right, every other browser out there depends on Blink (most of the time being based on Chromium, the open source version of Chrome). Opera ? Ditched its own engine ages ago. Vivaldi ? Same. Brave browser ? Blink.
Some Linux users use Epiphany or other webkit based browsers, but these lag a bit behind in terms of performance and stability.
So, why does it matter ? It’s only a browser engine, it’s just the way it renders webpages, right ? Surely, it’s easier for developers to deal with the quirks of one engine than messing up their code to contend with two, three, or more different implementations of the same standards ? Absolutely. But there is an issue that makes this situation a dire one, in my mind: an engine monopoly is terrible for the web.
The Internet Explorer era
Internet Explorer was infamously the worst browser in history, and abused its monopoly at every turn. The web has been held back for years by its lack of support of standards, its very slow pace of evolution (6 major new versions between 2001 and 2013, so about A major version every two years. Compare this with the release cycles of Chrome and Firefox), and its prevalence, led by the total dominion of Windows machines in the personal computing space.
Internet Explorer is the reason developers have nightmares about supporting different engines. As its market share eroded, web developers still had to contend with its quirks. While making nicely formatted code for Firefox and other browsers, they still had to implement dirty hacks to make sure their website ran in IE. To this day, a lot of companies still have software that will only run in Internet Explorer.
As of today, on the desktop, Firefox has about 10% market share. Blink dominates the rest, so we already are in a similar situation. Blink is a pretty good engine, though. It supports standards, it’s fast, and it’s become the de-facto testing bed for most web developers. Plus, Blink is open-source, and anyone can contribute to it, so it’s not as bad as Internet Explorer was.
Google is a monopoly
Whether you’re firmly entrenched in the Google ecosystem, or you are trying to avoid it, there is no denying Google has done a lot for the open source community, and the web in general. They mostly use open source technologies, improve on them, foster contributions, and make a business out of it. Sure, their greed for your data is undeniable, but that’s not perceived as a problem by everyone.
The problem here is not that Google controls the browser market, it’s that it also controls the search market. Google is the absolute mammoth engine that everyone uses today to look for stuff on the internet. It holds 79% of the search engine market, as of January 2019. This means that Google already has a huge amount of control on what people can look for, find, or just see when they are browsing.
Giving them the reins of the engine that allows people to display and interact with these webpages means that, if they were so inclined, they would be able to deprecate features, outright kill any technology they don’t like, hamper any technological advance a competitor could try to make, and generally dictate what you can, or can’t use when building your websites. If Google decided that a specific standard is not to their liking, there is nothing really preventing them from taking it out of the engine entirely. If the open-source community disagrees ? Just de-rank pages that use it, without touching the engine itself.
Obviously, this is a worst case scenario. Google has shown no real inclination at the moment of being willing to do such tampering (apart, maybe, from using a deprecated property only supported on Chrome, to alledgedly make Youtube a lot slower on Firefox). This is purely speculative, and falls squarely into the “should we let them have the power to do it, even though they probably won’t”.
I personally feel that letting a company such as Google, with its habit of gathering as much data as possible, and selling its use left and right, dominating how the web is rendered, how it looks, what it can do, and deciding whether what you created on the open web is worthy of watching, is a bad idea. While they might never turn “evil”, or decide to comply with every censorship / data request from authorities, they still might do it. Today’s Google is not the Google we’ll be using 10 years from now, and who’s to say investors, management, or other external forces won’t force them to use all this potential power to do some awful stuff ?
I, for one, will be diversifying the services and applications I use, just for the sake of paranoia.
PS: For those who want to check out more on the story, with a specific Linux focus, check out this video: