A monoculture is usually better in the short term. It’s a better allocation of resources (everyone working on the same thing!) If you want to write a rich web app that works today (ie, on the browsers of today), it’s much better.

But the web is a platform. Platforms are different beasts.

Imagine it’s an all-WebKit mobile web. Just follow the incentives to figure out what will happen.

Backwards bug compatibility: There’s a bug — background SVG images with a prime-numbered width disable transparency. A year later, 7328 web sites have popped up that inadvertently depend on the bug. Somebody fixes it. The websites break with dev builds. The fix is backed out, and a warning is logged instead. Nothing breaks, the world’s webkit, nobody cares. The bug is now part of the Web Platform.

Preventing innovation: a gang of hackers makes a new browser that utilizes the 100 cores in 2018-era laptops perfectly evenly, unlike existing browsers that mostly burn one CPU per tab. It’s a ground-up rewrite, and they do heroic work to support 99% of the websites out there. Make that 98%; webkit just shipped a new feature and everybody immediately started using it in production websites (why not?). Whoops, down to 90%; there was a webkit bug that was too gross to work around and would break the threading model. Wtf? 80%? What just happened? Ship it, quick, before it drops more!

The group of hackers gives up and starts a job board/social network site for pet birds, specializing in security exploit developers. They call it “Polly Want a Cracker?”

Inappropriate control: Someone comes up with a synchronization API that allows writing DJ apps that mix multiple remote streams. Apple’s music studio partners freak out, prevent it from landing, and send bogus threatening letters to anyone who adds it into their fork.

Complexity: the standards bodies wither and die from lack of purpose. New features are fine as long as they add a useful new capability. A thousand flowers bloom, some of them right on top of each other. Different web sites use different ones. Some of them are hard to maintain, so only survive if they are depended upon by a company with deep enough pockets. Web developers start playing a guessing game of which feature can be depended upon in the future based on the market cap of the current users.

Confusion: There’s a little quirk in how you have to write your CSS selectors. It’s documented in a ton of tutorials, though, and it’s in the regression test suite. Oh, and if you use it together with the ‘~’ operator, the first clause only applies to elements with classes assigned. You could look it up in the spec, but it hasn’t been updated for a few years because everybody just tries things out to see what works anyway, and the guys who update the spec are working on CSS5 right now. Anyway, documentation is for people who can’t watch tutorials on youtube.

End game: the web is now far more capable than it was way back in 2013. It perfectly supports the features of the Apple hardware released just yesterday! (Better upgrade those ancient ‘pads from last year, though.) There are a dozen ways to do anything you can think of. Some of them even work. On some webkit-based browsers. For now. It’s a little hard to tell what, because even if something doesn’t behave like you expect, the spec doesn’t really go into that much detail and the implementation isn’t guaranteed to match it anyway. You know, the native APIs are fairly well documented and forward-compatible, and it’s not really that hard to rewrite your app a few times, once for each native platform…

Does this have to happen just because everybody standardizes on WebKit? No, no more than it has to happen because we all use silicon or TCP. If something is stable, a monoculture is fine. Well, for the most part — even TCP is showing some cracks. The above concerns only apply to a layer that has multiple viable alternatives, is rapidly advancing, needs to cover unexpected new ground and get used for unpredicted applications, requires multiple disconnected agents to coordinate, and things like that.

Tags: mozilla, planet