These are product choices. If the flags aren't flexible enough, that's one thing. That flags need flipping is simply the result of disagreement, which is both healthy and rational.
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Replying to @slightlylate @RickByers and
Completely agree - flags are great! My impression of what's not so great is not really having much say in engine direction (and having to fight proxy battles for/against features through W3C or other means instead of via blink-dev).
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Replying to @marcosc @RickByers and
Fighting *against* features is implicitly asking to edit the choices of other embedders. That's the work of flags in a well-run project pre-consensus.
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Replying to @slightlylate @RickByers and
That would be true if what Blink shipped wasn't also seen as "The Web Platform"
. Therein lies the problem: in that by flipping flags one can be painted "anti-Web", when some features perhaps should never been implemented in the first place (a failure of governance).2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes -
Replying to @marcosc @RickByers and
Moved goalposts. We have ways for products built on Chromium to disagree. That's part of why there are more Chromium browsers today than any other sort. What we don't have is a single product. Each makes choices and competes in the market. Products have engine choice too!
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Replying to @slightlylate @RickByers and
Engine choice? Really? The only choice is, switch of Blink or be forced to WebKit on iOS. Mozilla has GeckoView in the works, but will be challenging to make it competitive unless it also ships by default on Android.
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Replying to @marcosc @RickByers and
Any embedder can fork at any time. That's foundational to OSS and why we work so hard to keep the Chromium community open and healthy (aspersions of non-participants not withstanding). If we fail, they fork. We remember what pushed us to it and aspire to do better.
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Replying to @slightlylate @RickByers and
Again, you can't say "fork any time". That's not realistic. It cost a squillion dollars and pain to do that. Look how screwed that mobile fork of Gecko is right now... they are stuck on a super old version of Gecko unlikely to ever update. It's not feasible for small players.
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Replying to @marcosc @slightlylate and
You cannot look at a Chromium fork the way you’d look at the fork of a different project for multiple reasons:
it’s a corporate project, so most of the community’s loyalty is to its employer, not to the project itself, hence you’ll have to rebuild a community from scratch.1 reply 1 retweet 1 like -
Market share of the Chrome browser creates de facto standardization, which means forks need to maintain feature parity with Chromium to stay relevant.2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
All browsers must maintain parity with the leading edge to stay relevant over a long-enough time period (roughly time x the evaporation rate of install base). The market for engines that don’t have features people want may simply be smaller than some like to imagine.
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& Web Standards TL; Blink API OWNER
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