No.1714
The enclosure of the commons is inevitable, ane the digital commons are no different. Though this is true, it's also basically Marxist drivel, and fails to show how and why something so democratic could become so oligarchical.
(Caveat emptor, I am not a scholar. I only know what I've picked up from using these technologies and interacting with these companies on a daily basis.)
I think that a lot of people don't truly appreciate how much work goes into creating a functional web browser. You have to parse several different versions of HTML and CSS in a way that tolerates errors and allows for nonstandard extensions, implement a JavaScript interpreter and optimize the everloving soykaf out of it, then render all this soykaf in a way that takes into account all the weird edge cases. The magnitude of this task is the reason that there are basically three rendering engines: Blink, Gecko, and whatever Microsoft calls their engine these days. Because people aren't willing to duplicate the functionality, and because the development of these engines are driven mostly by Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, respectively, these three companies also become the largest consumers of these protocols. What's more, these massive companies also have staggering amounts of manpower and money to throw at engineering new protocols, which means that the volunteer work required for open source software becomes unnecessary. If their work is unnecessary, then their input is totally irrelevant.
The best, and probably only, way to reverse this trend would be to fragment the everloving soykaf out of the browser market, which would require the creation of several efficient rendering engines that could compete with Blink, Gecko, and MS Bullsoykaf 2018. Then, each would have to be saddled up with a browser featurally equivalent to Firefox and Chrome (which have basically converged in featuresets (and even architecture) at this point) plus its own gimmicks and features to set it apart. That would add more voices to the debate, which hopefully would enable J. Random Hacker to throw his voice in. However, the requirements for that are so staggering that I fear it would be impossible.
If it offers any solace, it's a miracle at all that internet technology isn't totally stagnating. I think Google deserves the credit here to a great extent. The philosophy is, roughly, "The faster/more reliable/better the internet is, the more Google searches happen and the more ad revenue we make." This is the attitude that made Chrome threaten then eclipse the IE market share, and the kind of attitude that encourages new technologies in order to optimize the internet, even if the technologies are soykaf.
No.1715
>look mom I copypasted a thread from lainchan!
No.1752
>>1717What is so wrong about lainchan?
No.1768
>>1714I've been thinking about this recently, and wondering why there is no real alternative rendering engine that is truly botnet free, entirely community driven, and actually good…
No.1841
>>1752they hate them cause they ain't them
