It's unlikely, but I could see it happening. Add in Samsung Internet, Opera, and Edge, the top Chromium-based (or soon-to-be-Chromium-based) browsers, and the figure goes up to 70.8%!!! Imagine if Apple decided they were tired of everyone moaning about Safari's missing features (as Safari now tends to lag the furthest behind in implementing cool new web platform APIs) and decided to go the same way as Microsoft. (retrieved June 7, 2019, from )Ĭhrome alone has over 60% of the global browser market share. Looking at current statistics, we do seem to be heading that way: So this is the concern: what if enough of the market share ends up on Chromium based browsers that we end up with a Chromium monoculture? Opera and Samsung Internet both moved to Chromium-based builds in 2013, and of course, as mentioned earlier, the big news this year is that Microsoft Edge will be moving to Chromium as well. It's designed such that it can be used as the basis for new browsers, and many browsers have been built on top of it, including browsers you've heard of. Google Chrome's underlying browser engine is developed as an open source project known as Chromium. This is not exactly unfounded, either many people have big problems with how Google has handled user privacy issues in the past.Īnd that brings us to recent events. That said, there is a third, less technical concern that non-developers do care a bit about: when everyone uses a single vendor, that vendor then has access to everyone's user habits, data, etc. Most users don't know or care about this stuff, and they aren't going to start moving to a different browser just because some 🤓 nerds🤓 are complaining about "APIs" and "standards". You might think that the developer community would get mad and start moving away from that browser, providing a check to their power, but the thing is, most browser users aren't web developers. The worst part was that IE was super quirky, didn't follow the standards, and was very slow to change or improve.Īnd this is another major concern: when there's really only one player in the market, the push for that browser vendor to follow standards and play by the rules declines they can effectively do whatever they want. That's one main worry: the concern is that if one browser becomes too dominant, developers may begin to ignore other browsers and just target the set of CSS and JavaScript features supported by the dominant browser, never bothering to test for cross-compatibility in other browsers.Īnd this isn't unfounded: this is exactly what happened in the early 2000s, at the height of the browser wars: Internet Explorer became so absolutely dominant that devs often specifically targeted IE, and many websites simply didn't work in any other browsers.
GOOGLE CHROME CHROMIUM BASED BROWSER CODE
What does "browser monoculture" even mean, and why should we care?Ī "browser monoculture" is when a single browser becomes so dominant that it triggers a chain reaction: it's effectively the only choice, so it's the only browser anyone uses, so it's the only one anyone cares about, so it's the only one developers write code for.
But first, I need to lay some groundwork.
I'm not entirely sold on it myself I'm sure there are aspects I'm not considering. This topic has flared up again recently as a result of Microsoft dropping their EdgeHTML browser engine and moving Edge to Google's Chromium engine.
I've been thinking a lot about an oooold problem in the web dev community, one that's been the subject of 🔥flamewars🔥 basically since web browsers have existed: "browser monoculture".
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