Thread by @rachelnabors

You ask me why browser diversity matters. I’ll tell you why.

Back when the first browsers came out, there were far fewer APIs to implement. It was a simpler time. And over the years the browser grew in sophistication and the specifications increased in a delicate dance of evolution.

We have three major engines right now: WebKit/Blink (Safari, Opera, Samsung, Chrome), Gecko (@firefox), and EdgeHTML (Edge). Each is very different and has different strengths and weaknesses. Each could pull the Web in a different direction alone.

To generalize using trade names: Firefox has a multithreaded processing rendering for blazing fast graphics. Edge has the least abstraction from the operating system, giving it more direct access to resources. And Chrome has the most web developers testing for it.

It is hard to imagine any one entity justifying the hours and expense it would take to spin up a browser engine from scratch today. Even these three are evolutions of engines that were there at the start of the Internet. They’ve evolved piecemeal alongside us, our needs.

These are the three browser engines we have. We are unlikely to get any brand new bloodlines in the foreseeable future. This is it.

If we lose one of those browser engines, we lose the lineage, every permutation of that engine that would follow, the unique takes on the web it could allow for.

And it’s not likely to be replaced.

Imagine a planet populated only by hummingbirds, salmon, and horses. Say all the hummingbirds and horses died out. Maybe one day salmon would evolve into something that could walk on land, but they’d be a far cry from a horse and farther still from a hummingbird. It’d be a wait.

I genuinely do not like the idea of pruning the great family tree of browsers (or collection of bushes as it were) down to a single branch. It smacks of monoculture, which is a fragile thing.

Develop in more than one browser. Test in more than one browser. Use more than one browser.

You are both consumer and producer. You have a say in how the future plays out.

Thanks for listening. I never did turn this into a proper post. (I got too tangled up illustrating the horses, hummingbirds, and salmon!)

PS: We already lost a browser engine bloodline when Opera moved to Blink.

Three left.

I just want to remind folks of the time when Microsoft bailed out Apple as it was about to sink. What would personal computers be like today if we’d only had Linux and Windows left standing?

Well, I didn’t expect this to blow up like it did! Thank you for all the conversations and RTs!