@yanta said in Microsoft switches to Chromium:
This quasi-monoculture might threaten security and diversity.
The whole culture/system is cost-driven. Websites (of which there are now enormous numbers) operate by writing website code which interfaces with web browsers and their underlying rendering engines. Since there are different ways of doing the same things, there may be different forms of browser code that render the same website code into a screen display, but show it somewhat differently - which causes what's seen on-screen by the user to be different from what was intended by the site-code writer. Likewise, for certain other forms of embedded functionality (embedded video, pop-up buttons, page swapping, etc).
Consequently, to ensure their site-code looks and operates the same on different browser/engine designs, the site would have to test each browser design for compliance... continually retesting, since both website code and browser/engine code are changed constantly. That costs money, so many sites simply test against a few browsers and publicly declare the other ones "unsupported". The few browsers tested are simply the ones with most market share, hence the smaller market-share browsers are frequently ignored or rejected. Some sites go so far as to put in a few lines of site code that actively test (or "sniff") for the brand of visiting browser and actively block it from access. Their reasoning seems to be that it's cheaper to simply reject a small-marketshare browser than deal with the cost of support complaints over potential compatibility problems. Other websites don't even publish a list of supported browsers, but instead simply code for the big one or two browsers and ignore everything else.
Frankly, this channelization looks to only worsen in the current "free" universe of browsers and websites. Cost recovery is very difficult when the end product is being 'given away' and other income sources (ads, favored placements, paid-product tie-ins, etc) must underwrite the income. Diversity is indeed being threatened, as it always is in a monoculture - and that means innovation is being quenched. Insofar as innovation is being threatened, that implies security innovation is also being reduced, at least in the grand scheme of things.
