WebKit VS standards-positions

Since 2023 Chrome announced the View Transition API, and it looks like Safari is also going to support it soon.

One heap per type.

Here’s an allocator optimized for that use case.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/bmalloc/li...

To use this in Bun, you’d have to start Bun with the environment variable “BUN_JSC_useDollarVM=1” and then $vm.createBuiltin(mySourceCodeString)

When using this intrinsic, if any of the arguments are incorrect or it cannot otherwise enable it, the entire process will probably crash. In debug builds of JSC it will have a nicer assertion failure but that is not enabled in release builds

Example code: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/17351231b4dedb62d81721...

also happy to answer any questions about Bun

Ah, good, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of the Chrome Devtools Protocol! (fka Chrome Remote Debugging Protocol)

I love this API for almost everything browser related. I built my RBI product atop this (BrowserBox: https://dosyago.com), and I think it's a drastically underrated API.

Also, it works out of the box in Edge, Brave, Chromium, and many parts of CRDP are supported by Firefox and Safari^1

1: See for example: https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/main/Source/JavaScript...

No, it's unrelated.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/064df1a9f395f8c6e32c...

It's being worked on now: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/17320

It is different. The cross-site navigation flag is a couple of years old. It was enabled by default for iOS in November 2018 for example https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/e191fc8c412850cb9fd0...

> That's excessive scope creep. Adding site-specific workarounds for some sites feels uncomfortable.

Not to Google and its fellow corporations apparently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29707078

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

They have site-specific fixes for their own sites. Why can obviously apply the exact same strategy to dealing with every single website out there. If a website is broken or generally annoying to use, just fix it by providing a site specific version of the browser.

> Who decides what websites get "fixed", and how?

Whoever develops the browser or its extensions. Arguably the whole of uBlock Origin and its filter lists is just a database of site specific fixes. If people can maintain an extremely huge list of advertisers and blockers for every website out there, surely they can maintain something like this too.

> Also, remember how Mozilla is funded.

I remember Mozilla has about a billion dollars in the bank. Who cares about their Google funding? I doubt they're gonna drop them anyway. I bet they pay them just to ward off risk of antitrust lawsuits.

You can check why Mozilla and Apple have opted to not support this.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28

Neither Mozilla or Webkit are satisfied that the proposal is safe by default, and contains footguns for the user that can be pretty destructive.

FWIW Mozilla updated their position on Web Serial API to "neutral" and clarified that they might be okay with enabling the API with an add-on.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial

Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.

Hasn't FireFox been dragging their asses on @scope? https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

It took years to just convince them of the need for it. And I'm not sure anyone got convinced vs Chrome had already shipped it and Safari has it planned so they caved in.

Hard to believe FireFox used to be a leader of the modern web.

As mentioned by others, OK idea, but not a fan that this isn't standardized. After a quick search+peruse, these seem to indicate that it's not around the corner either. Happy (/hope) to be corrected.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4180

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/990

Mozilla's position on these specs is nicely outlined publicly and transparently as part of their standards-positions project: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

I'm kinda glad it's not implemented in my browser, to be honest, because the whole thing seems like a security nightmare.

It's a shame it impacts some hobby usecases, but I don't think this outweighs the reasoning set out on the GitHub issue.

This should have big warnings on it. Some of these are not web standards; they are features implemented unilaterally by Google in Blink that have been explicitly rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds.

Take Web Bluetooth, for example:

Mozilla:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

Apple:

> Here are some examples of features we have decided to not yet implement due to fingerprinting, security, and other concerns, and where we do not yet see a path to resolving those concerns

— https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/

This is Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish bullshit applied to the web platform by Google. Google keeps implementing these things despite all other major rendering engines rejecting them, convinces people that they are part of the web, resulting in sites like this, then people start asking why Firefox and Safari are “missing functionality”. These are not part of the web platform, they are Google APIs that have been explicitly rejected.

Is BLE a PWA requirement? I think they explained their position pretty well here, regardless of whether I agree:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].

Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].

Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?

[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...

Mozilla are dragging their heels on @scope:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/implement-css-scope-rul...

Someone who clearly didn't get it was wasting three years time "well actually"ing everything. The latest news is "it's worth prototyping". Meanwhile Chrome has released it(steam rolled?) and Safari has it in tech preview.

I question if FireFox has the resources to keep up with the pace of the modern web.