@wojtek said in Why Blink and not Gecko?:
... That's very disappointing reasoning given that supposedly we have "web standards"... and in the end we end up with poor chrome-clones and terrible and bloated engine...
There are "web standards", and then there are the ways that site coders choose to do things... and they're too often not the same. Many of the popular websites are continually bending or "interpreting" the 'standards' in order to get their sites to do "creative" things - or else ignoring some of the 'standards' entirely because of poor-quality coding. However, all that matters to the vast majority of browser users is whether the website they're trying to view renders properly in the browser they're using, regardless of how that site may be coded.
Websites discover very quickly that their coding variants often don't work well in every flavor of browser, hence they frequently only test and debug their site code against the idiosyncrasies of the biggest-name browser engine(s) and sniff out all the other kinds of browsers in order to block them (thus not having to wrangle in support with the thorny incompatibility issues encountered by users of less popular browsers that respond differently to the site's unique coding variants).
This has actually been going on for many years in largely the same way, though the standards involved have themselves changed a fair amount. To see the extremes to which this has been carried at times, simply check out what MSN did to Olde Opera and what Opera did in retaliation back in 2003 (ref: the now-legendary Opera Bork version)... and note: in Internet years, 14 years ago is a very long time.
The point is that there's more to making a successful browser than just the technical creativity poured into it or the existence of "standards"; the browser must be compatible with the maximum number of websites "out of the box" in order to be successful to its users, and that implies it must be built on a rendering engine that is inherently accepted for compatibility by most websites. That means you either have to have the financial clout to push your own engine design for many years to gain big-name status with the site-coders or adopt an existing engine that already has maximum website compatibility. As @ayespy notes, Presto Opera fought such an incompatibility battle and lost. That loss should be instructive.
