Tesla founder Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla’s in-car browser (currently not available in Australia), will change to use the Chromium rendering engine.
Tesla develops the software for their vehicles and like Microsoft, have given up on investing developer efforts in building the rendering engine. When a developer writes website code, they do so in the hope it renders the same in every browser.
The problem is, even though we’re at HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript 9, browser makers have interpreted the code differently, some trying to do things like automatically close html tags where the developer forgot, instead of having the page throw an error. They also got far too creative in interpreting things like padding and margins which means pages often result in different layout issues between browsers.
In 2019, it seems we’ve reached a point were most companies are realising there’s really no benefit in investing engineering effort in a rendering engine when this problem has essentially been solved by Chromium. This is the opens source project that powers Chrome and soon Microsoft’s Edge and Telsla’s in-car browser.
With the website code to presentation layer taken care of, browser makers like Tesla can focus on the Chrome (UI around the browser window) and add features that actually benefit users.
Tesla has 2 different screen sizes and orientations to accommodate, the 17″ vertical display in the S and X and the 15″ horizontally mounted display in the 3 and upcoming Y model.
Musk’s confirmation of the change, came as a result from an owner query (Ken Crawford) about the quality of their current browser offering which does have issues rendering some websites.
Via Electrek
