Chrome breaks the Web

where you been? web been broken for awhile now..it's all just duct tape and spit. We're also repeating the sins of the IE days all over again with chrome.. At this point i'm using alternative browsers and only fire up stuff like chrome if i have to

No, Google were concerned about your websites. Your mobile websites which are so heavily overloaded with JS that basic interactions like scrolling don’t work.

Complaining that Google “broke the web”, when mobile developers have been making it slowly unusable—and unused—for years is pretty hypocritical. All the feature detection and backwards compatible changes in the world won’t help developers when their entire userbase has fled to walled gardens like Facebook. But I guess some people will resent anything that forces them to accept short term pain, even if it’s essential to their long term survival.

To be honest as a user, I'm glad they made this change, even though as a developer it might be a pain in the ass for a day or 2.

Scrolling on the mobile web sucked for a long time. Yes, updating the default broke many things, but the scope of that breakage was fairly limited in the grand scheme of things (like the author said, sliders, maps, touch-and-draggable things like lists are the biggest impacted, stuff like "sticky headers" and other junk would be impacted, but not "broken beyond usage").

We've seen time and time again that simply giving a developer the ability to fix things doesn't help, and letting the mobile web suck for several years while a few percent of the web slowly learned how to fix this would end up impacting far more people than the "breakage" ever would.

It's not ideal, and I wish that google provided a very quick and easy way to "opt out" of the breakage (like some one-line "polyfill" that reverted the change that site owners could use as a stop-gap until they could properly update their apps to work correctly), but I see their point and as a user I agree with it, even though as a developer this is the kind of stuff that ruins your day.

I personally have not hit a single website that was impacted by this that I could notice myself. That's not to say that I haven't been impacted by the breakage, or used sites that had something break because of it (that I didn't notice). But even knowing that this change was made when it was made, I didn't see any sites that were "unusable" or "broken" because of it.

that's a load of bollocks. if google wants a better web, he needs to work toward better standards. implementing a vendor specific api by fiat with broken detection is what fucked the web in the first place!

same with apple - "now we'll ignore user-scalable=no and screw every responsive webapp out there"

instead of user punishing badly behaved application, vendor are indiscriminately breaking well behaved apps whether they're doing the right thing or not (ie. apps that use em and thus respect user accessibility settings)

this leaves both developers AND users with a sub-par browser experience - like all canvas games out there now get zoomed on double taps, an animation which is often enough to stress the device gpu so much that the browser crashes.

I'm all for improving the web, but there are ways that work and there's this force feeding crap to developer without tough and foresight, and we as a community need to call what's good and what's crap for what it is.

I think the point of it was that they made every event listener passive by default, rather than making it an option.