Chrome breaks the Web

How's about adhering to standards? We gave Microsoft a hell of a time for not adhering to standards, but Google gets a free pass now? Because "performance"? (read: some negligible gains on some synthetic benchmarks)

Then let's stop pretending: let's scrap the W3C and go back to the good old days of "Best viewed on Netscape Navigator at 800x600".

I think what it comes down to is backward compatibility for the web. There are SO MANY websites relying on old behavior that introducing new behavior is going to break some sites that don't KNOW about your shiny new shit.

IE used to have this kind of thing too, anyone here remember "Quirks Mode" and so on?

What web browsers sorely need is a backward compatibility standard that they can STICK TO. Such as feature detection as a first-class API to be tried first. Perhaps this way any new features can be detected across browsers. Like, they would actually have to coordinate to name EACH new change the same in EACH new browser.

But this is what you get when you have multiple browser makers. Some just won't coordinate with the others and you need another layer - a library - to abstract away the differences.

Which is why it would be super-useful for browsers to add content-addressable protocols (read: not just http) to fetch files from any website in a DHT. So these libraries can be loaded ONCE and become cheap to use!

Does anyone know any mainstream browserd planning to implement, I dunno, IPFS? The only one I've heard of doing this is Blockstack and dude, how much adoption does that have exactly?

Last question -- can there be a browser extension that can intercept http requests by their Subresource Integrity checks, and load them on demand as if they were content addressed? Maybe use service workers in Chrome? Is that possible? I would be willing to partner with someone here to write such a thing.

Let us return to a moment to the WWW's ripe vintage of 1995, when Netscape Communications Corporation released a browser which had 3/4 of the browser market share within a year of release. Their product was advertised as a consistent universal interface to the web. They created custom features for their product, such as SSL, and JavaScript. But many of the features were released to outdo its main competitor, Microsoft, who could dedicate far more resources to development (they had so much cash they didn't even need to charge for the browser!).

Netscape Communicator attempted to be a groupware solution combining multiple products to provide a complete solution for office and enterprise needs. But the design was too monolithic and complicated, and development was eventually halted. Ever since then, many organizations have attempted to build complete groupware solutions, but have been weighed down by the difficulty of developing such a complex suite of applications.

And so came the future. As the web's technologies progressed, so did the capability of content delivered through a "standard" web browser. Even though browsers have traded back and forth over who supports what, most of the time the browser with the majority market share holds all the cards. As long as that browser works the same on multiple platforms, they don't need to worry about cross-browser compatibility, because that isn't their goal. Netscape's original goal was to kill Mosaic, and they did that in spades.

Today, Google provides a mostly-complete groupware solution, delivered on its favorite application platform: its own web browser. The costs of developing and shipping the software to end users are much lower than traditional native apps, and they increasingly control more and more of the pipeline, even to the actual computer (Chromebooks are designed to cement Google's ownership of computing resources, freeing them from the constraints of other vendors' platforms).

They not only don't want you to have "less JS and simpler JS on a website", they don't want you to run a website. They want you to provide an application which runs on their application platform. In service of that goal, they have developed dozens of web technologies designed to further their own application platform, just like the Netscape of old. If they have to break compatibility with other browsers to do it, that's fine with them.

The bizarre thing is breaking existing websites on their own browser. If you can't browse the web reliably you'll stop using their browser, and then their app platform and apps are in danger of becoming obsolete.