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Chrome breaks the Web

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Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#171

Post by rhizome »

bluGill wrote: post #89
biotech wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this different from websites that think it's okay to force you to abide by ridiculous password restrictions The difference is that disabling of "autocomplete" is a user interface issue, and can be addressed by the browser I use. The problem of ridiculous password restrictions is not usually something that can be controlled by the client. I like the idea of convincing IT to change crazy password policies, but…

You don't necessarily have to convince IT. If you instead convince their legal department that by not following the NIST standards for passwords they are opening their company to a lawsuit, that could get results a lot faster. When IT is convinced they have to decide when to put it into the budget. If they think their policy is not okay, just not perfect the fix will probably be buried in the bottom of the budget pil…

Do you have any references to instances where this strategy was successful?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#172

Post by deno »

falcolas wrote: post #150
deno wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with making event listeners passive by default. If you don’t do feature detection then of course your website will not be backwards compatible. If you care about backward compatibility there exists a polyfill for this functionality.

In saying that "Devs assume Chrome", I'm asserting that they do not do feature detection. However, that does not absolve Chrome of breaking backwards compatibility, workaround or not. Tossing the responsibility of dealing with their breaking changes back on the developer (with little notice) is what caused this article in the first place.

If Chrome shipped with opt-out UI option to disable janky scrolling, would it be any better?

Web is not a static target. Being afraid to break things gets you a decade of Flash websites. Things that are important will be maintained, and things that aren’t… well good riddance.

Personally, I think we are way past due HTML6. A sort of Vulkan-like platform for Web[1]. HTML5 should be build on top of this next-gen low level platform. That’s the way forward if Web wants to remain competitive. Otherwise in 5 years we’ll all be writing Android Instant apps.

[1] https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#174

Post by dhimes »

emodendroket wrote: post #157
dhimes wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the difference is? It's been going on for years. https://superuser.com/questions/926902/google-chrome-loses-d...

Have they enabled the Cloud password sync thing?

They may have but I don't use it.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#175

Post by francasso »

ko27 wrote: post #167
francasso wrote: post #152

Jesus Christ, to think there are people in this thread defending what the assholes in the Chrome team did is unbelievable. You make breaking changes opt-in, that is API design 101. Linus should take over Chrome development.

Stop being so dramatic. Valuing users over developers is not malice, it's common sense.

You can make it opt-in without breaking other people stuff. If a website doesn't opt in their users will migrate to another one that offers the same content with a better user experience. It just won't happen tomorrow (What really bothers me is that people like you can't figure out that there is a trend behind this and it's not good one.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#176

Post by FussyZeus »

staticassertion wrote: post #113
FussyZeus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So aside of the fact that you agree with their decisions, how is this at all different from how Internet Explorer's dev team made arbitrary decisions on how things would work in their browser, and in so doing because of their market dominance, influenced how the web grew, looked and functioned for decades to come? And how much technical debt had to be tacked onto every project to address that need (and is to this day…

It's not really comparable to IE. MS had a pretty explicit goal of destroying Netscape - to the extent that they were making deals with other companies to break compat with Netscape. Chrome is breaking 'autofill=false' on webforms because its really bad to have autofill=false most of the time . For example, this was breaking password managers, forcing users to have a worse experience around something as security crit…

> It's not really comparable to IE. MS had a pretty explicit goal of destroying Netscape - to the extent that they were making deals with other companies to break compat with Netscape.

Netscape is irrelevant. The fact is Chrome is using it's market dominance to affect the implementation of standards and in doing so, is breaking numerous websites. That IE is famous for but because Chrome is made by Google, it gets a pass.

> Chrome is breaking 'autofill=false' on webforms because its really bad to have autofill=false most of the time.

That is not the Chrome web-teams decision to make. The point of standards is that the standards should be followed, regardless of your or anyone elses opinion. If you disagree with a standard, you work to change the standard, you don't just change your browser's implementation of the standard, break a ton of functionality all over the web, and then sit there saying "well that's how it should be."

> This isn't anticompetitive - they aren't trying to break websites on Firefox, they aren't contacting websites to get them to do some Chrome specific thing. They're ignoring a really bad default that hurts users.

I agree with this in principle, but then they should be working to see that the standard is changed, and do so in such a way that the other browsers can follow suit and allow the standard to be improved. I don't disagree with the stance Google is taking; I don't like that one company is allowed to make such a sweeping change, and all the people who would get all over Microsoft's or Apple's asses about it if it was done in IE/Edge or Safari, are just all cool with it because again, Google is the golden child.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#177

Post by mrighele »

s17n wrote: post #78

> As a user, I certainly do not care about “being part of moving the web forward aggressively”. Why should I? I like my stuff working, not broken. Actually, I do want to be part of websites being faster, and I don't care about the functionality that is being broken. Performance isn't a secondary concern - if it's bad, the site is unusable from my point of view. Your shitty scrolljacking site breaks the web, Chrome is…

But his shitty scrolljacking doesn't break the web, at most his own website. Google probably broke a lot of website _except_ its own.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#178

Post by Groxx »

deno wrote: post #59
diafygi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally hate scroll jacking, but the Australian news article on the NK ballistic missile range was pretty cool, even on mobile. http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-16/north-korea-missile...

This page doesn’t do scroll-jacking. Its state appears to update asynchronously based on the scroll position. That is the correct way to do this sort of thing. Scrolling on this article is buttery smooth on my Apollo Lake (1.1GHz Celeron) netbook, on both Firefox and Chrome, even if the background animations aren’t. No jank whatsoever.

meanwhile... once I scroll to the globe, Chrome locks up.

:|

Scrolling in FF is indeed super smooth, but that background janks all over the place. Not sure what I'd prefer, tbh, though agreed that the vast majority of scrolljacking is utter garbage.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#179

Post by ko27 »

jarym wrote: post #73

It really feels like the Chrome developers have forgotten that they're providing a platform and not an in-house Google service. It happens very often - developers with experience building apps don't always manage to build tools for other developers very well. They focus too much on the end-user and disregard their platform developers too much. The balance needs to be somewhere but I doubt they have it in the right pl…

> The balance needs to be somewhere

It might be a controversial opinion, but I think that the balance should always lean closer to the user's side, not developer's.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#180

Post by Manishearth »

untog wrote: post #10

> Turned out, Google wasn’t concerned about your websites at all. It was more concerned about its own product performance, Google Chrome Mobile. As a web developer, I see this attitude a lot and it annoys me immensely. Another way of phrasing it: Google is putting users first, ahead of developers. This is as it should be. "your" website exists to serve users, if you're doing a bad job at it then maybe it's an opportu…

The web is the only platform aside from perhaps some assembly languages that is that stable and that ubiquitous. Websites have always been a "write and forget" deal; there never was supposed to be any feedback loop of developers fixing breaking changes. This is why old websites from 1998 still work in your browser.

This is why there are piles and piles of cruft within browsers and web standards for making sure old behavior that folks may rely on continues to work.

The commitment to stability on the web is astounding; I don't see anyone changing that any time soon. Google should not be breaking things just for its users; because its users are affected when they break things too.

That's the problem with Javascript. When Javascript breaks, it's not the developers who get the error, it's users, who have no idea what it means and no way to fix it. This is not the case with e.g. compiled languages; there's no extremely strict guarantee your code will still compile on a new release.

That said, Google did push this through the right channels (https://github.com/WICG/interventions/issues/35 , https://github.com/w3c/touch-events/issues/74 , https://github.com/WICG/interventions/issues/18 ) and it seemed like browser vendors were in agreement that this wouldn't be a problem. This is something that does happen; browser vendors "unship" or break functionality after discussing it sometimes.

So while I'm not convinced Chrome stepped out of line here, breaking sites absolutely is not putting users first.

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