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Chrome breaks the Web

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Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#201

Post by Spivak »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #158
Spivak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, I'll call out that it's good. I mean honestly you should have seen the writing on the wall with user-scalable: it inhibited the user from doing something they wanted to do, it hurt accessibility, it made websites imperceptibly inconsistent, and there isn't a good way of asking the user if they would like to disable zoom.

Shut the W3C down, call Mozilla, close the Acid pages, now Spivak calls out what's good for the web. You know what's good for the web? Standards. Standards that are thoughtful and consistent.

Since you want to be pedantic the user-scalable and user-zoom viewport tags aren't an official standard. They currently exist in the CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1 Working Draft.

Here are the comments on the property:

> Authors should not suppress (with user-zoom: fixed) or limit (with max-zoom) the ability of users to resize a document, as this causes accessibility and usability issues.

> There may be specific use cases where preventing users from zooming may be appropriate, such as map applications – where custom zoom functionality is handled via scripting. However, in general this practice should be avoided.

> Most user agents now allow users to always zoom, regardless of any restrictions specified by web content – either by default, or as a setting/option (which may however not be immediately apparent to users).

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#202

Post by kodablah »

virgilp wrote: post #163
mcv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for allowing the user to control whether autocomplete is or isn't respected. But the browser breaking web standards to force certain choices on the user is about the worst possible way to go about this.

Aren't cookies a web standard? I can assure you that Safari's policies w.r.t. cookies "break" a lot of website functionality, and quite intentionally so. You may not like that functionality, but the website marketers like it and have spent lots of time implementing it. So - what's ok to break, and what isn't? In the end, it's a judgement call on the browser developer. I like what another person said here - the browse…

> So - what's ok to break, and what isn't?

I'd say, for a start, achieving consensus before breaking is ideal. If the attempt to achieve consensus fails, at least I can see they tried (or I can disagree). Hopefully in the future users can use their leverage to make it not a judgement call on the browser developer, but a judgement call by the community of users. The myriad of features in browsers, however, makes it a difficult arena to enter making a large swath of users subject to these judgement calls.

> as long as the actions are clearly motivated by user interest

It doesn't matter what the road is paved with. Many things are not clear and intent is also not clear. You should not use intent to determine what you are ok with, you should use the action and effect. You may be ok with Safari's approach to third party cookies, or Chrome's approach to cookies, which is ok. But you might not be ok with the next action, and when it hurts you as a user, the reasoning will matter less than it does when you support it.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#203

Post by agentultra »

KeitIG wrote: post #9

> they made all top-level event listeners passive by default. They call it “an intervention”. This is my very problem with Chrome/Chromium right now. The Chrome team does assumption on how things "should" be (in a highly subjective way) and breaks the web. Another example: they decided to ignore the value of `autocomplete` attributes on ` ` tags [1], because: > The tricky part here is that somewhere along the journey…

Regulatory compliance. I've worked on applications that had to go to great lengths to get the target browser platform to not do something like auto-complete authentication credentials.

Philosophically-speaking some Web Platform developers think that it's more secure for the browser to autofill credentials from a keychain so that users can use better passwords and not be burdened with remember N-pseudo-random character sequences. Sounds good. Probably is good.

Whether or not you agree with the above there are plenty of regulations in certain setting that require us to disallow client applications from auto-filling form fields. We have to battle with the Web Platform authors to fill this niche and work around everything they put in our way to stop us from doing our job. Awesome.

Personally I thought feature detection was a smell and was glad to see it going the way of the do-do in the early aughts. Not so glad to see it making a come back.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#204

Post by francasso »

ko27 wrote: post #186
francasso wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If a website doesn't opt in their users will migrate to another one that offers the same content with a better user experience Can't you see how this logic also applies in Chrome's case: everybody would switch to another browser that does passive listeners by default because it's a better user experience. What's bothering me is that people like you think they are entitled to not maintain your active web apps on bro…

There is a rule against breaking APIs, there is no rule against making a website that is better than another one.

So by your logic it's ok for you to kill and rob a rich person and redistribute all the money because, hey, at the end of the day it's a better user experience for everyone else and if you don't do it someone else might.

EDIT: By the way, browsers are in the business of providing a platform. Platforms should be stable. If they plan on not doing that they should say so. Guess how many developers will stop supporting chrome the day after that?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#205

Post by Illniyar »

They broke userland.

They introduced a backwards incompatible change that causes a lot of sites to lose some functionality, behave differently or outright break.

Now you could say that the user (the developer here) used the feature wrong (I.e. they caused scroll jank), but that's a bit disrespectful - sure there are a lot of developers who had no idea what it'll do to performance, but others that weighed the options and decided that even with the jank the user experience for the majority of users is acceptable.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#206

Post by gw »

Klathmon wrote: post #101
ksk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it good for the user if it breaks the website?

The same way getting your flu shot can make you feel worse for a bit, but can prevent you from getting the flu which will make you feel worse for much longer, and it can help prevent others around you from getting the flu. Yes, it breaks some websites, and for those users in that moment things might be worse, but it is making the web better for significantly more people, and even the users affected aren't really "imp…

This is a really paternalistic attitude. The local presbyterian church down my street can't afford a full-time web developer to update their website every time Google decides to break it. The idea that sacrificing actual functionality in exchange for smoother scrolling makes the web "better" is a claim that makes sense only in a terrifically isolated bubble.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#207

Post by ko27 »

disconnected wrote: post #31
stupidcar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 user…

So this is a good thing because the gatekeeper is Google instead of Facebook? 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 800x…

Let's also complain about Mozilla because they are removing Flash support and thus breaking backwards compatibility. It's obvious that they are all 'evil'.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#208

Post by ghostly_s »

edoceo wrote: post #139
wereHamster wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What manual are you referring to? HTML5? That's a living standard, it evolves daily.

Dude, autocomplete=off should just work. Chrome does the WRONG THING. Spec says what to do, living spec says what to do - Chrome does whatever they want. It's BS. It breaks the web. Then chrome Devs say to use autocomplete=something-stupid to get the specification behaviour of 'off' WTF is that?! Donate to Firefox. Chrome is the new IE

> Dude, autocomplete=off should just work. Chrome does the WRONG THING.

Screw you. I've probably encountered 'autocomplete=off' thousands of times in my browsing history, and maybe 1% of the time was it being used for something that wasn't user-hostile. I don't care what the spec says, I care about what's good for users. If the spec writers aren't willing to embrace that, vendors will ignore it.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#209

Post by gldalmaso »

CydeWeys wrote: post #107
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…

There are several other first-class browsers that you have a choice of if you don't like Chrome. The same was not true during IE's era of dominance. Also, do you agree, in general terms, that sometimes changes can be good whereas other times changes can be bad?

Are you advocating for a second coming of browser wars era because we now have more options?

Have we not been there yet? Can we agree that that is a place of endless pain for developers, project managers and users as well?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#210

Post by Klathmon »

gw wrote: post #206
Klathmon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way getting your flu shot can make you feel worse for a bit, but can prevent you from getting the flu which will make you feel worse for much longer, and it can help prevent others around you from getting the flu. Yes, it breaks some websites, and for those users in that moment things might be worse, but it is making the web better for significantly more people, and even the users affected aren't really "imp…

This is a really paternalistic attitude. The local presbyterian church down my street can't afford a full-time web developer to update their website every time Google decides to break it. The idea that sacrificing actual functionality in exchange for smoother scrolling makes the web "better" is a claim that makes sense only in a terrifically isolated bubble.

Yes but not all breaking changes are equal. The church down your street was extremely unlikely to even be impacted by this change let alone have functionality broken by it.

This only affected websites which were using blocking scrolling event listeners. Scrolljacking, some mapping websites where you were able to tap and pan around, and some sticky headers, and only on mobile devices using chrome.

And of those features impacted, most weren't even "broken", they were simply delayed until after the user lets their finger off the screen. A "sticky" header will still work with this change, it will just "snap" into place after scrolling. Scrolljacking content will act in a similar manner.

I'm completely against breaking the web wherever possible, but in this case I really believe it to be worth it. Smooth scrolling makes sites usable, janky jumpy websites on mobile are so infuriating, and on lower spec devices can be completely unusable. This makes them usable again, it wasn't just "breaking the web" it was "fixing the web" for many people.

In my mind I see this like I see popup blockers or even adblockers built into the browser. Yes, they break functionality, but they do so for the user, and if the website needs to get around this change, they can easily do so without the user having to do anything (unlike popup and adblockers in most cases).

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