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Chrome breaks the Web

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Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#241

Post by danaliv »

agentultra wrote: post #203
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 characte…

> Regulatory compliance.

> there are plenty of regulations in certain setting that require us to disallow client applications from auto-filling form fields.

And which regulations would those be, specifically?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#242

Post by notjoemama »

saas_co_de wrote: post #84
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…

> does assumption on how things "should" be (in a highly subjective way) They claim they are making these decisions based on user data which I have no reason to doubt. > and breaks the web. Breaks crap websites that are broken already from performance and usability perspective. I personally think this is exactly what is needed to make the web better as a whole. Individual developers working for individual companies a…

Woah woah woah. Let me recount/nutshell the crux of conversations I've had with my product manager(s) about things like this.

Me: Hey, I'd like to add a work-item to our current sprint that reworks semantic attributes into our site.

Them: What would that do?

Me: It improves the underlying architecture making the markup more usable and extensible.

Them: How does that benefit the users?

Me: Over time it will reduce the TTM for features and allows us to adopt a common standard others use on the web.

Them: So there's no UI and it won't affect their workflow?

Me: Well, no.

Them: Then why would you suggest it? We don't have the budget to add meaningless development tasks.

I might be biased towards thinking there are plenty of developers and engineers out there thinking about this stuff but we don't always get the final say in what is done. Also, a lot of enterprise applications were and continue to be around before many of these standards. It's a struggle to improve what doesn't directly add to the bottom line.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#243

Post by mathias »

mediumdeviation wrote: post #160
mathias wrote: post #134

> Which means you can’t practically use the new form without feature detection. That does not follow. `{ capture: true }` works in both, since it’s an object, and thus truthy. There’s no need for feature detection in the case you describe. Sadly, that’s the whole premise of this article. It’s only a problem if you want `capture: false` combined with other options — since you’d need to pass in an object, that would be…

In older browsers, useCapture is NOT an optional parameter, and in most cases you do NOT want to use event capture instead of event bubbling. There's no trivial way to support addEventListener(event, handler, { passive: true }) on both new and old browsers without that really ugly feature detection code in the article.

> In older browsers, useCapture is NOT an optional parameter

Which browsers are those?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#244

Post by laumars »

FussyZeus wrote: post #176
staticassertion wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> Netscape is irrelevant.

Netscape is entirely relevant. The question was raised about how different Google / Chrome are compared to Microsoft / IE and the answer is Netscape. Microsoft tried to tie the internet into their own platform, Windows + IE, due to them pushing non-standard rendering and ActiveX. Whatever your opinion of Chrome's break from standards might be, Google simply are not trying to lock people into Chrome on Android / ChromeOS. Remember that Google's revenue comes from ads, not software sales (as was the case with Microsoft). Chrome, Android, etc are just platforms to help leverage ads but they still make money from people running Firefox on Windows, Linux and OS X. So while you might dislike the standards Google are breaking in Chrome, the intent is very different from Microsoft in the 90s with Internet Explorer as Google are not trying to control the web (or at least not with the examples given in this discussion. I'm less convinced their intentions are honorable with AMP).

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#245

Post by slrz »

Cacti wrote: post #183
saas_co_de wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does assumption on how things "should" be (in a highly subjective way) They claim they are making these decisions based on user data which I have no reason to doubt. > and breaks the web. Breaks crap websites that are broken already from performance and usability perspective. I personally think this is exactly what is needed to make the web better as a whole. Individual developers working for individual companies a…

It's not the browser developers jobs to police the web.

But it is the job of browser developers to build programs that serve their users. If I, as a user, want to autocomplete a form field, the website operator doesn't get a say in whether I can do that.

The settings that come with the markup are best understood as a recommendation, a slight hint that autocomplete might not be appropriate here. The final say is always with the user, though.

Sadly, through over-usage on the part of website operators, this hint has become utterly useless.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#246

Post by josteink »

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

While Chrome has the goal to destroy everything else.

Example 1: Google Chrome spam on youtube, gmail, every website on the internet. I can't count the amount of times my parents called and asked why Google asked them to "upgrade their browser" (hint: It wasn't a new Firefox-build).

Example 2: Sending email SPAM to all Google-users where they are advised to install Chrome if they ever sign in to their Google-account on a new machine using anything except Chrome.

Example 3: Installing Chrome unasked as drive-by installers when you install anything lots of freeware, because Google paid third-party developers to host Chrome as a spyware-like installation in their installer.

Google is using spyware techniques to deploy their fucking browser. Google is literally working on killing all other browsers.

And for the good of the web, this should be reason enough to instantly and permanently uninstall Chrome.

Had Microsoft done a fraction of this for anything they did, you'd seen social media and the EU causing a shit-storm. How come Google gets a free pass?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#247

Post by anchpop »

gldalmaso wrote: post #227
dotdi wrote: post #32

Dear developer, I hate you[1] when you interfere with scrolling. Yes, some people do it right and so on. You are not one of them. Please. Stop. Yours, A user that will close your website when scrolling is messed with. --- [1] not OP, but the average developer, which, under time pressure and without many resources, cannot test all desktop/phone and browser combinations. Assuming they even care.

Not all users have a choice to leave a website. If a Chrome update breaks the governmental website that relied on some "never used" feature and the user can no longer, say, apply to unemployment insurance, real people would be getting affected in very real ways. We wanted technology to part of peoples lives, now it is, we have to own up to the responsibility.

Couldn't they use Firefox?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#248

Post by michaelmrose »

daanlo wrote: post #214
ghostly_s wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A website is owned by someone. If they decide that in their shop they want to have a carpet floor it is up to users not to visit that shop (if they don't like that), but not up to adidas to turn the floor into tarmac, because that works better for their shoes...

The browser vendor CAN'T install tarmac in shops floor.

The shop controls the server the user rightly controls the experience on their machine. The browser vendor provides an application that runs on the users machine. If the shop doesn't like it they can pound sand or suggest the user would be better off with a different browser.

They can perhaps rightly say that the deviation from standard is unfriendly or sub optimal but one would hope they wouldn't appeal to imaginary authority derived from a bad analogy.

A raven isn't like a writing desk and a client server interaction isn't like a user visiting a physical store.

Analogies can serve to communicate but when you use them to prove a point the only thing you prove is your lack of understanding of the matter.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#249

Post by halr9000 »

ysavir wrote: post #188
CydeWeys wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is a program that I run on my computer. It protects my interests, not the interests of random crappy website developers doing horrible things like hijacking clipboard events. I'm all for the defaults being whatever is best for me. The browser is the agent of the user.

In this case, the browser is the agent of those advertising to the user. It's not protecting your interests, it's protecting Google's interests. If it was protecting your interests, it would be a toggleable setting that defaults to normalized behavior.

> It's not protecting your interests, it's protecting Google's interests.

But you can always install (or develop) another browser that might do this job better for you.

> If it was protecting your interests, it would be a toggleable setting that defaults to normalized behavior.

The problem with this view is that the vast majority of end users do not want, and in fact will never know about or use a new setting, and so the when doesn't move forward. This is the opt-in problem that Google is talking about. In politics, an analogy is called public choice theory.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#250

Post by Manishearth »

untog wrote: post #195
Manishearth wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

> This is why old websites from 1998 still work in your browser. They won't if they use a tag, for example. The problem is that if we freeze the entire web and demand 100% backwards compatibility, we also can't ever move forwards. This scroll event change is a positive in 99% of cases - should a web site built in 1998 really hold that back? There's no absolute in "putting users first" there - you're either putting th…

was never standard cross-browser

> There's no absolute in "putting users first" there - you're either putting the minority user looking at an old site first, or you're putting the majority looking at newer sites first.

I'm not talking about old sites; I'm talking about current sites. The old sites were illustrative examples of the backwards compatibility in the web.

The point is that the web has always been a platform you can deploy code to without needing to tend to it later.

This post is an example of it breaking a current site.

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