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Chrome breaks the Web

tonsky.me

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Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#311

Post by baybal2 »

cesarb wrote: post #222
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. Unless their navigation interface used a Java applet.

yet, a few years old website is most likely broken now because it runs JS code with half of its API interacting functions being incompatible with current browsers

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#312

Post by tree_of_item »

CydeWeys wrote: post #110
mcv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the question becomes what's less bad: for website developers to break their own site, or for Chrome to break other people's site. I'm all for empowering browsers to override abusive behaviour from websites, but using bad defaults and breaking innocent websites as a result is not the solution.

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.

If the browser was the agent of the user, the user would decide this behavior.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#313

Post by WillPostForFood »

CydeWeys wrote: post #130
digi_owl wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those are rebranded chromium. The only big ones that are independent are Safari (since Google forked Webkit to create Blink), Firefox, and IE/Edge. And the impression i have is that Safari is lagging, Mozilla is directionless and struggling to keep Firefox relevant, and MS is, well, MS. Ever since Opera folded and made their browser a Chromium clone, only Mozilla have been carrying the banner for standard cor…

Mozilla is directionless and struggling? Huh? They just came out with Firefox Quantum, which is a huge step forward, and I believe might have taken the web performance crown.

If you step back and look at Mozilla's performance, it looks like they have been struggling.

https://www.w3counter.com/trends

Hopefully they are on the upswing recently because they have found more focus and direction.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#314

Post by gw »

Klathmon wrote: post #307
gw wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, mobile scrolling wasn't "broken" for them, scrolling via their "timeline" feature was broken. So, mobile scrolling is broken, but not all the time. Is that really the distinction you want to make right now? For the individual who said "[c]omplaints from my users are starting to come in", is that an adequate response? > Luckily Discourse will email you when there is an update with a link to the admin page that l…

The timeline feature is the sidebar that shows you where in time since the first post you are looking at. When you drag along it, it can move you to that date and time. It's a cool features but not integral to the application. Scrolling still worked... 100% of the time on 100% of devices. And as for the upgrade, if the parishioner can't click [0] in the web UI (a link to which was emailed to them), then I'm not sure…

You're showing a pretty serious case of cognitive dissonance here. What previously was a theoretical problem was actualized with a real world example with actual affected users, and you've shifted to an entirely subjective argument that the breakage is "not integral to the application".

You also chose to rationalize the breakage by shifting the blame to the victim -- they have "no business hosting anything themselves". Well, great, but that isn't going to stop them. Maybe they want to ensure their web forum isn't censored by a hosting provider. It turns out that people still host their own websites in 2017, and until they all shift to centralized monolithic providers these bugs will persist for years, and you will persist in rationalizing the breakages as "flu shots".

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#316

Post by emodendroket »

dhimes wrote: post #292
emodendroket wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it and my passwords stick around, so perhaps enabling it would help?

Maybe that's the key, and why they don't care. I tend to stay away from that kind of service though.

I was a little skeptical too but it seems to be encrypted locally before going anywhere, so it seems like it's alright to use. Anyway, if the deletion's compromising security as much as you say it might be an acceptable trade-off.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#317

Post by Klathmon »

gw wrote: post #314
Klathmon wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timeline feature is the sidebar that shows you where in time since the first post you are looking at. When you drag along it, it can move you to that date and time. It's a cool features but not integral to the application. Scrolling still worked... 100% of the time on 100% of devices. And as for the upgrade, if the parishioner can't click [0] in the web UI (a link to which was emailed to them), then I'm not sure…

You're showing a pretty serious case of cognitive dissonance here. What previously was a theoretical problem was actualized with a real world example with actual affected users, and you've shifted to an entirely subjective argument that the breakage is "not integral to the application". You also chose to rationalize the breakage by shifting the blame to the victim -- they have "no business hosting anything themselves…

Reread my first comment. I pointed out that the breakage would be limited in scope. Very very few applications were broken by this (broken being defined as having it's core functionality unusable).

And you seem to be completely ignoring the fact that the upgrade "path" is one click of a button. Whether you agree with my stance on the responsibility of hosting your own internet connected server or not, it's a one click button upgrade, to a fix which was made 24 hours after the problem appeared.

If your problem is a minor UI breakage of a side feature of a well maintained web application that doesn't get updated because the admin doesn't know how to click a button in response to a fix which significantly improved scrolling performance for all chrome users, how do you justify any changes at all? Call it rationalizing if you want, I'm saying it's worth the extremely small amount of pain for the bettering of all chrome users.

How can you change anything at all if that is your threshold for unacceptable? How can you even update a single line of code if you feel that such a small amount of breakage is not allowed?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#318

Post by lgierth »

EGreg wrote: post #37

A lot of fair points in here. 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 S…

> Does anyone know any mainstream browserd planning to implement, I dunno, IPFS?

It's actually not too far off - IPFS is already capable of running a full js-ipfs node in a WebExtension's background page and expose its API to content pages. What's missing is minor things like streaming to/from the background page, and WebRTC in the background page.

For proper ipfs:// protocol support in the address bar and in links, a better protocol handlers API in WebExtensions is required though, which will take some more time. Basically right now with the ipfs-companion extension, ipfs:// URLs get rewritten to http://.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#319

Post by laumars »

hinkley wrote: post #296
laumars wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If we don’t want to repeat the 90’s we have to complain a lot sooner. If your litmus test is “as bad as Microsoft” then that’s exactly what we will get.

> If we don’t want to repeat the 90’s we have to complain a lot sooner.

Complaining wouldn't change anything. Corporations don't change their policies because a few nerds moan on a few message boards.

> If your litmus test is “as bad as Microsoft” then that’s exactly what we will get.

It wasn't my litmus test. I feel you're missing my point because others are making that comparison and I'm saying the two don't compare. In Microsoft's case they broke from standards to lock people into their paid platforms. Clearly that's bad. But in Google's case the platforms are free and the break from standards doesn't lock users into any platforms. You can make arguments against Google break from standards if you want but comparing the two because they involve a web browser is just clutching at straws.

Now, if you wanted to argue about Google corrupting the web then AMP is a far better example. There are far more similarities between MS+IE and AMP even though AMP isn't a web browser:

• both are a free product that locks users into the company's revenue stream (ads in AMP for Google, Windows for MS)

• both push their product through their massive market shares (Google promoting their AMP CDN on Google Search above the search results, Windows shipping IE)

• both onboarded developers with promises to better user experience while locking them into a non-standard platform.

I could go on, but in short AMP is where you guys need to be worried about with regards to Google shifting the web landscape. Not whether Chrome follows spec on a small handful of specific tag properties. That's a whole lot of hysteria over nothing.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#320

Post by Silhouette »

pas wrote: post #287
KeitIG wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking from the developer point of view here, not the user's: I'm expecting things to be working the same way they are documented in the manual. The changes some browsers have made to autoplay videos or alerts do not contradict what is in the manual.

With evergreen browsers, that basically requires a dev team to adjust the code and release/deploy a new version every X months. WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really. Let the market (and the users) decide. If a site takes forever to load, and scrolling is impossible because it takes ages to scroll, and burns a mark in your palm in that time, then maybe you'll reconside…

With evergreen browsers, that basically requires a dev team to adjust the code and release/deploy a new version every X months.

WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really.

It's not automatically OK to break functionality even for security/privacy reasons, IMHO. Browsers are used for many useful purposes that do not involve visiting sites run by large organisations with full-time development teams assigned to ongoing maintenance. Intranets. Embedded UIs in devices. Personal sites full of useful information but with no-one actively maintaining them.

The number of breaking changes browser developers have been willing to make in recent years does not bode well for the future of the Web, a platform which became what it is today precisely because it was a known target for developers and for a few years the industry standards actually meant something.

The Brave New Web is one dominated by ego-stroking contests between the major browser developers and huge, centralised sites with effectively unlimited resources run by just a handful of organisations. Notice that neither users nor original content creators appear in that previous description. The original author here is quite right to call the big players out for that. We saw Microsoft's infamous embrace-and-extend strategy and the way the Web was held back for years as a result. We should be just as wary when the likes of Google sing the same song.

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