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Chrome breaks the Web

tonsky.me

381–390 of 473 posts

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#381
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Was flash a standard? Also, flash still works, it's a click away with a button in the location bar for sites that try to use it.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#382

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…

Whether or not you think Chrome "wants" to destroy the other browsers, we can observe that:

Chrome is the most used web browser

Chrome is deciding how the web should work unilaterally.

These are the exact conditions that produced ActiveX and resulted in many websites with an IE6-only requirement. As much as developers dislike having to design around the various browser quirks, the situation will get much worse if any one browser becomes "important" enough that you can forget the others.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that millions of sites will not ever be fixed; they'll just be broken indefinitely.

Possibly, but if they are that useful to users, those sites either need to be maintained or forked. Your argument could have just as easily been used to argue for Adobe Flash support(OK it's still sort of around, but it's nearly irrelevant at this point).

> sites either need to be maintained or forked

Maintained by who, forked by who? You can't just fork someone's work, there is copyright. Also any saved copy of website(think web archive) will stop working.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#384

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…

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…

> How does that benefit the users?

It brings the site closer to recommended accessibility guidelines, making it easier for e.g. people who have vision loss to navigate. It also reduces our potential legal liability to such users for not meeting accessibility requirements.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#385
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…

Chrome also recently broke sendBeacon functionality in a rather unusual fashion. The API is documented to return false if it fails, but apparently it'd be way more hilarious if instead of returning false as documented, Chrome just started throwing exceptions... Oh, and the reason for the exception, a bug in Chrome's security, that will be resolved at a later date.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=490015

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#386
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…

Chrome also recently broke sendBeacon functionality in a rather unusual fashion. The API is documented to return false if it fails, but apparently it'd be way more hilarious if instead of returning false as documented, Chrome just started throwing exceptions... Oh, and the reason for the exception, a bug in Chrome's security, that will be resolved at a later date. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id…

And another one...

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=696126

Broken WebGL anti-aliasing because:

> for now since it _shouldn't_ affect any actual devices

Except well... it did.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#387

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. 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…

> [google] intent is very different from Microsoft in the 90s with Internet Explorer as Google are not trying to control the web

How very wrong you are on this one point, your argument was going on the right line but here it took an unexpected turn. Microsoft was the one truly not trying to control the web. The web was a causality for something else (killing java). Now, Google. Google is the one that must control the web. Chrome and android and AMP serve the exactly same goal!

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#388
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.

Firefox would have given you an option. Which someone would have made an extension to control it for each site. In fact, that is exactly what happens there.

Now, Google shoves on you their preference (which is a coin-toss to align or not) and you shout that this is protecting your freedom of choice.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#389
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users don't use thousands of sites. If a site misbehaves and users want autofill on it, they should be able to override autocomplete=off for that site. Google could even make an extension for this to allow users to gather and share a list of sites that behave in a user unfriendly way. But of course, it was much easier to fuck up half of the Web. Public choice and mandates are great for things that require cooperation…

I have a site that deals with HIPPA protected information. I absolutely don’t want autofill, especially for sign in information. Chrome makes that impossible and just ignores the code.

Could you explain the downside of allowing auto-fill for sign-in information here? I understand that security is a concern, but I don't see how allowing a password manager to handle sign-ins would be harmful.
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