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Chrome breaks the Web

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Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#421

Post by scaryclam »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #230
kodablah wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They do have a consensus about these things among their users. Virtually no one wants their password manager to not work or for third-party marketers to be able to track them more easily. The people who disagree are third-parties who want to impose their own preferences on Chrome's users. Their opinions should not be taken into account because they are not Chrome's users.

We get regular complaints from users using chrome about password autofill where they didn't want it. It would be really nice if chrome would honor standards and let us worry about how to make our users lives better.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#423

Post by [deleted] »

jrockway wrote: post #399
techdragon wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about an Administration interface that allows you to set a password to a known value for the user to use so they can log back into their account. So the helpful support person can now go "Your password is now 'foobar' and you will be asked to pick a new one when you login."

Why would you use input type=password for that?

[deleted]

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#424

Post by sumeno »

pas wrote: post #290
halr9000 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

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…

Do you have concrete examples of websites that are "fucked up" because of this?

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#426

Post by laumars »

hoosieree wrote: post #382
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…

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…

Chrome is at around 60% of desktop user agents, which is obviously significant but nothing on the scale of what IE was in the 90s. What's more, Chrome's market share plummets massively when you take other devices into account. So comparing Chrome to IE is a little premature when talking about browser monopolies.

Next lets look at the actual technology we're complaining about. ActiveX wasn't just an Internet Explorer-only feature, it was Windows only as well. Furthermore it wasn't the only feature in IE that wasn't supported on other browsers (VBScript, JScript, WebForms†, different support for HTML and CSS, etc). Where as Chrome doesn't diverge from other browsers all that significantly in comparison.

Chromes changes could be compared better to Internet Explorer with regards to how IE4 changed the way frames were used (inc the addition of iframes). This was really annoying as a developer but actually these changes were for the better - particularly the iframe - and eventually those features landed in other browsers. Including Netscape Communicator.

The W3C are pretty glacial at updating their specs so it's often required browsers taking things into their own hands, eg the browser CSS prefixes. Developers would moan about having to add lots of extra junk to their code just to get new features to work but it was the price to pay for having access to new features that hadn't landed in the various web specifications. So as much as they would moan about vendor prefixes, they'd welcome browsers extending the specification.

The above paragraph wasn't all that long ago and the difference between then and now was that Chrome, Firefox and Opera were all at it with IE still playing catch up with regards to compliance; but now the browser market has consolidated where Chrome (read: Blink) has absorbed Opera, IE has largely died off and Firefox is sadly slowly falling out of fashion. So people are paranoid Google might abuse their advantage. However I really cannot see that happen - or at least not with regards to Chrome. Not only is Chrome's market share small compared to IE in the 90s / early 00s but also the web is viewed from a multitude of different devices. As someone who has managed online shops, games and other popular web-based services I can testify that product owners do NOT want to lose business from portable devices. If just because some product owners are so technologically inept that their primary computing device outside of the office is an iPad and/or their business iPhone.

† I think it was called. But basically it was their 90s tech for writing apps that looked like Win Forms.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#427

Post by dmitriid »

laumars wrote: post #426
hoosieree wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chrome is at around 60% of desktop user agents, which is obviously significant but nothing on the scale of what IE was in the 90s. What's more, Chrome's market share plummets massively when you take other devices into account. So comparing Chrome to IE is a little premature when talking about browser monopolies. Next lets look at the actual technology we're complaining about. ActiveX wasn't just an Internet Explorer-…

> Chrome is at around 60% of desktop user agents, which is obviously significant but nothing on the scale of what IE was in the 90s. What's more, Chrome's market share plummets massively when you take other devices into account.

Yeah. Where other devices are mostly Android phones running Google's fork of Webkit. I.e., Chrome

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#428

Post by nolemurs »

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.

> 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.

It's a simple question of cost benefit analysis. Some users are harmed by slow scrolling, others will be harmed by the update. There's not some obvious reason to prefer one group to the other absent an assessment of how many users are impacted and how bad the impact is.

In this case, the impact of slow scrolling affects almost everyone, and it's pretty bad. For a long time, I basically wouldn't bother to use my web browser on the phone.

The impact of breaking some scrolling behavior affects the users of a small number of poorly maintained sites, and in most cases, not in a way that actually breaks anything.

To me, the "terrifically isolated bubble" approach is to focus only on the part of the user experience you care about rather than balancing the pros and cons to all users.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#429

Post by gcb0 »

laumars wrote: post #392
gcb0 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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…

I was there at the time, the whole IE Vs Netscape thing started long before Java became a threat (though you are right about how Microsoft also fought that war as well). Plus Bill Gates has said in interviews since that he was trying to lock the web into Microsofts ecosystem because he saw the threat very early on about how it could be platform agnostic. While you can argue that Chrome and AMP serve the same goal, th…

you have good points. but what I belive gates was refering to at the time was what he was seeing as a threat to windows. if you ever have the chance, buy a used SGI workstation from ebay and play with the system. SGI had an affordable business workstations (pizza boxes) that shipped with irix5. the mais thing for irix 5 was that most of the in house applications (e.g. settings pannel, doc library, etc) were mozilla XUL+js applications! I kid you not. that was 1994 and the electron concept was alive and strong with mozilla 2. iriz 5.3 or 6 (i am sure i am getting the versions all wrong from memory) even had the first CSS implementation! and it was mostly to ease the transition from the motif gui framework to XUL.

this is what gates calles the figth for the web. saving windows. thats why they integrated IE so heavily on explorer. ...again, they did hit very hard in the actual internet ecosystem, but that was a side effect. and they would be silly not to try to take some advantage of that too since they were getting this for "free" while fighting for windows dominance.

Re: Chrome breaks the Web

#430

Post by nolemurs »

jhasse wrote: post #336
gw wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your local church added a scroll listener for their small website, they deserve it.

To be fair, most likely someone's teenage son added a scroll listener when he built the small church's website before going off to college.

In the category of "poor decisions made by teenagers" this is pretty tame.

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