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Chrome is Not the Standard

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Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#121

Post by optimuspaul »

JohnBooty wrote: post #99
appdrag wrote: post #3

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well." I really don't agree at all with this, Safari is the new Internet explorer ... https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/

Chrome is the new IE. Chrome ships new features fast, and some of them are very cool. Because of course! "Embrace, extend, extinguish" doesn't work unless the "extend" part is full of shiny, delicious candy. And platform makers can make lots and lots of shiny candy when freed from pesky things like standards. It's hard to believe we're having this discussion again. Did we learn nothing from Internet Explorer 6? IE6 d…

I mostly agree. Chrome worries me for a lot of reasons and I don't trust google at all.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#122

Post by WorldMaker »

hungerstrike wrote: post #91
WorldMaker wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is not Chromium, however. Just because there is a nougaty open source center doesn't mean that Chrome is entirely free from proprietary software worries and worries about Google's commercial interests infringing upon user interests/greater web interests. Additionally, Chromium isn't WebKit either. Blink forked from WebKit some time back and the fork continues to diverge, with WebKit and Blink disagreeing on so…

Yes thank you, I understand all of that - it's very well known among web developers. None of it changes my argument: The majority of the functionality that we care about in our web browsers comes from an open source library.

Except it does change your argument: you are clearly missing a for now, so long as it pleases Google.

You can imply that if Google did something to upset consumers they may flock to an alternative Blink-based browser or Chromium, but Google and Chrome are the brands they know, they don't know or care about Blink or Chromium.

You may believe that Google are entirely generous and would never upset the open source balance from which they benefit, but they've done it before. The hard fork of Blink from WebKit is one obvious sign that if Google isn't happy, they can and will take their ball and move on. You can also consider in this equation the increasing disparity between open source AOSP and consumer Google Android. The number of closed, proprietary "Google Play" APIs that applications increasingly rely on still seems to be growing at a strong pace. The number of APKs that you can, for instance, sideload to AOSP-based Amazon FireOS continues to only dwindle and at this point a software developer very much has to develop two apps, one for Amazon's APIs and one for Google's, despite all the shared open source between the platforms.

So of course we should worry that Chrome has such a huge marketshare and that so many web developers are essentially building "Chrome-only" websites.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#123

Post by CobrastanJorji »

c3534l wrote: post #119
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found a lot of people are quite naively idealistic around browser development. The rendering, JS engines in Firefox and Chrome are state-of-the-art and take small armies to build and maintain. Mozilla has to strike a balance between revenue seeking and consumer protection seeking behavior that I would imagine is quite difficult to maintain. Lots of people here additionally are up in arms their incredibly specifi…

> revenue seeking Then what the hell did I donate money to them for? I thought their whole thing was they were for "people, not profit." I don't want my technology to make money off of me in any way I'm not aware of.

You probably donated money to the Mozilla Foundation, which owns the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation is not a nonprofit, in the sense that it's taxed, although that is not the same thing as saying their goal is profit.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#124

Post by AckSyn »

soperj wrote: post #113
dijit wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can argue that they're not implementing $thing-you-like but lets be real; you can't compare IE to anything if you don't include the market share. IE was harmful because it had such incredible market share and could do what it wanted with that.

And Apple has a major mobile market share, that HAS to use safari. If I could get away with not supporting safari, I definitely would.

Web developers grouse over supporting all web browsers and I find it fairly ridiculous. If you're job is to essentially "paint a vision" for users of the sites you're hired for, pick the highest common denominator that ALL of the three or four largest browsers have and work from there.

It really grinds my gears that some in my dev team constantly pick shit that ONLY works properly on one browser, then they write in hacks for the others. It's dirty, dealing with dewy eyed "pros" whose strength is one of dozens of frameworks that would have been better suited for the task at hand.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#125

Post by ptero »

yoavm wrote: post #36
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't just screw up once . They've screwed up many times over the years with many projects and attempts that run counter to the core values that Mozilla claims to uphold. Bryan Lunduke articulated this very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMALm1VthGY At this point Mozilla has to prove to us that they are worthy of our usage

I don't really understand this attitude. Mozilla doesn't need to be everything I ever wanted from a browser in order to get my support. It only needs to be better than Google. Are all these people sticking with Chrome because Mozilla is not holding up to its values really think Google is better at taking care of our freedom?!

> I don't really understand this attitude. Mozilla doesn't need to be everything I ever wanted from a browser in order to get my support.

Having a Mozilla option is good, but when Mozilla screws up it needs to get a clear indication that it did. I think folks saying "down with Mozilla" do not really mean this 100%; but they do want Mozilla to know that it seriously screwed up in their view. And we should not treat it as a shrinking violet -- it is not a tiny startup; it is a large corporation with funding in hundreds of millions.

> It only needs to be better than Google.

This, IMO, is setting the bar way too low. It should aim to do what the users want and consumer technology easily allows. If there is a big gap between those we should encourage new entrants, not entrench Mozilla as "the" alternative to pick-your-evil. My 2c.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#127

Post by jld »

reacharavindh wrote: post #41

Is there a possibility of an alternative to Mozilla with the kind of backing that Mozilla enjoys now? GNU project? Apache web browser? Linux Foundation? Heck, I'm sure privacy conscious people will happily pay for a quality browser that they can trust. I don't have the technical prowess to build a browser. If I did, I would.

Mozilla has ~$500M revenue/year.

I don't think you'll find a alternate non-Apple/Google/Microsoft player with similar backing.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#128

Post by ako »

trendia wrote: post #32
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't just screw up once . They've screwed up many times over the years with many projects and attempts that run counter to the core values that Mozilla claims to uphold. Bryan Lunduke articulated this very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMALm1VthGY At this point Mozilla has to prove to us that they are worthy of our usage

Lest we forget: A third party company (funded by venture capital) created something called "Pocket", which allowed you to save any article you were reading to their service. Pocket had an extension that you could choose to download & enable on your Firefox browser. For apparently no reason at all, in June 2015, Mozilla integrated the proprietary Pocket into their open source browser, not just as an optional extension…

I actually like the pocket integration: these days more than. >50% of what I read, I read though pocket. Anything interesting is saved to pocket and read there. Pocket really makes the Internet a lot more readable, and I applaud Mozilla for recognising that, and making that as easy as possible.

Regarding the I robot thing, I must be living under a rock, had not heard of it before today. Storm in a glass of water.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#129

Post by dmytroi »

bitwize wrote: post #50

The only relevant Web standard in every era is "does it work in the browser most people are using". So Netscape in 1995, IE in 2000, Chrome today. That's just the reality, unless you'd rather lose money doing Web development.

Fully agree with this. I know people who were developing 3G/4G base stations at Ericsson, and as they say: the only right way to check if implementation is correct - to test if your phone connects to it or not.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#130

Post by paulryanrogers »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #52
yoavm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand this attitude. Mozilla doesn't need to be everything I ever wanted from a browser in order to get my support. It only needs to be better than Google. Are all these people sticking with Chrome because Mozilla is not holding up to its values really think Google is better at taking care of our freedom?!

Chrome doesn't magically revert privacy or search engine settings in updates, but Firefox apparently does. To quote from https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-... : > Not only are these experiments enabled by default, but updates have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off. Chrome has some troubling defaults but Google never decided to flip the default search engine or turn on any phone-h…

While that may be true, defaults matter too. Even as a privacy conscious techie it's possible to forget the X different settings one must change with each new install or device.

And for some dissidents or researchers those defaults could be life or career ending.

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