Chrome is Not the Standard • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#161

Post by seanp2k2 » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:41 PM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #35

kevmo wrote: post #4

I know they screwed up recently with the Mr. Robot malware, but I think it's really important for developers to get behind Firefox again. As the American government fails to provide any sort of check on its behemoth corporations (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and to protect consumer privacy, Firefox is basically the last contender for real consumer protection standing.

Please tell me how Safari or Apple in general works against consumer privacy protection? This is yet again a too-simplistic view of things that seems very common with Americans. Some big companies do unethical things, and you translate that to "all big companies hate consumers and want to eat their children"

“””In the recent history of management ideas, few have had a more profound — or pernicious — effect than the one that says corporations should be run in a manner that “maximizes shareholder value.””””

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/09/how-t...

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#162

Post by icebraining » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:42 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #108

sgift wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is transparent. I know what they are doing. You do? Okay, I don't. Please, show me exactly how Google uses data they collect from their users. Every usage. Not just a few. And no "but they say they can use it for whatever they want!" - then we can talk about transparency.

Sure it is - it markets my information to advertisers via its own platform. It is my neighborhood drug dealer, and drug are pretty good - nicely packaged and no one fucks with me when i use its drug delivery service. Mozilla is pretending to be a health store. But we are starting to see that they are also peddling drugs. Not Google drugs - drugs with security and drugs with delivery system and drugs that we are prett…

Can you specify which "shady drugs" are these? Because I'm not seeing it. In this particular case, the addon was written by Mozilla employees, and was completely harmless. I don't think Mozilla did well - and I've said so in the original thread - but calling it shady compared to Google ads? That's laughable. DoubleClick is one of the largest malware distribution platforms in history.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#163

Post by fixermark » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

adregan wrote: post #100

smoyer wrote: post #60

I like Chrome but lately I've spent almost all my time in Firefox Developer Edition. When I use Chrome it's to verify that it behaves the same way on more than one Javascript engine.

I switched to FF Developer Edition a little over a year ago, and I have caught several bugs that went unnoticed by my Chrome using colleagues.

How were they unnoticed in Chrome?

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#164

Post by DubiousPusher » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

I'm beginning to think that the best thing you can do as a user is to distribute your information footprint as much as possible.

Personally, I'll keep on using Firefox specifically because Mozilla does not own any of the other technologies I use.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#165

Post by Arcsech » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

paulirish wrote: post #149

Arcsech wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is 100% the IE. They blatantly ignore standards, the most obvious of which is their treatment of autocomplete=off in forms[1]. They broke the ability to disable autocomplete, and since then have been intentionally breaking workarounds people find to actually turn off autocomplete. This has been a major pain in the butt at work. Before you yell at me about password managers or whatever, we don't use this on our…

FWIW, the HTML spec says that the autocomplete=off means either 1) the input shouldn't be autofilled or 2) the input is for sensitive information. It doesn't require handling it only as the first case. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-infrastr...

> "When an element's autofill field name is "off", the user agent should not remember the control's data, and should not offer past values to the user."

Seems pretty clear to me. The only exception I see is:

> "A user agent may allow the user to override an element's autofill field name, e.g. to change it from "off" to "on" to allow values to be remembered and prefilled despite the page author's objections, or to always "off", never remembering values."

But that's user-initiated action, not something the browser should do for every field just because it feels like it.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#166

Post by agentPrefect » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

Everybody favours the underdog.

Mr. Robot was stupid because - why do I want marketing in a product I use as an eveyday utility? Chrome is the standard because of the majority market share and also because they do a great job of delivering a good developer AND user experience.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#167

Post by macintux » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #145

optimuspaul wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Their goals are less outwardly evil than 1990s-era Microsoft, and that makes me think they have a much better chance at succeeding.

I don't know how "understand everything there is to know about everyone" is substantially less evil, especially when entirely avoiding Google is effectively impossible.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#168

Post by seanp2k2 » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:46 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #109

stephenr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me how Safari or Apple in general works against consumer privacy protection? This is yet again a too-simplistic view of things that seems very common with Americans. Some big companies do unethical things, and you translate that to "all big companies hate consumers and want to eat their children"

Please tell me how Safari or Apple in general works against consumer privacy protection? Safari is pretty good at privacy protection. Apple doesn't really have an interest in collecting your data and they have a history of implementing features improving privacy (cross-site tracking protection, build-in adblock API, etc.). The problem is that Safari is only available to the wealthiest in the world.

Not technically Safari but https://webkitgtk.org is a thing and WebKit itself is open source: https://github.com/WebKit/webkit

“”” WebKit is a cross-platform web browser engine. On iOS and macOS, it powers Safari, Mail, iBooks, and many other applications. “””

Midori is also based on WebKit: http://midori-browser.org

AFAIK Safari does not provide more privacy protections than WebKit.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#169

Post by NightlyDev » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:46 PM UTC

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well"

Well, clearly this person doesn't have much experience with web development... The webengine in iOS is the biggest pile of crap I've ever worked with since IE6.

"Oh? You want to click this? OK, let's wait for 300 ms just in case you want to double tap to scroll!"

"We finally fixed it, no more delay on clicks! Yo Apple, the delay is still there if it runs as standalone, good job..!"

"OK, you've added the page to the home screen, now, if you click another URL on the same domain you definitely want it opened in the browser, right? Good guess Apple, that's why I added it.."

"Wait, are you saying that if you switch to another app and back again to the standalone site you don't want us to reload the URL that's added to the home screen? You would prefer us to let you continue where you left off, what!?!?"

"Oh, so you think momentum scrolling is a good idea? Too bad, we don't support it on elements that overflow, but we do have it elsewhere, have fun! PS we do have an experimental flag to enable it, but then I sure hope you're not using animations with gpu acceleration, cause then we have som nice race condition bugs in store for you, so who knows if scroll will work or not.."

Seriously, iOS is the worst of them. Sure Firefox and Chrome often has experimental features with bugs, but both of them are much more "solid" when it comes to features you'll actually use in production.

Safari on iOS is the IE6 of today.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#170

Post by fixermark » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:47 PM UTC

chriskrycho wrote: post #160

fixermark wrote: post #153

Consider QUIC. QUIC is a UDP-based transport-layer alternative to TCP/IP (which, to a rough approximation, has some advantages over TCP/IP for multiplexing multiple logical data channels between the same two physical machines). While it is being standardized by the IETF, it is not yet a standard. Google implements it server-side and it's enabled by default in Chrome. It is, as a result, already around 7% of Internet…

Experiments are great in my opinion, and this is a fabulous example. We just shouldn't mistake " is trying something" for "Ergo it is now standard and everyone should support it." The beauty of the web is that everybody can try these kinds of experiments, and if they have high value, the others will adopt them. I'm not sour on Chrome for trying stuff, by a long shot. I'm sour on people thinking "Chrome tried somethin…

Agreed.

... but it's interesting that when Google "tries something" that crosses their server and web browser boundaries, that "something" can quickly become 7% of network traffic.