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Chrome is Not the Standard

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Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#301

Post by connorelsea »

baddox wrote: post #299
connorelsea wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with a low market share Apple could still theoretically be engaging in practices that are anti-consumer, such as disallowing the use of other browser engines. Though, afaik, Apple does not stoop to the levels of Amazon, who removed the Twitch app from Roku platform for absolutely no reason other than to line their pockets with more cash.

Aren’t anticompetitive and anti-consumer two completely separate things?

Yes, but I would say that anti-competitive behavior is inherently anti-consumer, as the consumer does not benefit from it - and Apple preventing other browser engines is both

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#302

Post by freshhawk »

ABCLAW wrote: post #179
themistocle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is fighting an uphill battle, but that doesn't give them a free pass. The Pocket, Cliqz, and Mr. Robot controversies undermine Mozilla's core message. Whether or not they are simply failures of marketing and branding doesn't change the fact that they hurt the company. That being said, a lot of people will never know about these issues so the damage is not catastrophic. I would also argue that "just being bett…

Am I the only one looking at this and thinking that the so-called controversies are absurdly tame in comparison with the outcry associated with them? They're missteps, not trust breakers. Quantum was a massive step in the right direction. The Mr. Robot Easter Egg was non-malicious poor execution. I don't think it's a free pass to just contextualize how small their missteps have been in the grand scheme of things.

I think you are wrong about them not being "trust breakers" and right about them being fairly tame.

The reason the response seems outsized is because of the breach of trust involved, much more so than the technical impacts.

Quantum is great, and I just like a lot of the UX decisions Firefox makes. But a major reason for my support of Mozilla is their stated mission. And regularly making bumbling moves that overtly compromise that stated mission makes you start to question their commitment to it. Is it really their mission, or is it just a thing it is good for them to keep saying? POSIWID and all that.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#303

Post by adambyrtek »

earenndil wrote: post #300
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…

Just because it was planned 2 years in advance doesn't make it any less meaningful. And there were a lot of "incredibly specific workflows" that xul extensions allowed that webextensions won't. Will you deny millions of people each their own incredibly specific workflow if there's one singular ecosystem that mozilla has to maintain, to accommodate them all?

I would say yes, since web browsers should prioritise performance and security of their primary use case which is accessing the web. In my opinion extensions are just a nice add-on, not the reason browsers exist in the first place. Most developers understand from their own experience that backwards compatibility while admirable can be very costly to maintain forever.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#304

Post by bhawks »

Spivak wrote: post #296
bhawks wrote: post #207

I wish the author discussed the fact that Apple doesn't allow any other browsers to target the iOS platform. Chrome / Firefox are forced to be thin wrappers against the webkit engine instead of bringing their own technology. No other platform has policies like this and it greatly impacts the web platform and changes the dynamic of web standards in a way no other browser developer could.

> No other platform has policies like this The Windows store has the same policy and by proxy all Windows S machines.

So then the trend is that platform owners are the only allowed browser implementors on the their platform?

Platform owners' interests and public rationalizations aside, is this in the best interest of the web and its users?

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#305

Post by tannhaeuser »

The thing is that Google owns WHATWG (who write and edit HTML specs) so the difference between Web "standards" and "what Chrome does" is moot. Other browser vendors have no choice other than to follow suit. I'm putting "standards" in scare quotes since what WHATWG publishes - the "living standard" thing - doesn't qualify as standard in my book.

It's a tragedy to see so much well-intentioned work being weaponized. Actually I appreciate the hard work of Domenic et al, and also the work being done on CSS specs. But we're way past the point where Web specs serve a purpose other than to keep people busy and brittle and monopolize the Web beyond recognition.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#306

Post by threeseed »

riquito wrote: post #253
threeseed wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) iOS is not a monopoly. 2) Apple has legitimate technical reasons for not allowing other browser engines (well specifically the JS part). Intent matters.

> Apple has legitimate technical reasons for not allowing other browser engines (well specifically the JS part). Intent matters. Oh please... source?

Remote execution of code is a very popular attack vector.

Apple can negate this almost entirely by controlling JavascriptCore and WebKit and ensuring that their security models e.g. sandbox are tight and well tested. Leaving that up to third parties who may not be so vigilant compromises the security of the entire device.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#307

Post by freshhawk »

tytso wrote: post #274
notyourday wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a myth that Google literally sells your information to advertisers. It uses your information to show you advertisements which both it and its advertisers hopes are relevant and useful (so you will click on them). If you think about it, that business model essentially requires that the ads not be too annoying, because if they are, people will use ad blockers and the business model dies. The really annoying ads wh…

There is less of a difference between those than there seems to be, there are a lot of interesting research papers and experiments regarding methods to create a feedback loop between targeting ads and then identifying those targeted.

If I narrowly target an ad and then I know you saw it, I now know all those things about you.

So, yes, they do not literally sell your information, there is one level of indirection there. And the amount of information that data brokers get their hands on tells me that it is very likely people are exporting this information regularly.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#309

Post by 0x0 »

riquito wrote: post #253
threeseed wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) iOS is not a monopoly. 2) Apple has legitimate technical reasons for not allowing other browser engines (well specifically the JS part). Intent matters.

> Apple has legitimate technical reasons for not allowing other browser engines (well specifically the JS part). Intent matters. Oh please... source?

Efficient javascript needs to be JIT'ed, but that means your app needs to be granted API access to map writeable memory as executable, which is a security risk they are not willing to grant third party developers. So a third party browser/js engine will likely be quite slow. I guess this would give users of a bad impression of iOS perfomance as a whole then, if other browser engines were allowed and became popular?

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#310

Post by ksk »

userbinator wrote: post #30

developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” Indeed, perhaps "holding the web back" is a good thing if it means websites will be more accessible overall, to even less common browsers like NetSurf, Dillo, and all the other text-based ones. IMHO the "feature war/race" between the major browser vendors has had an overall negative effect, as if all sites somehow need to turn into ridic…

People investing money in the web are the ones who want to turn it into another sales vehicle.
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