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Re: Browsers

#91

Post by Sylos »

virtualwhys wrote: post #73

OT, but I was and am still pretty steamed that Mozilla spearheaded the effort to deprecate WebSQL back in 2010 [1], while providing a replacement that left many disappointed [2] (see comments in both threads universally deriding the decision). The idea was that javascript libraries would be created that would replicate SQLite in the browser (albeit horribly inefficiently with terrible APIs compared to shipped-with-th…

Are you aware of the recent WebSQL remote code execution vulnerability?

That's a pretty good reason for Mozilla's decision.

Re: Browsers

#92

Post by quanticle »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #78
eddieroger wrote: post #45

I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made…

The concern is not 'now' it's 'later'. Google is a business like any other - and when they have the power to lever a monopolized situation - they will. For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's? Or what if they integrate technology that de-facto collects usa…

For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?

They've already started. Google Meet (their version of Hangouts for enterprise) didn't work on non-Chrome browsers for a very long time. If you tried to do a video call with a non-Chrome browser, you were told to install Chrome and load the page in Chrome. The only reason they were able to get away with this is because Chrome has the high market share that it does. If they'd done this when Chrome had 10% market-share, the response from users would have been to stop using Google Meet. However, because they did this when Chrome has 70% market share (and climbing) there was hardly any outcry; those who didn't already have Chrome installed gave a resigned sigh and installed Chrome in order to participate in their work meetings.

Currently, all of Google's services work on non-Chrome browsers. But will that always be the case? I can very well imagine a world where Google starts making its services Chrome-only, citing, for example, that only V8 has the necessary Javascript performance to run Google's increasingly bloated webapps with adequate performance.

Like you said, it'll start as a slow drip, with the least popular and most obscure applications (for example: Google Play Music) being moved over first. Then, as users fail to object, they'll move over larger and larger applications. Even if they never make the "big-two" of YouTube and Google Search Chrome-only, they'll still be exerting a fair amount of pressure for users to switch to Chrome.

Re: Browsers

#93

Post by Sylos »

mixedCase wrote: post #13
snarfy wrote: post #10

Firefox has one feature the other browsers will never have - privacy.

Brave seems to go for the same, but with a Chromium base (currently in beta). They seem to de-claw whatever's left by Google.

Firefox has still some clear advantages over Brave, thanks to owning their engine.

A trivial example is the battery API. It's nowadays mainly used for tracking, but is an official webstandard. Mozilla decided to fuzzy it, so it lost its usefulness for tracking. Google didn't.

And I imagine, there's hundreds of similar examples at this scale, which as an average user you'll just never hear of.

One bigger feature is Firefox's Containers. It's based on work from the Tor Browser. Which also just illustrates what this partnership sometimes brings forth. Tor Browser is going to always be there, checking the Firefox code for privacy problems, and will suggest better ways of doing things, which Mozilla can just adopt.

For Chromium, there exist in principle similar efforts, like Brave, Iridium Browser, ungoogled-chromium, but these will always fight an uphill battle against Google and obviously Google isn't going to adopt and maintain their fixes.

Re: Browsers

#94

Post by koonsolo »

eddieroger wrote: post #45

I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made…

Exactly. A week ago I read on hackernews how desktop linux failed because of diversity. Now I read the web will fail because of monoculture.

Re: Browsers

#95

Post by jancsika »

avaer wrote: post #74
newscracker wrote: post #57

This move by Microsoft may probably help Microsoft have Windows users using its browser, but I seriously doubt if it's good for the web. There are people claiming that Microsoft could easily fork from Chromium, but honestly, do you see that happening in the next few years? Having read that Microsoft's Edge team was a very small one, I don't believe Microsoft will fork Chromium anytime in the next two or three years (…

Instead of funding Mozilla, perhaps funding the many non-Blink, non-Gecko browser authors out there would be more impactful? Even if it's indirectly through spreading responsible ownership of standards discussions and components like Skia/ANGLE/etc. Disclaimer: independent browser author, unpaid.

Does your independent browser properly render a page like the following:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

?

There should be a left column wide enough to read the text, and some transient menus which appear when mousing over the links there, and a switch to icon-only left column when you scrunch the window size small enough.

Re: Browsers

#96

Post by austincheney »

robin_reala wrote: post #86
austincheney wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance,…

Couple of corrections: IE6 actually fixed the box model (that was the difference between the new standards mode vs quirks mode that matched IE5), and IE on the Mac used a completely different rendering engine (Tasman instead of Trident).

The box model issue was independent of quirks mode. Quirks mode was triggered by HTML not conformance to a modern doctype (HTML4, XHTML 1.1, or one of the three XHTML 1.0) which produced a different DOM tree and thus different layout/appearance when CSS was applied. This was particularly frustrating because even when MS fixed the corresponding CSS defects their DOM tree remained non-standard until IE9.

I remember having to deal with all these things when working with the company's aging CMS. It was a great tool, but the version the company was using was old (before standardized doctypes in 1999) and inserted a comment into the top line of code throwing all documents into quirks mode in IE.

The box model was corrected when IE released version 7, which still also featured quirks mode rendering for backwards compatibility.

Re: Browsers

#97

Post by 43920 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36
tannhaeuser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is this: HTML (+CSS) is supposed to be a standardized and recommendable format for publishing rich text with the expectation that it can be rendered for a long time to come. But if only a single browser will be able to display it, this not only questions the longevity claim, but also questions the whole web stack. New CSS specs can't be reviewed and proven with independent implementations, and web specs w…

> But if only a single browser will be able to display it Chromium has no intrinsic power. If Chromium and Google disagree, the latter can easily break off. The browser political landscape is fragmented as ever.

> the latter can easily break off

How? Developing a browser takes hundreds of millions of dollars, and Google is currently providing all the funding for that (meaning they decide what changes get made). Who has the necessary resources to fork Chromium, and would actually be willing to do it?

Re: Browsers

#98

Post by thelasthuman »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #78
eddieroger wrote: post #45

I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made…

The concern is not 'now' it's 'later'. Google is a business like any other - and when they have the power to lever a monopolized situation - they will. For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's? Or what if they integrate technology that de-facto collects usa…

The people should own their own data, and be able to take it with them to other services.

Re: Browsers

#99

Post by yuchi »

wvenable wrote: post #67
austincheney wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance,…

> IE6 used a non-standard box model. Which we all use now anyway because it was right way to do it... * { box-sizing: border-box; }

No no no, that's a completely different issue — we are talking about hasLayout stuff here.

Re: Browsers

#100

Post by jancsika »

wyqydsyq wrote: post #84
exogen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any other browser. I don't have much love for MS, but this is just wrong. XMLHttpRequest, the precursor to fetch, pretty much allowed "web 2.0" to exist. Now we use fetch, but they introduced it first. box-sizing: border…

You seem to have missed the part of my comment that said "since IE6" AFAIK the box-sizing box model you mentioned was implemented since the beginning of Trident, well before IE6 came about. XHR was available from IE5 onwards (only accessible via ActiveX object, it didn't become available as a native window property in JS until IE7 but the feature was still available), so again isn't "since IE6". If you think whether…

> You seem to have missed the part of my comment that said "since IE6"

IIRC the pointer events specification[1] came from Microsoft and is implemented in Chrome and Firefox (just checked and found setPointerCapture in devTools-- yay).

It allows developers to use a unified approach that can work for various pointer devices. I can confirm it does just that in Chrome and am waiting to hear back from someone who will test it with multi-touch on a surface pro.

That API was released well after IE6.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/pointerevents/

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