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Re: Browsers

#211

Post by magicalist »

JoshuaJB wrote: post #124
sonnyblarney wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

> For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life.

Huh?

First, I can find nowhere that Chrome claimed to have better video-watching battery life (in fact, popular tech sites mention improving but still worse[1]).

Second, the only dip I can find in the public Edge battery life tests[2] was

April 2017 - 12.5 hours

Dec 2017 - 16 hours

May 2018 - 14.3 hours

vs Chrome's 9.3, 13.5, and 12.5 hours. Which means whatever happened last spring, Chrome also dipped.

And third, how about we talk about the kind of web browser battery benchmark based on playing fullscreen video and is defeated by adding a single hidden div? It's not testing battery life of a representative sample of what a web browser is actually used for (especially over 12+ hours), and obviously wasn't very resilient in the face of what a web browser has to actually handle.

Honestly it sounds like they added a div for unrelated reasons (accessibility, "security", ads, who knows), thought it was worth the performance tradeoff (or never measured), and it indirectly ended up making Edge better for real web content (as of the Win10 Oct update).

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/edge-still-boasts-be...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWs4_NfqMtoxOT8E8d5KP...

Re: Browsers

#212

Post by eridius »

StudentStuff wrote: post #136
eridius wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Meet still doesn't work with Safari, with no explanation. Safari supports the latest WebRTC, and AIUI Google Meet uses the current WebRTC standard, so why does Google refuse to let it work on Safari? This has to be deliberate.

Safari has purposefully neutered WebRTC, both Firefox and Google have full codec support while Apple tries to push H.264 only, plus things like web push still doesn't work on iOS: https://webrtchacks.com/safari-webrtc/ Google Meet also appears to have updated to support the WebRTC spec (rather than the oddball implementation Chrome had) so long as your browser supports it: https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/firefox-is-n…

While it's true that Safari only supports H.264, Google already produces quite a lot of H.264 video. In fact, Google has a Google Meet iOS app; I don't suppose you have any idea if they push H.264 to that app, or if they've actually embedded a software VP8/9 encoder/decoder into the app? I sincerely hope it's the former for battery life reasons if nothing else (though we already know Google doesn't seem to care about power efficiency).

What does Web Push have to do with WebRTC?

Re: Browsers

#213

Post by rictic »

pritambaral wrote: post #148
quanticle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

> Currently, all of Google's services work on non-Chrome browsers. Google Earth is Chrome-only, because they use the Chrome-only NativeClient. Google Hangouts dropped calling support on non-Chrome browsers for quite a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889018 YouTube (and perhaps GMail) is extra slow on non-Chrome browsers because they use a dropped-and-never-standardised feature that is available only on…

> YouTube (and perhaps GMail) is extra slow on non-Chrome browsers because they use a dropped-and-never-standardised feature that is available only on Chrome, and force a slow polyfill on Firefox (and perhaps Edge): https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

I work on the Polymer team at Google, and have worked with YouTube on this. I can promise you that the folks at YouTube are working very hard on porting to the specs that are supported crossbrowser. Switching to the final versions of the specs is super high priority for all of us, there were just some changes between v0 and v1 that are hard to paper over, and as you might imagine, YouTube has a lot of code.

> Google Earth is Chrome-only, because they use the Chrome-only NativeClient

My understanding is that if it weren't for spectre, cross-browser Google Earth would very likely be shipping today. There is a web assembly version of Earth, but it needs threads and SharedArrayBuffer, which is disabled in most browsers today because of spectre-class security issues.

https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cro...

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/02/meltdown-s...

Re: Browsers

#214

Post by Manishearth »

kipkniskern wrote: post #182
JoshuaJB wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

These are, however, changes to Chrome and not Chromium, right? Even with a move to Chromium, anyone/everyone is still going to be playing catch up to Google. Having an open source engine means next to nothing if Google plays these kinds of games, abusing its dominant position. Having Edge updates tied to OS updates seems to be more of a problem than EdgeHTML itself, unless there are other issues (and there probably a…

Chrome and Chromium share the same engine, and for this stuff it is the engine that matters.

Re: Browsers

#215

Post by ken »

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…

> 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.

For me personally, multiple independent implementations is a stamp of approval. It means that Google can't just sit on the standards committee, build something behind closed doors, and ship it, even if the result is open-source.

It means someone outside of that one company has to understand it, and be able to implement it. It can't be ridiculously complex, or have DOCX-style "just do what proprietary implementation X does" requirements. There has to be sufficient documentation. The implementations probably won't all have the same bugs -- I've heard avionics systems have multiple independent implementations for this very reason.

> Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows?

I fear it'll be more like Darwin. It's nice that XNU is "open source", perhaps, but nobody is taking advantage of this. I've never heard of anyone running XNU except as part of Apple's proprietary operating systems, and I've never heard of anyone forking it to run a custom version on their Apple hardware. I'm not even sure to what extent it's technically possible.

I would be much less worried if the single surviving browser engine were Gecko -- not because I think it's technically superior (I don't think it is), but because I trust Mozilla a lot more than I trust Google, or even Google+Microsoft. Mozilla is not good at design but they operate out in the open.

Re: Browsers

#216

Post by jki275 »

ken wrote: post #215
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…

> 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. For me personally, multiple independent implementations is a stamp of approval. It means that Google can't just sit on the standards committee, build something behind closed doors, and ship it, even if the result is o…

There used to be a BSD type distribution of Darwin. It's not been maintained in many years.

Seems like there's something called PureDarwin that's trying to do something with it now.

http://www.puredarwin.org/

Re: Browsers

#217

Post by cramforce »

JoshuaJB wrote: post #124
sonnyblarney wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

Counter anecdote: As a Google engineer it always seemed like Edge implemented the sparsest possible version of the web platform to make major Google products work–and literally nothing else. That works to launch the browser, but then basically any product change runs a chance to no longer fall into that sparse subset and break in a browser. If Edge had implemented a more robust set of features, it would have massively improved compatibility down the road.

Re: Browsers

#218

Post by technomage82 »

JoshuaJB wrote: post #124
sonnyblarney wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

didn't MS did the same thing in the past?

Re: Browsers

#219

Post by [deleted] »

JoshuaJB wrote: post #124
sonnyblarney wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

[deleted]

Re: Browsers

#220

Post by Mil0dV »

cramforce wrote: post #217
JoshuaJB wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

Counter anecdote: As a Google engineer it always seemed like Edge implemented the sparsest possible version of the web platform to make major Google products work–and literally nothing else. That works to launch the browser, but then basically any product change runs a chance to no longer fall into that sparse subset and break in a browser. If Edge had implemented a more robust set of features, it would have massivel…

Features like empty divs on top of video? Could be by accident ofc, but the entire story makes this unlikely.
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