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Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

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Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#111

Post by josteink »

todd3834 wrote: post #64
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

It seems like more and more, Google is leveraging their near-monopoly on web browsing to just skip the proposal process and do whatever they want without discussion.

That’s exactly what I would do in the same shoes I think. Proposals are cool and I understand why it is better for an open web etc… but getting features immediately is pretty cool too.

But then they only work in one browser and that is massively uncool.

So yeah, standards please. And not Googley “Comments? What do you mean ‘comments’? We’ve already shipped this and we’re not changing it, so you better follow suit”-standards.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#112

Post by Lorkki »

dannyr wrote: post #35
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

It seems like more and more, Google is leveraging their near-monopoly on web browsing to just skip the proposal process and do whatever they want without discussion.

I agree with you on Google's monopoly but imagine if every browser has to go through proposal process to release any feature? Everything will just stagnate. Browsers copy features from each other. If this is a useful feature, it would make its way to other browsers pretty soon.

It sounds not unlike what used to be the role of W3C before HTML5. Everything stagnated, while Microsoft with IE largely did not care, and everyone ended up making their pages in Flash because it was the only really consistent target.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#113

Post by xg15 »

SquareWheel wrote: post #52
adrianN wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stagnation is not always bad. For one, it helps keep complexity down. We're at a point where building a browser is impossible unless you have literally millions and millions of dollars to invest. That is not good.

If building from scratch maybe, but when was the last time a browser was built from scratch? Even Chromium was forked from WebKit.

Even if you fork, you'll still need constant investment to just keep it up-to date with the ever-evolving "living standard".

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#114

Post by xg15 »

SquareWheel wrote: post #65
misterman0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But since when is it a good thing that the last time someone managed to build a web render engine from scratch was thousands of years ago?

Hopefully Mozilla will have some luck modernizing by replacing pieces one at a time with Rust components. ;)

What do Firefox implementation details have to do with this?

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#115

Post by k_bx »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #106
gcb0 wrote: post #80

Real use case for this is so Google can poke into context for links shared via services they have no ownership. They got used to know exactly what people share and, much more importantly, what people click on email, thanks to gmail rewriting all links to a google track url (while misleading the user by a fake status text on mouse over). When they sum the info of 1. who send it, 2. who clicked on it, 3. what was the e…

> what people click on email, thanks to gmail rewriting all links to a google track url (while misleading the user by a fake status text on mouse over) They use the same trick for Google Search in a way that is transparent to the user - as long as you have JS turned on. When you switch it off, you realize instead of clicking on HNs URL, you actually click https://www.google.com/url?q=https://news.ycombinator.com/&s..…

This technique (redirecting through some dummy ?url=... page) is a common way of doing an external redirect on any service you're building. It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website, which is more secure to your data and the service you're building (e.g. Gmail).

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#116

Post by SquareWheel »

xg15 wrote: post #114
SquareWheel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully Mozilla will have some luck modernizing by replacing pieces one at a time with Rust components. ;)

What do Firefox implementation details have to do with this?

They are modernizing the browser by replacing pieces over time. That's relevant to the topic of browsers being built on legacy tech.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#117

Post by xg15 »

SquareWheel wrote: post #100
IshKebab wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's right. SPDY and WebP both started as Chrome-only features, and the world has essentially been forced to adopt them. So far I think that's been a good think on balance because they are good technologies. But it is worrying how much power Google has in this space.

SPDY was donated to the IETF for adoption into the HTTP/2 standard. Other browser vendors only implemented it at that time. WebP is a file format and doesn't fall into the normal standardization process. Browsers implement support for new file formats at their own behest.

Yes. After SPDY had already been implemented and shipped in Chrome.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#118

Post by xg15 »

SquareWheel wrote: post #116
xg15 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do Firefox implementation details have to do with this?

They are modernizing the browser by replacing pieces over time. That's relevant to the topic of browsers being built on legacy tech.

I don't see how this supports to the argument that you can easily build a new, competing browser by forking. If you fork and then need the same kind of resources to replyce the forked codebase with your own, I don't see what you'd win.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#119

Post by z3t4 »

k_bx wrote: post #115
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what people click on email, thanks to gmail rewriting all links to a google track url (while misleading the user by a fake status text on mouse over) They use the same trick for Google Search in a way that is transparent to the user - as long as you have JS turned on. When you switch it off, you realize instead of clicking on HNs URL, you actually click https://www.google.com/url?q=https://news.ycombinator.com/&s..…

This technique (redirecting through some dummy ?url=... page) is a common way of doing an external redirect on any service you're building. It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website, which is more secure to your data and the service you're building (e.g. Gmail).

But browsers seem to have stopped giving out referrer some years back.

Re: Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page

#120

Post by dmurray »

nerdponx wrote: post #89
gcb0 wrote: post #80

Real use case for this is so Google can poke into context for links shared via services they have no ownership. They got used to know exactly what people share and, much more importantly, what people click on email, thanks to gmail rewriting all links to a google track url (while misleading the user by a fake status text on mouse over). When they sum the info of 1. who send it, 2. who clicked on it, 3. what was the e…

It's a shame because it is actually a good idea, but now Google has first-mover advantage, so any other implementations will just be a clone of what Google already did.

Isn't that...better than every browser having an incompatible implementation of it, so Firefox users could only share links with Firefox users, etc?

I get the argument that it's better for these things to be done by consensus among the browser makers. Is it in scope for WHATWG?

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