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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome

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Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#151

Post by spankalee »

zaarn wrote: post #65
delta1 wrote: post #17

From the chromium forum: "Intent to Implement: Toast UI element" https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink...

>Firefox: No public signals >Edge: No public signals >Safari: No public signals >Web developers: Positive (previously expressed privately; we've encouraged them to make their interest public on the WICG thread) So basically, nobody at Google talked to anyone about this, asked only google engineers and then pushed those mentioned google engineers to make postive comments in the standards thread? And none of the other…

This is the start of the standards process. Intent to implement does not mean intent to ship, only that an engineer want to start writing some code. It's the public signal that the team is interested enough in this idea to prototype into the Chromium codebase, but it will be behind a flag.

The standardization process will undoubtedly change the shape of the thing altogether, or it could not even make it into the HTML spec.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#152

Post by edent »

jerf wrote: post #116

So, uh... fun web history time... this actually kinda existed. When Internet Explorer 4 or 5 was released, Microsoft was in full-on Embrace and Extend mode, on their way to Extinguish. One of the ways they tried to appeal to businesses (and one of the ways IE4/5-ish ended up being installed well past its best-by date in certain places) was a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (…

Wow! Thanks for the history. I remember Polly The Parrot - I think as part of an early MP3 player.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#153

Post by giancarlostoro »

reallydude wrote: post #147
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different... I'm old enough. It's not different. Chrome is the new IE.

> Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different... I'm old enough. People sharing your view, are agreeing with a broad assumption that isn't based in reality. Ironically, the Chrome has had to adopt from the other direction (webasm) and hasn't created much whole-cloth that other browsers have had to adopt...and developer's certainly aren't hambstringed by these small additions that make…

It's not just developers, just like Microsoft made web applications that only worked on IE (think Outlook.com and the introduction of AJAX) we've seen it here on HN all the time, they announce new products that are only known to work on Chrome initially. Some have even changed the user agent and it works on Firefox, so there's some old school Embrace Extend Extinguish nonsense going on from Google's end when they introduce new products.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#154

Post by solidasparagus »

sovande wrote: post #77
JoshTriplett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What aspect of the Firefox UI bothers you?

Not the OP, but I'll chip in with my $.02. I really want to like Firefox, but everything UI feels wrong (on macOS). From tabs, where the close button is on the wrong side (right) and if you click the + button to open a new tab the cursor ends up over the new tab, not over the + button so you can click again to open a new tab. The whole UI looks and feels non-native. Pressing ESC in full screen mode does not bring the…

I'm so confused. I'm on Chrome for mac right now and half of those things seem to not exist in Chrome either.

- The 'x' is on the right of every tab.

- When I press '+', the cursor ends up over the new tab - I cannot immediately click '+' again.

- Pressing esc does not do anything for full-screen mode.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#155

Post by iforgotpassword »

munk-a wrote: post #140
xeromal wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE6 was good until it wasn't anymore.

No, IE6 was far less terrible than IE4, but still amazingly awful. If was from the era of browsers where you had to essentially code up different copies of a page per-browser if you wanted any sort of graphical anything.

No you didn't. You had to code exactly one copy: for IE6. Nobody cared about anything else.

Just like nowadays more and more pages only get coded for chrome and might or might not work on Firefox.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#156

Post by interlocutor »

zaarn wrote: post #65
delta1 wrote: post #17

From the chromium forum: "Intent to Implement: Toast UI element" https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink...

>Firefox: No public signals >Edge: No public signals >Safari: No public signals >Web developers: Positive (previously expressed privately; we've encouraged them to make their interest public on the WICG thread) So basically, nobody at Google talked to anyone about this, asked only google engineers and then pushed those mentioned google engineers to make postive comments in the standards thread? And none of the other…

Public signal from Firefox: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1138980859728531456

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#157

Post by nonbirithm »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #38
OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.

What aspect of the Firefox UI bothers you?

The search bar in Firefox always assumes you're attempting to visit a URL if you type two words separated by a dot. It's incredibly frustrating trying to search things like "table.sort" and being redirected to a URL that doesn't resolve to anything and will almost certainly not for a while. Chrome doesn't have the same behavior (it ships with a list of valid TLDs). I get that you can work around it easily by typing a space, but the habit is ingrained for me due to switching from Chrome and this alone makes me want to switch back, if not for the desire for Mozilla to succeed. There is a bug for this issue[0] which has been open for 5 years.

For FF mobile the UI is less convenient than Brave. In Brave the icons for adding a new tab and switching tabs are at the bottom of the screen, while in FF they're in a menu at the top. Because I use my phone in portrait mode I have to reach my thumb up to the menu every time to create or switch tabs. It's really tiresome and I use Brave instead due to this. Also, the URL bar on mobile FF has the 'X', but its behavior is completely different from Brave. It closes the bar entirely rather than clearing it. I also get that it's a thing to get used to after switching, but why not just delegate cancellation to the Android back button? (Could it be due to iOS?)

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1080682

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#158

Post by yitosda »

zaarn wrote: post #106
TeMPOraL wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new reality, what people were talking about for a while now. Google owns the web now, they do whatever they want with it - and what they want is primarily improving their advertising revenue.

Every time I mention that Chrome is the new IE, people on HN keep saying that it is not true because IE was bad and Chrome is good. Have these people and the google developers behind Chrome considerd that maybe they are the baddies ?

It was frequently said that /at the time of release/ ie6 was better and more standards compliant than the other web browsers. Then it was left to rot for years.

Perhaps notably, it was actually faster and had lower memory usage than Firefox for a while (Firefox had many leaks). The issues were security, standards and NO TABS!

... Honestly if MS hadn't been so unbelievably deaf to users and web developers, Firefox and Chrome may have never succeeded. If Google doesn't completely screw up, Chrome won't go the way of IE. Maybe messing with adblockers qualifies?

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#159

Post by SquareWheel »

moreira wrote: post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

>There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web

This is a shallow comment. IE was closed-source, cornered the market and then abandoned all development. They stalled the web for years.

Today all browser vendors are active in the standardization process, open or nearly open source, and collaborate heavily to implement the same features.

Any feature that "only works in X browser" is a result of one browser implementing a feature first, rather than the result of a browser monopoly. For instance prefers-color-scheme was introduced by Safari, than Firefox, and next to-be Chrome.

So yes, for a period of one to two months a site might have "worked best in Safari" as a result of this feature adoption. But drawing a parallel to a web dominated by IE6 is completely ignoring all context of the situation. It shows a complete misunderstanding of how the web has evolved.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#160

Post by jefftk »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #25
moreira wrote: post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-s…

> when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch

Firefox began as a version of the Netscape Suite stripped down to just the browser. The Gecko rendering engine long predates Firefox. No one has launched a full browser "from scratch" in nearly twenty years.

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