Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing a new HTML element – welcome

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 234 posts

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

#201

Post by eridius »

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…

> From tabs, where the close button is on the wrong side (right)

Chrome does this.

> 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.

Chrome does this too.

> The whole UI looks and feels non-native.

Yep, that describes Chrome.

It sounds to me like you're a Safari user, since the things you're describing are things Safari does correctly. I'm a die-hard Safari user, and both Chrome and Firefox feel wrong to me. But Chrome feels even worse than Firefox does.

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

#202

Post by eridius »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #91
scarface74 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a nice and (irrelevant) statistic. No one targets a “global” audience with a website. If I’m targeting North America, Europe, or Japan, why do I care that a billion people in India use Android phones? Even in countries where iOS is a sliver of the overall population like China and India, if you want to reach the affluent population, you still need to target iOS users. How fast do you think someone creating a w…

North America is about the only significant market where iOS has a ton of market share, and the world is not North America. If you're targeting Europe, iOS has only 25% [1]. Not sure why you said Japan instead of Asia, but iOS market share there is less than 15%; even worse than it is worldwide [2]. People don't have their browser choices etched in stone, and Google's services are a powerful form of persuasion. If th…

"only" 25%? It's ok to ignore 25% of your users?

> If they work in Chrome but not other browsers, people will just switch to Chrome.

On iOS, Chrome is just a wrapper around WebKit. You can't ship third-party web rendering engines on iOS. So if Apple doesn't implement this tag for Safari, Chrome on iOS won't have it either.

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

#203

Post by comex »

mcguire wrote: post #191
module0000 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Chrome, you also get Chromium, and the ability to see inside(and contribute!) to development. This did not exist in the IE-dominated era. Link to chromium dev: https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

Out of curiosity, how much flows from Chromium to Chrome, compared to vice-versa?

Chrome is basically a distribution of Chromium; there are some extra bits added like DRM, but otherwise it's built straight from the Chromium tree. It's not like Android, where there's a private repo that occasionally gets thrown over the wall in the form of AOSP.

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

#204

Post by tannhaeuser »

jfk13 wrote: post #169
tannhaeuser wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML parsing is not that hard compared to CSS/layout/fonts (or even figuring out layout), a competitive JavaScript engine, and the myriad of APIs and site compatibility problems OP talked about. My HTML parser uses SGML which is more generic as it takes the HTML grammar (a DTD) as parameter and computes state machine tables etc. dynamically based on it, thus a bit harder, but still very much doable.

Does that HTML parser follow all the HTML5 parsing/error-handling rules, so that it conforms to the spec's behavior for random tag soup full of broken markup? Or are you assuming "clean" HTML?

No, it follows the normative description of HTML as specified in chapter 4 of the HTML spec. The redundant procedural spec for parsing HTML is strictly aimed at browser implementers, and in particular to reach same behaviour accross browsers in the presence of errors. Note that the covered fragment still contains the rich tag omission/inference rules for HTML and other minute details, based on formal SGML techniques, though.

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

#205

Post by mwcampbell »

nonbirithm wrote: post #157
JoshTriplett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "table.sort"

Just curious, are you developing in Lua? That would be my guess from that string.

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

#206

Post by OnlyOneCannolo »

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?

Simply put: There's too much of it.

Chrome is dead simple, minimal, and predictable. When I want something, I look in the one menu. Firefox, on the other hand, has multiple bars, multiple menus, sidebars, icons plus text. It's too much.

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

#207

Post by OnlyOneCannolo »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #44
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.

Not sure how legit this is, I'm with another commenter, I don't care for the Chrome UI but maybe this might help: https://gist.github.com/tjespe/aeb514aaff6f4ca4d97afe476e360... Looks like somebody updated the Firefox Quantum UI to look more like Chrome.

Interesting, but it requires adding a file to your machine. I'm constantly on different machines. Being able to log in, get all my info and settings, and then log out leaving the machine in its original state is invaluable to me.

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

#208

Post by DCoder »

packet_nerd wrote: post #105
tannhaeuser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I keep seeing this come up, that it's practically impossible to write a brand new browser. This got me thinking, what would it take to make a better browser? A browser is something that 1 out of every 2 people on earth [1] use frequently. That's a lot of people! All developers in the world use a browser. Lots of them really believe in open software. Some are 10x developers. A certain percentage are literal geniuses.…

> What would it take?

All the developers in the world combined can not solve a legal problem. You can't implement technologies like Widevine without a license, and if they simply won't give you one [0], you're dead in the water.

[0]: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

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

#209

Post by Too »

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…

Feature creep seems to be a common failure of many standards. Bluetooth or usb-c to name some others.

World is missing a standard, a good and lean one is created, multiple vendors implement it, there's an initial year of minor incompatibilities but otherwise all is gold and glory, everybody loves the standard. Standard becomes immensely popular so everything supports the standard and worse - the standard starts supporting everything because every vendor just has this one small extension they want to add. After adding thousands of such extensions, suddenly the standard isn't so lean anymore. Now the spec isn't just a single RFC that can be read over lunch. It's a whole collection of documents with thousands of pages, appendices, mandatory extensions and compatibility tests. You need few people employed just to keep up with organizing the documentation. Vendor implementations start becoming incompatible because of too high complexity. Only a few big players manage to stay afloat and they probably like it that way because it raises the barrier to entry and they get to keep their position.

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

#210

Post by eitland »

notus wrote: post #136
m0nty wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome is the new IE Some software houses who supply the company I work for, are refusing to work with anything but Chrome. So it really does seem like the bad old days all over again.

It is nothing remotely like the bad old days. I'm assuming you never had to support IE6.

I had to and I understand fully well what GP means:

Yes, Chrome is a better browser than IE 6 was, but getting everybody on a team, on every team to test cross browser compability is starting to get hard.

We're now seeing otherwise great developers who more or less openly admit they don't test in other browsers.

I call them out on it. It is unprofessional.

We've fought to get where we was a few years ago, where every modern browser was considered equal.

Don't let any web developer get away with Chrome only!

Post reply on HN