51–60 of 84 posts
Also, I think web bundle can be a Electron replacement too for some use cases, so that some totally offline JavaScript webapp don't have to use Electron.
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Kind of. It is already be possible today to put ads into a page directly. But the benefit for Google would be that if they deliver the bundle, they would know that their ads are in there. Heck, they would know everything that is in there. So they would have full information about all ads and everything that is taking place on this new "web". Of course, they could also use the opportunity to hinder ad blockers further…
> But the benefit for Google would be that if they deliver the bundle, they would know that their ads are in there. Heck, they would know everything that is in there. Is this a problem for Google currently? 1. They already get loaded/notified for the ads themselves. Do they have a problem with sites claiming they're serving ads and not doing so? (Wouldn't those sites just not get paid?) 2. They'd be serving this in r…
They already get loaded/notified
for the ads themselves
A simple text or image in the website would currently not be tracked by Google. But if they deliver it, they can track it.
Yet another thing Google wants to fix by serving everything through their servers instead of asking devs to fix their owns sites. Same problem with AMP. Instead of asking news sites to fix their slow pages, it forced them through AMP by promising better result ranking. Ask them to make their sites faster within a month or say they'll get booted off search. You'll be surprised at how fast they comply
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The real world problem web bundles solve is distributed caching. Right now sites have pick one or a few CDNs and have a trust relationship with them and allow them to impersonate your site. Web bundles changes this relationship so that anyone can cache sites if it benefits them to do so. If you share a link on Twitter or Facebook or Discord or Slack they can cache the page on their servers and deliver it through the…
This feels contrived. Rarely do I, as a brand or content creator, want it circulating without my control. It doesn’t make business sense.
It's a file format, there will be lots of uses.
Fyi... Web Bundles and Signed HTTP Exchanges are confusing topics so I think it's worth reading 2 previous threads with comments from 2 Google employees (spankalee, jefftk) [1]. One may still choose to discount their explanations because they may be biased sources but I still think everyone should try to understand what they're saying. Hopefully, being familiar with the technical details will elevate the discussion s…
> Hopefully, being familiar with the technical details will elevate the discussion so people who disagree can point out specific and concrete technical flaws Asserting that an elevated discussion should center only on technical flaws and disagreements is a myopic way to look at a topic. There’s more to the web than the technology used to power it. How a technology is used, and what it enables (good or bad) is an appr…
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> Hopefully, being familiar with the technical details will elevate the discussion so people who disagree can point out specific and concrete technical flaws Asserting that an elevated discussion should center only on technical flaws and disagreements is a myopic way to look at a topic. There’s more to the web than the technology used to power it. How a technology is used, and what it enables (good or bad) is an appr…
I think you misunderstood the point you were replying to. The idea is that you can’t really have a discussion about what it enables or how it’s used unless you already understand the technical details. And that shows as a lot of the comments/blog posts about this topic are using underlying technical assumptions that are entirely incorrect.
> so people who disagree can point out specific and concrete technical flaws
That’s the basis of my reply. I think you have a good point; but it isn’t what the parent said.
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Because of CDNs the delivery was never all that private to begin with.
CDNs are a known commodity with business relationships. You can’t have an unknown CDN in the mix. They are an extension of your infrastructure and you can control if they are or aren’t in the path of control. They key here is that there is also a legal and business relationship.
Fyi... Web Bundles and Signed HTTP Exchanges are confusing topics so I think it's worth reading 2 previous threads with comments from 2 Google employees (spankalee, jefftk) [1]. One may still choose to discount their explanations because they may be biased sources but I still think everyone should try to understand what they're saying. Hopefully, being familiar with the technical details will elevate the discussion s…
> Hopefully, being familiar with the technical details will elevate the discussion so people who disagree can point out specific and concrete technical flaws Asserting that an elevated discussion should center only on technical flaws and disagreements is a myopic way to look at a topic. There’s more to the web than the technology used to power it. How a technology is used, and what it enables (good or bad) is an appr…
You misintepreted what I wrote. My comment did not restrict it to only technical flaws. I already agree with your following statement:
>How a technology is used, and what it enables (good or bad) is an appropriate topic for this forum and constitutes elevated discussion.
Yes. Having us share some armchair anthropology (which I do myself[1]) on the social or secondary effects of technology is constructive dialogue and elevated discussion. My comment was never trying to cut that off.
That said, just rehashing "Google is just trying to own the web!" or slight variations of that meme may feel good for the poster to type out but it does not educate me on this topic. This is especially degrading to the discussion if the poster restating that common sentiment has a mistaken mental model of what Web Bundles actually do or can't do. Instead, share some quality facts so I as a reader can come to the conclusion on my own that this technology forces unblockable ads and lets Google take over my web experience.
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Links on the page are the same as before signed, so the only actual problem with them is not being able to change/delete the documents hosted elsewhere immediately.
Yea, but the web server delivering them is now google. Google now gets the access logs and using the persistent tls socket can follow the users activity. Sure the content is signed, but the delivery is no longer private.
It doesn't seem like this would materially change the information Google receives. The status quo is that Google knows (via redirect links) what search results I click and when. It doesn't technically know what data the website will send me, but normally it's the same as Google's cached copy. It doesn't know what resources my browser will block, but in a bundle scenario, my browser is free to ignore resources even if they must be transmitted as part of a bundle.
> using the persistent tls socket can follow the users activity
Even if this caused browsers to keep idle sockets to Google alive more often, what information is there to be gained from an idle socket?
The massive control Chrome and Android gives them means they can do whatever they want already, but at least with a private platform they won’t have to fight people and deal with the negative PR of doing evil stuff. And then the rest of us who like privacy and competition and ad blockers can use the “legacy” web.