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Google's playing the closed-open game again, this time with HTML5

extremetech.com

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Re: Google's playing the closed-open game again, this time with HTML5

#11

Post by jawns »

Funnnny wrote: post #6
jawns wrote: post #2

I tried to trick it with User Agent Switcher, but no go. It's not just examining the user agent -- it's looking for window.chrome, too. Having watched the video and the word-spelling at the end, there's nothing about this sort of content that strikes me as stuff that can't be done in other browsers. And isn't that supposed to be the point of experiments like this? Google should be showing us stuff that can't be done…

Google showed that this is Chrome showcase, a Chrome experiment, isn't that clear ?

Oh, they certainly have a right to call it a Chrome experiment, but the question is: What unique thing about Chrome are they trying to show off in this "experiment"?

Google could just as easily call ...

    
Hello world!
... a Chrome experiment, but that's not going to make me switch from Firefox.

Re: Google's playing the closed-open game again, this time with HTML5

#13

Post by angryasian »

mrpollo wrote: post #10

It is clear to me that this is a Google Chrome Experiment, from their labs, and that they did not had any intention of it working on any other browser but i got curious... i was doing some research on it and they appear to be using sync xhr calls which causes FF to hiccup even after all this time. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383304 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313646 they are marked a…

this article is written with the obvious intention of bashing google, the writer didn't even do his research because honeycomb 3.2 source is available.

Re: Google's playing the closed-open game again, this time with HTML5

#17

Post by ZoFreX »

Disappointing article, given all the other ways in which Chrome is harming the web. Example: There's a bug on a site I made in Chrome. It is categorically incorrect behaviour on the part of Chrome, it breaks the specs in order to be faster. How do I fix the bug? By calling a proprietary interface in Javascript that only exists in Chrome. Yup, that's right - to make my standards-compliant web page work, I have to do browser-specific stuff for Chrome. It actually works fine in Internet Explorer 9, and has no IE9 (or 8 or 7) specific code in it. This is actually the second time that Chrome has been the stand-out browser for causing issues when building a site (unless you count Opera - I don't).

Re: Google's playing the closed-open game again, this time with HTML5

#18

Post by jannes »

cageface wrote: post #16

Ironically this article is presented in yet another degraded "iPad" interface I had to break out of to actually read the article.

I can't agree more with you. I hate these stupid iPad-optimized themes which in reality make the reading experience worse.

Why would anyone prefer faked scrolling or faked pagination (that's what this theme does) over the perfectly good native scrolling? I simply don't get it.

The cause seem to be these guys: http://onswipe.com/

They created this theme which seems to have infected half of the web's wordpress blogs. I wonder if any of those guys who install this theme on their blogs actually have an iPad.

Re: Google's playing the closed-open game again, this time with HTML5

#19

Post by pornel »

andybak wrote: post #3

It's quite possible that there's a valid technical reason for this. Codec usage? Something bleeding edge to do with HTML5 Audio? A slightly crappy but plausible reason is that they didn't want the extra hassle of cross-browser testing and pool of browsers capable of running this was pretty small.

Whatever the reason, the implementation is broken — it sniffs User-Agent and blocks everything else than Chrome.

If I change Chrome's User-Agent string to Safari, then this site blocks even Chrome:

http://yfrog.com/z/kh1rylsqj

Re: Google's playing the closed-open game again, this time with HTML5

#20

Post by pornel »

mrpollo wrote: post #10

It is clear to me that this is a Google Chrome Experiment, from their labs, and that they did not had any intention of it working on any other browser but i got curious... i was doing some research on it and they appear to be using sync xhr calls which causes FF to hiccup even after all this time. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383304 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313646 they are marked a…

That would explain blocking of Firefox, but they're blocking Safari and WebKit nightly and... everything else that doesn't have "Chrome" in User-Agent string: http://yfrog.com/z/kh1rylsqj
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