91–100 of 356 posts
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Microsoft exposed virtually all elements in the DOM. Netscape was extremely limited in this regard.
They also definitely advanced the CSS more than Netscape. modern DOM, Ajax, modern CSS, bunch of other small details of JS, all iirc came from IE.
The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with. We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web…
> It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable. A body of web standards that they lobbied for and to be in the form that they are...
As an example, Google holds 18 of 39 seats on the Web Assembly Working Group. This means that if they whip their seats, they only need 2 additional votes to pass anything.
1. Microsoft: MS was never interested (until it was far too late) in having a standards-compliant, performant browser. It was a spoiler move to keep people Windows dependent.
2. Mozilla: I honestly don't understand what Mozilla is doing other than raising top exec pay while Firefox users go down [1]. As best as I can tell, Mozilla is the Yelp in this situation. Yelp has spent over a decade extolling the evils of Google while doing absolutely nothing to improve their product. It's a great way to collect a fatter and fatter paycheck but you're ultimately doomed.
3. Apple: Safari has almost always been bound by its own ecosystem. It's dominant on iOS because you have no other choice (for now; you can install other browsers but they're still the Safari engine basically). A lot of people use it on MacOS. For a brief time there was a Windows port but it died. This doesn't seem like an area that Apple wants to compete in. I mean at the end of the day Safari and Chrome share a common Webkit lineage.
So I see a lot of failure, lack of prioritization, missed opportunities and finger-pointing in this space so is it any wonder that a massive engineering company has been able to dominate this space?
I don't see us repeating the IE6 era however. The Internet is core to Google's business in a way that it never was to Microsoft.
That being said, I think this is one area where government intervention may well be needed sooner rather than later. Google has (and continues to) use their properties to advance Chrome (IMHO) eg [2].
There can be a fine line between advancing the browser space and simply crippling your competitors.
[1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
[2]: https://mspoweruser.com/engineer-accuses-google-of-sabotagin...
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> There is no reasonable argument to make for a Chromium only web from anyone without vested interests. It could be just apathy towards choice. I've observed this behavior among GNOME advocates as well. Some of them would rather see GNOME as the only de facto choice for a desktop environment on Linux and considering how it's installed by default on most major distributions, those words and their effect aren't far fet…
In the case of GNOME it is not apathy towards choice but corporate backing. Companies that do business with Linux like Redhat, Canonical, will benefit greatly if the vast number of options that the Linux ecosystem has can be culled to a certain approved stack, at least on their supported platforms. Since they also employ or sponsor a large amount of development within the ecosystem, other players are left either to g…
That's what it looks like to me as well but whenever this is asserted, GNOME folks are quick to point out that they are understaffed and GNOME is a community project. I suppose we'll never know the reality.
> Despite being an even larger collection of s/w than GNOME and strongly supported by SuSE
I remember reading on HN that SuSE has people for GNOME developement but no one for KDE development. IIRC, they also ship with GNOME as the default choice.
> That shows the power of big corporate money's ability to take over even ostensibly "FOSS" software that's theoretically free but practically still dominated by a few companies
I've mentioned GNOME being similar to Android and Chromium in its nature of "look but don't touch" open source (unless you are part of their "community") but this hasn't been received well.
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You fail to mention that IE was closed source while Chromium is open source. That's a completely different situation. We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).
Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match. Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, mi…
That's where Firefox is right now, unfortunately.
Probably we have to start again with something different in the same way as the web replaced all the other protocols (gopher, usenet etc). I’m not what that looks like but it should be cleaner, simpler, open and blockchain-free.
Yes, I've been wanting something that's just a rich document but designed around accessibility with no styles or JavaScript.
If what you really want is to change what other people want you will stay disappointed.
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For what it's worth, there's Gemini. You can't really call it rich document though, as styling is left to the user consuming the content.
Well I don't want styling just document structure/description (eg. H1-8, Title, EM, P, IMG, Author, Article, Forum-Post, Search-Result) and yes I want images too so Gemini goes way too far my uses.
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You fail to mention that IE was closed source while Chromium is open source. That's a completely different situation. We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).
Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match. Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, mi…
Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different.
I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks....