A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team • Hacker News Board

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#91

Post by amelius » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:17 AM UTC

camillomiller wrote: post #66

lodovic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: does the concept of a webmaster still exist in 2023? Sites are developed and built in dtap, deployed by gated processes, and in many instances nobody but the deployment agents have access to the actual production servers.

Maybe not, but you could be in a bit of a bubble regarding the average website deployment method. In my experience as a webdev most website are still very much deployed in a way that’s controllable by those who would put up such an alert. The problem is rather political. Any organization with a website relevant enough to make such a popup worthwhile would never agree to have such a popup alienating its largest share…

For large organizations, there are two ways to limit consequences for individual webdevs:

1. Get fingerprints of the browsers of your superiors (or simply use IP addresses), and don't show the popups on those browsers.

2. Let the script be hosted by a central authority (say eff.org), so they can activate it centrally and the popup appears on many websites at the same time, which will make you look less bad.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#92

Post by TheDong » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:19 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #76

Semaphor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Later, IE was also hated for being tied to the OS (which was related but different to the "not evolving"). Another thing Safari has. So yeah, I also fully agree. Safari is still the new IE.

The reason IE was hated for being tied in the OS was because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all, just because the OS provides a JS engine out of the box doesn't make it Windows Me grade.

> because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all

I mean, I've had iOS crash while using safari more often than I had windows 98 crash while using IE.

At least back in the IE days, when a user found a site they couldn't open in IE, they could go download firefox.

When a user encounters a websites that doesn't work on iOS safari, they can't download a different browser.

Even worse, when you report the bug to the site owner (say your friend), they'll then say "Oh, sorry, I don't own an iPhone or macbook, so I'd have to pay $800+ to reproduce your bug", while with IE, it ran on basically any computer, and I think windows back then still had a trial version you could use for free.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#93

Post by toastal » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:19 AM UTC

lol768 wrote: post #74

mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

Safari caused me by far the most issues, back when I was doing frontend in ~2017/2018, in terms of how it complied with web standards (I wasn't as fussed at the standards it didn't support - at least I knew!) and rendered the web application I was working on across desktop, iPad and iPhone. I spent more time chasing Safari bugs and rendering idiosyncrasies than I did dealing with IE11, frankly.

And bugfixes always took 6 months til the next OS update.

Holding back Notifications and other PWA-related specs left a sour taste to me because it meant I couldn’t build a PWA …but you could buy Apple hardware a developer license and make a native app (even if it was mostly CRUD).

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#94

Post by febusravenga » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:20 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #34

worrycue wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly Firefox is barely a hedge against Chrome. When it comes to things like JPEG-XL they are in lock step with Chrome. Safari ended up being JPEG-XL’s unlikely champion. I kind of wished Apple would release Safari for other platforms again.

HN is weirdly obsessed with jpeg-xl. The logic for removing it totally made sense.

true, I'm web fronted developer and I don't care ... more, I have no ida that there's some drama going on

let alone normal users

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#95

Post by cowsandmilk » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:21 AM UTC

tommiegannert wrote: post #64

mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs…

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much.

Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”.

The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions.

> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving

IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#96

Post by roenxi » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:23 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #81

mrtksn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when…

As crazy as that sounds, IE had a better development team until IE6 basically killed off its competition. It was more stable than equivalent browsers, it had more features, I think it was even developed faster than competitors. Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browse…

OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. The "problem" is that the browser projects are organised as big monoliths with limited internal competition for the components. Although it isn't really a problem yet. Chrome works fine, and switching web browsers isn't hard to do.

But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#97

Post by pferde » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:25 AM UTC

irthomasthomas wrote: post #17

Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow. But Brave browser is very snappy. It's the fastest chrome fork, and has great features, like vertical tabs, which have become essential to me.

Color me surprised, after having used firefox on linux exclusively for last twenty or so years. I think it's fast enough.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#98

Post by DrNosferatu » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:25 AM UTC

Switch to SerenityOS and use Ladybird ;)

(or build it for your favorite OS)

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#99

Post by SgtBaker » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:25 AM UTC

ksey3 wrote: post #7

dbish wrote: post #3

The problem is there are almost 0 alternatives beyond Firefox so if you don’t like their UX you’re stuck. All the “new” browsers are just chromium skins (edge, arc, etc.) Are there any real competitors building a new browser?

I have been using Brave for about a year. Dont miss Firefox or Chrome.

Brave is just a privacy scam. And it's also Chromium based

So you might as well be using Chrome.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#100

Post by hutzlibu » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:26 AM UTC

viscousviolin wrote: post #79

hutzlibu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads and tracking(called studies) enabled by default from the browser - and marketing itself as privacy orientated. "What features do you need that only Chromium can give you?" WebGPU and sone features with webworkers.

Oh interesting! Seems like a pretty specific requirement to have. Do you mind if I ask what you use those for? As for the tracking - I'm pretty sure Firefox blocks a lot of those by default, last time I checked it was plastered all across their homepage. It's not 100% effective, but if them making an effort to do the right thing pushes you away, you might be asking too much unfortunately. Building an entire browser t…

"Do you mind if I ask what you use those for?"

Game engine.

"As for the tracking - I'm pretty sure Firefox blocks a lot of those by default, last time I checked it was plastered all across their homepage"

And the thing is, that firefox itself is tracking you and sends that data home. Maybe look up what "studies" mean. But so far at least you can opt out of it, unlike with chrome.