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

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

mastodon.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 602 posts

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

#261

Post by matwood »

bartread wrote: post #145
tommiegannert wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so. So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But…

In the 90s many things were only possible with ActiveX or Java Applets. ActiveX just had the nice side effect of only running on Windows and IE. But, it's important to remember browsers were much much less capable than they are today. I was writing 'webapps' and manipulating the dom and javascript was sloooow (on both IE or FF). One hack I did was have the server dynamically writing js code (instead of doing something on the client) and doing htmx like we see making a comeback today.

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

#262

Post by goku12 »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #202

Browser wars tend to get preachy at times and border on religious fanaticism. Chromium is free to fork. That's the only thing that matters. I'm not going to give up sweet convenience so that I can make a claim that am sticking it to the man. That's ridiculous.

> Chromium is free to fork. That's the only thing that matters.

Yet, we see browser after browser dropping their own engines and migrating to blink. The fact is, something being free to fork no longer means that it is practical to do so. These ostensibly open code bases are massive monoliths backed by morbidly bloated standards. It isn't practical for even big companies to fork and maintain. Aggravating this is the fact that these are developed primarily by just one company who rarely listens to its users and often silences them with CoC. Such code appear open, but not in spirit.

> Browser wars tend to get preachy at times and border on religious fanaticism.

> I'm not going to give up sweet convenience so that I can make a claim that am sticking it to the man. That's ridiculous.

People are calling for the use of any alternative due to an imminent threat to the open nature of the web. And yet, there are attempts like these to bill them as preachy and fanatic. It's not wrong to care about freedom! Convenience - if any (I don't feel inconvenienced on Firefox) - is no longer an excuse to neglect the seriously wrong turn the web has taken.

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

#263

Post by oblio »

INGSOCIALITE wrote: post #150
roenxi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software. If a project is too complex for a single organisation, then break it up into 2-3 projects. That is how OSS software handles complex tasks. Someone could do a real LLVM-style browser project then we don't have to use javascript which'd catapult us all into the 21st centu…

> What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software. This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.

Blame the OS vendors (Microsoft has 70% of the blame, Apple 25% and even Linux distro share a 5% amongst themselves).

They killed[1] cross platform apps and they made software updates hard, so everyone just flocked to the web.

[1] Not through a single blow, death by a million cuts.

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

#264

Post by lapcat »

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 sabotaged its own content blocking extensions long before Google did — uBlock Origin for Safari was killed years ago — and Safari also implemented web attestation before Chrome: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...

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

#265

Post by tomrod »

omgmajk wrote: post #209

* The "Manifest v3" sabotage of content blocking extensions: https://archive.is/i2vGD * The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL: https://archive.is/2ihEV * #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes: https://archive.is/S912x

> * #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes

What really blew my mind was how out of touch the dev guiding the WEI proposal is, in relation to how dangerous this implementation would be.

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

#266

Post by jwells89 »

joshstrange wrote: post #257
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…

I’ve been saying this for years (on HN and elsewhere). In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.

Additionally, Safari at least has the fundamentals in place — IE couldn’t even render transparent PNGs properly without Windows-specific filter trickery until around version 9 or so which was released in 2011, around a decade after Gecko based browsers, WebKit-based browsers, and even Microsoft’s own Tasman-based IE for Mac did.

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

#267

Post by ColonelPhantom »

sneak wrote: post #124
kramerger wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have all kinds of weird excuses for not using Firefox. Sometimes it feels like "Sure, Chrome sold my kids data to human traffickers. But I can't switch to Firefox because I really _need_ MIDI-2 over websocket support" Sure, FF is not perfect but a lot of issues is due to sites being optimised for webkit and that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.

Chrome is a lot more robust and secure against exploitation than Firefox is. This is a very unpopular fact, and every time I point it out the rabid Mozilla people get upset, despite it being the truth. I use Ungoogled Chromium.

Once upon a time that may have been a very hard to dispute thing, but I'm not so sure anymore.

For starters, recent Firefox versions do proper process isolation per domain, similar to Chrome, which has long been claimed to be the primary security benefit of Chrome-based browsers.

In addition, the Firefox codebase is partially rewritten in Rust. This effort is incomplete and likely always will be, but it's still significant. Keep in mind that according to Google, 70% of security vulnerabilities in Chrome are related to memory unsafety!

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

#268

Post by cubefox »

arp242 wrote: post #206
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…

The IE block model was better though, and everyone is using it today with box-sizing: border-box. I still maintain that the pragmatic and sensible thing to do was to just modify the standard – "best viewed in IE" was a self-inflicted wound. Also remember the context: Netscape was just as gung-ho with standards as IE and everyone was kind of figuring out what did and didn't work on the fly. To just ossify a standard a…

The standards are there for a reason (interoperability), so following them makes sense even if a browser vendor reasonably thinks it should have been done differently. If everyone just implemented what they think is best, no standard would be required in the first place.

Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.

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

#269

Post by blibble »

colordrops wrote: post #4
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?

Aa long as chromium is open source and various entities are able to build and remove/modify anti-user features, i don't see a problem with alternatives being a "skin". If Google makes moves to make it difficult to modify chromium then browser maintainers will quickly migrate to other engines.

WEI will make chromium effectively unusable

yes you'll have the source, but it won't remotely attest unless you're Google/MS

so it is effectively closed source

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

#270

Post by AndroidKitKat »

kvrck wrote: post #181
kmlx wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’ve been a happy safari user (desktop and mobile) for years now.

What adblock do you use with Safari? Last time I've tried, I couldn't find one and returned back to Firefox.

I've been using AdGuard and haven't seen a single ad since I installed it. AdGuard seems to offer a much of the same functionality from uBlock that I enjoyed, like being able to selectively block elements on the page, and choosing what filter lists I want. The only 'downside' is that I believe you have to pay for it, but I believe there is a free version that I use on my mother's MacBook.

AdGuard also offers a pi-hole-esque ad-blackhole that I deploy on my home network and it's got much better UX than pi-hole.

Post reply on HN