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

#331

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:18 PM UTC

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 lost because Microsoft thought they had won forever and stopped devoting resources to its development. By the time they reformed a team to improve it, it was too late. The reason we hate it is not the reason it became hated by most consumers.

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

#332

Post by mrtksn » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:19 PM UTC

spoiler wrote: post #246

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…

> Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE It wasn't because they had poor feature adoption. It was because they'd tend to adopt features in a way that's incompatible with other browsers (of the top of my head, handling of localStorage in private browsing). It was a bit of a "fuck you" to devs since you often had to do browser detection for Safari…

Apple probably have similar motives to MS when it comes to crippling the browser and enforcing its own rendering engine in iOS and that is to protects its app market.

However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff.

With the IE situation, you couldn't just download Firefox and live happy thereafter because every website was made to work in IE and any other browser would simply fail to display the webpages properly either due to the way HTML/CSS is handled or due to some proprietary technology. Apple hasn't done that, maybe only because its tiny marketshare compared to the alternatives but that's how it is. Unfortunately, due to the marketshare of Google Chrome, they can pull an IE and there are signs of it.

The hate towards Safari comes from the Web devs who are angry that they can't send push notifications and have to pay 99$ to Apple to embed their webpage into a WebView to pass as an app.

There's no much hate towards Safari in its userbase, it's by far the most convenient Web browser in Apple's ecosystem, by far the most battery efficient and the performance is top notch too.

Completely different situation with the tragedy of IE.

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

#333

Post by Dah00n » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:21 PM UTC

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.

I have used the internet since, well, since back when a 56k modem was a dream. I have had zero security incidents via a browser. On the other hand Google collect data on me 100% of the time I start a Chrome browser. "What if" versus "this actually happens" is the typical argument.

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

#334

Post by rvnx » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:21 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #104

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…

Also ActiveX, which brought a lot of "desktop only" capabilities to the web, at the cost of the ultimate lock-in. We should probably be glad that Microsoft basically stopped all IE investment when the dot-com crash happened (IE6 came out 2001), if they had kept investing the internet might still be dominated by MS

The lock-in is mostly because competitors were not good enough to implement a similar solution, not because of artificial restrictions.

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

#335

Post by jefftk » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:21 PM UTC

mrblampo wrote: post #322

Sounds like the thing about "ad blocker sabotage" is about replacing the Web Request API with something called declarativeNetRequest. I've been sifting through documentation but have had trouble seeing why this is any kind of a downgrade for ad blockers. Can someone explain?

It removes the ability to run custom logic to decide whether a net request should be allowed to go through, switching Chrome to a system like Safari's where you can only declaratively specify what you would like blocked.

While Google claims it is a change they are making for security and performance, a lot of people are worried that it is actually intended to make ad blocking harder.

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

#336

Post by consentreality » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:22 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. It's an important part of my workflow to have a separate profile for home/work/other, with history, bookmarks, etc. Container tabs are not a good replacement. Worse, I get irritated with the fact that Firefox fully supports this under the hood, but seems to push back against actually implementing a convenient way to use it.

I'm currently doing my yearly attempt to switch, using the Profile Switcher extension [0]. It works well enough, but requires external software running and I fully expect it to break eventually. I also can't open external links in anything but the default profile (vs Chrome opening in the profile most recently active, a nice convenience).

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

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

#337

Post by devwastaken » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:22 PM UTC

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 doesn't even support adblockers. It's a DOA browser.

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

#338

Post by throw_m239339 » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:23 PM 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…

> 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."

IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.

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

#339

Post by yomlica8 » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #16

Webmasters should really fight back and show annoying popups when the user agent equals Chrome. These popups could nudge the user towards e g. Firefox. Perhaps EFF.org could provide a reference implementation of such popups.

Some one suggested using the WEI API to block access to chrome. It wouldn't really work but it was amusing, until I realized the censorship potential of the whole thing on the world stage.

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

#340

Post by tatersolid » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

intellix wrote: post #26

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.

I wish Safari would stop breaking the web. Every new iOS version requires me to change how to handle scrolling and fight new position bugs for days/weeks

You shouldn’t be “handling scrolling” at all in your code, that’s the browser’s job. Sites which attempt to interfere with native scrolling have terrible user experience and often break accessibility tools like screen readers or magnifiers.