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

#341

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

onurcel wrote: post #159

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…

To be accurate, IE was not hated by "end-users". It was hated by web developers (understandably) reluctant to support non-standard apis and by informed people.

If the API was used by 90%+ of the internet, then it was the standard.

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

#342

Post by err4nt » 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.

Punishing users for the browser they use when it can render the site perfectly fine is so hostile. They may not even have the choice of browser installed on the machine they use.

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

#343

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

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #165

phpnode wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)

I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.

Ya, if I was told correctly by management at the time, Microsoft’s first large scale layoff (that would layoff people without perf reasons) was in the 2008. They actually moved a bunch of IE KLTO to China by the mid 2000s, and then took it back to Redmond in 2009/2010 when they realized chrome and Firefox were kicking their butts.

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

#344

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

smcleod wrote: post #320

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.

IE was hated for being unreliable, lax on security and lacking in modern features. Safari / WebKit is incredibly performant and reliable with a modern feature set. Personally I’m not a fan of the UI but I guess it gets the job done.

I said "also hated", as in "in addition".

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

#345

Post by mattferderer » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:25 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…

IE was super strict on the standards it seemed. Can't remember the specifics anymore but it seemed something would work in CSS or JS on Chrome but not IE. Then I would look up & IE was correct but Chrome was adding features that made sense & made life easier.

When TypeScript came out the type support was what made me become a very early & passionate adopter even though it was very bleeding edge & a pain to use with other libraries. The cuts were worth it because they always saved much greater pain later. It was also an easier sell than something like Elm.

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

#346

Post by lesuorac » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:25 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #332

spoiler wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Flash would like a word with you.

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

#347

Post by mrtksn » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:27 PM UTC

lesuorac wrote: post #346

mrtksn wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use it's dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff. Flash would like a word with you.

Flash died due to its own sins. Apple never had a dominant marketshare to do that, Apple simply did not let that crap on its mobile platform which had %0 marketshare when that happened. Then the open web standards that can do most of the stuff that Flash was used for took over.

Google tried to support Flash, even it was listed as Android's "strength" over iOS but the tech that came to handle the most use cases of Flash was much superior and it killed Flash on desktop too.

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

#348

Post by troupo » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:28 PM UTC

devwastaken wrote: post #337

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.

Strange then that I use it with ad blockers both on MacOS and iOS.

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

#349

Post by mattferderer » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #117

wongarsu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Probably had more to do with the DoJ antitrust suit than the dot com crash. Microsoft approached anything that sniffed of antitrust violations with trepidation for a good 5-7 years. But yes, ultimately a good thing.

Yes, this is often forgotten. I've always assumed it's the biggest reason for Microsoft basically doing less & being more or a cash cow during the Ballmer years (similar to Apple's current philosophy with a CFO as CEO).

Though the phone fail was a huge fail. Those initial Windows phones were really awesome. These were the ones that competed with Blackberry before Apple took over the market.

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

#350

Post by LinuxBender » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC

j1elo wrote: post #315

Firefox had been underperforming during part of its life, but deep internal improvements meant those days are over. There is a huge difference in memory and CPU usage between older Firefox and the one we have today. Sadly, lots of people still think that Firefox never changed. I did a quick memory usage test, just for having my personal anecdote and some numbers to show. The result was that Firefox uses an average of…

An additional test that may be worth trying out is BrowserBench [1] Varies heavily by computer specs. My daily driver is an ancient PC running Linux still fast enough for me but my newer mini-PC's leave this old thing in the dust regardless of what browser I use.

[1] - https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/