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

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

#461

Post by noisem4ker »

consentreality wrote: post #336
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 do…

My solution for managing profiles consists of keeping a pinned tab pointing to "about:profiles". From there, I can launch any other profile in parallel to the current browser instance by clicking on its "Launch profile in new browser" button.

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

#462

Post by toastal »

dvtkrlbs wrote: post #319
toastal wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is big enough to have its own bureaucracy & infighting for this to easily & plausibly happen.

I think AVIF format had a play in this whole ordeal.

It’s a shame too because it takes a lot more resources to encode & can often give results that are too smooth. JPEG XL offers a lot of features from years of other formats like FLIF that never quite made it over the hump. You know you’re making deafened decisions when Facebook+Adobe were on the same side as GIMP+Krita in pleading to get the format back.

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

#463

Post by account42 »

reilnin wrote: post #155
nathan_phoenix wrote: post #47

Expected a huge list and there's only 3 items there, and one of them, JPEG XL, is kinda moot because it didn't seem viable until recently after Safari started supporting it... Feel that the list could have had much more substance with the addition of webUSB, webSerial and such features which Chrome just strong armed. In the current form the list and toot don't really drive the point home...

WebUSB is pretty useful though, I know people who've used it to control all sorts of devices in an easily accessible way. Google themselves use it for updating Android devices, via making an ADB connection from their update webpage. I don't see how it could be classified as hostile, as it's adding a feature rather than taking features away.

Very cool, let's train users to give websites root access to their devices.

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

#464

Post by jonsneyers »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #85
detuur wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was/is a very well thought-out format that had a lot of industry signalling they were willing or even enthusiastic about supporting it, which happens virtually never for new image formats. All the major browsers were working on support, many image processing pipelines were being updated. Everyone agreed that it was not just a major improvement, but actually the best option out of all the contenders out there. Even…

A possible reason might be some patents owned by Microsoft: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/ That's also a good reason for others to drop support until licensing of these patents is clarified.

Those Microsoft patents are not relevant for JPEG XL. Their licensing is therefore also not relevant for JPEG XL.

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

#465

Post by dangerwill »

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…

I use Firefox at home, but my work (large company) has standardized on everyone using Chrome to the point of writing custom Chrome extensions. So at work I use Chrome because it is essentially required. I wonder how many enterprise workers are in the same boat, even just due to security folks wanting to focus on a single browser and thus getting the company to mandate the use of Chrome.

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

#466

Post by toastal »

account42 wrote: post #403

> stop using #Chromium / #GoogleChrome and use #Firefox or #Epiphany > * The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/chrome Remind me, does Firefox support JPEG XL?

It’s behind a flag for Nightly. Some Fx forks like LibreWolf allow enabling it even not on Nightly.

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

#467

Post by jonsneyers »

Thaxll wrote: post #299

The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL. Well no one else is supporting or using that format, how come it is a sabotage?

If you read the Chromium bugtracker comments (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...) and see the messages of support from e.g. Facebook, Adobe, Intel, VESA, Krita, etc then I think it is quite clear that "no one else is supporting that format" is not quite a correct assessment of the situation.

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

#469

Post by insanitybit »

danparsonson wrote: post #427
insanitybit wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any concerns about Google's CEO's salary ($226 million) or failed products ( https://killedbygoogle.com/ )? The question here isn't "is Google's CEO bad?" it's "Should I be using Firefox on the assumption that it will help create a 'free' web?". I don't care about anyone else's salary. And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant.

> 4. Every initiative Mozilla has come out with has completely failed to gain traction. ... > And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant. It's quite hard to take your ideological stance seriously.

OK I don't know why this is hard to understand.

1. I use Chrome because Chrome works best for me

2. People are proposing I use Firefox because Firefox has a mission that people want to align with

3. Firefox has terrible leadership and can not execute on their mission, I am not switching browsers to one that's run by an utter failure unless they either build a much better browser or they fire the fool who has put them in this position

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

#470

Post by hammycheesy »

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…

I've been wanting to switch to Firefox for a while, but there is a single bug I filed ~6 years ago [1] that has prevented me from making the leap. I've always wanted to investigate and see if I can pull a fix together but haven't been able to find the activation energy to get a dev environment set up to do so.

The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423768

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