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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

#511
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…

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you have Firefox unload old tabs?

I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.

Try Auto Tab Discard. I've been using it for years to good effect and I'm one of those crazy people with thousands of tabs open.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari was always behind on Web specs that could replace apps in the app store. It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :) - Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives - Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)

People have been making this tired argument for literally over a decade. Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are. So no there is no conspiracy by Apple…

What's the chicken and what's the egg?

Did apple go for web apps before or after the app store?

Note: PWA's were after the app store fyi and I mostly use the web, not apps.

In comparison, there aren't many SAAS with apps, eg. Azure, AWS Portal, ...

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

#514
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…

As many others have mentioned, Safari is worse. It restricted content blocking to not support uBlock Origin many years ago, and it has already deployed remote attestation. On top of that, it is behind on support for APIs that people want, and those that it has implemented are often riddled with bugs, which are fixed slowly if ever. Firefox is a reasonable alternative.

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

#515
post #369
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…

>you couldn't just download Firefox ... Apple hasn't done that Apple has banned any browser engine except Safari from iOS.

Would that not mean you can't install any browser other than Safari? Because I'm running Firefox right now on iOS. Or does "ban" mean something else in this context?

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

#516
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 different things to different people. To developers, IE was the browser for which you had to spend hours debugging issues. Sounds like Safari to me. Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was. (Sent from my Safari browser)

You can run linux builds of WebKit, which should be enough to debug Safari rendering issues: https://webkit.org/downloads/

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

#517
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's the ecosystem. I like my desktop browser syncing with my Android browser, and I really like built in chromecast support in my browser. I know that Firefox has a mobile version with sync, but last time I tried it, I didn't care for it. I know there have been some attempts to bring chromecast support to Firefox via extensions, but last I tried it it was very buggy. But it's been many years since I tried eit…

Honestly Firefox is the biggest thing I miss on Android since switching to iOS. It supports uBlock Origin which makes mobile browsing so much nicer. I haven't found a better mobile web experience on iOS yet.

Agreed - I ended up switching to Safari. If Apple ends up allowing other browser engines (as rumoured) then I’d happily switch back to Firefox.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gradients could be done via base64 css if you triggered the Outlook rendering engine under the hood. ;)

Haha, I don't think I ever used that trick but on a number of projects I know I dropped in a `generateGradient.php`-type file that had it's output cached so that in CSS we could just do `background: url(/generateGradient.php?start=XXXXXX&end=XXXXXX)` (and maybe some other params as time went on) to make changes easier.

https://rymc.io/blog/2010/you-got-your-base64-in-my-css/

If you want a time travel portal this morning. ;)

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

#519
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once upon a time Lineage OS had Privacy Guard settings. You could feed an app fake data for things like location and contacts, leaving you with the best of both worlds: apps that "require" location will open, but you remain anonymous. Over time, AOSP became harder and harder to build this feature back in to. AOSP (and Chromium) is Open Source in name only. One may view, download, and build the source, but maintaining…

There was no intention by Google to go after forks with the changes they made that made Privacy Guard difficult to maintain, and in fact I believe it was because they added their own version of it. What could you do with Privacy Guard that you can't now with Permission Hub? I'm using Lineage right now and I have full control over all perms for all apps including network access.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so shortly after WEI goes live in Chrome, Brave users won't be able to: - use youtube - watch "premium" video content (disney/netflix/...) - use online banking - visit sites with adwords and will be presented with endless captchas on e.g. cloudflare sites

Yes and? How does that contradict my original point?

it doesn't

but you're missing the entire point

if brave doesn't implement WEI then brave ceases to be a functional web browser

it will have voluntarily removed itself from the market

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