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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

#531

Post by mrguyorama »

mattferderer wrote: post #349
pydry wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft phones only died because they were bad at making an App store. Microsoft made the exact same mistake with the later Zune HD. Despite having a massively superior IMO experience for the user, Windows phone was doomed.

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

#532

Post by undersuit »

profmonocle wrote: post #311
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…

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…

>For me it's the ecosystem.

My laptop is a Chromebook.

I need to re-research how to get Linux on this thing.

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

#533

Post by mrguyorama »

oblio wrote: post #263
INGSOCIALITE wrote: post #150

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. 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.

>They killed[1] cross platform apps

No they didn't! Extremely lazy devs deciding that they should just be able to deploy javascript and html anywhere and using Electron "killed" native apps. Why would anyone ever invest even 1% more into a native app when you can just hire intern javascript kiddies, pay them terribly, oversee them with one or two expensive javascript bros, and all your users will blame the slowdown on the operating system and Microsoft as they always have?

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

#534

Post by tomrod »

bagacrap wrote: post #529
tomrod wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an economist -- I focus on incentives. What I see of the one bad^H^H^H clueless apple is that their incentive with WEI aligns with a monopolist's goal to vertically and horizontally integrate. Google has proven, time and again, that their "don't be evil" mantra is long out of sync with what a layperson would feel is evil. Hence, it makes sense to expect they will behave as any other company. Perhaps one thinks WE…

You are moving your own goalposts. You stated that you couldn't believe how out of touch a single dev was. Now you are claiming that Google as a company is acting in a certain way. And yet the feedback from higher ranking members of the Chrome/Blink team has been negative towards this proposal.

> You stated that you couldn't believe how out of touch a single dev was. Now you are claiming that Google as a company is acting in a certain way.

To the contrary. I stated this:

>> What I see of the one bad^H^H^H clueless apple is that their incentive with WEI aligns with a monopolist's goal to vertically and horizontally integrate.

Clearly, I see that the dev is out of touch with reality in a way that benefits Google's short-term profits without benefiting society at large, and my comment explains such at a higher level of discourse.

> And yet the feedback from higher ranking members of the Chrome/Blink team has been negative towards this proposal.

And thank all higher powers for your identified reasonability of more experienced, understanding devs working against their employer's short-term interests by publicly holding back the shit-storm that WEI would unleash.

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

#535

Post by Takennickname »

profmonocle wrote: post #311
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…

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…

Brave has all of that AND built in ad blocking on both desktop and mobile (which is why I switched. Mobile browsing is finally sane)

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

#536

Post by bjord »

k__ wrote: post #504
bjord wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right, just problematic people to lead their efforts (brendan eich)

Fair. On the other hand, didn't he start the whole thing after getting kicked out of Mozilla?

pretty much—according to wikipedia, he resigned, though apparently moz actually tried to keep him around (just not as CEO, his appointment as which flagged the donations initially)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

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

#537

Post by WorldMaker »

simondotau wrote: post #416
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…

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) Google is of course much smarter than Microsoft. Google avoids this by declaring everything Chrome does to be a standard. And then far from being criticised from departing from the standard, their competitors get criticised for not implementing whatever thing Chrome came up with yesterday.

That was what made IE dangerous: everything Microsoft did in IE was the standard for a bunch of years. They built things like XHR and the concept of "AJAX". The CSS model of IE was eventually enshrined as box-sizing: border-box, because designers loved it and it was easier to work with.

For many years in IE4/5/6 every browser was criticized for not supporting IE standards.

That's how IE6 got a huge marketshare and then kept that marketshare for far longer than it ever should have.

That's why those of us that remember browser history worry that Chrome is the new IE. It's defining the standards. It has crazy momentum behind it. People are (victim) blaming Safari and Firefox for not "keeping up with standards", even though the standards they aren't keeping up with are often things Google decided to do without finishing the standards process first. That's what IE did.

People remember the years after the interregnum of the web slowly cleaning up that mess. Of standards finally getting passed and IE being the one incompatible. They don't remember as well that IE was the problem child so much because it defined standards for years and that's what cemented its huge marketshare and inability to go away quietly when it came time to clean things up. Cleaning things up was so hard because it had defined so many standards. Worrying about "Chrome is the new IE" now is trying to prevent that mess from happening a second time.

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

#538

Post by oblio »

mrguyorama wrote: post #533
oblio wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>They killed[1] cross platform apps No they didn't! Extremely lazy devs deciding that they should just be able to deploy javascript and html anywhere and using Electron "killed" native apps. Why would anyone ever invest even 1% more into a native app when you can just hire intern javascript kiddies, pay them terribly, oversee them with one or two expensive javascript bros, and all your users will blame the slowdown o…

Native apps cost far more than just 1% over web apps.

I'd argue each native version costs about as much as an web app.

The real shame was Gtk and Qt not getting the support they deserve.

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

#539

Post by bjord »

k__ wrote: post #505
ohgodplsno wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're still beholden to Google. Their own repo is a set of patches that disable some features. For now, it's mostly feature flags being turned on/off. What happens when Google starts being more hostile and makes disabling features harder ? Can Brave have the manpower to disable that, forever? What if there's a new rendering engine that's 10 times faster but it's so intertwined with a restrictive API that you can't…

I'd expect them to have the skills to fork Blink.

not sure about the resources to support its development long-term, though

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

#540

Post by bjord »

ksey3 wrote: post #183
TheRoque wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a serious question about Brave. I would be glad to use it, but I am a bit scared of the fat that it is linked to a crypto (I didn't dive in the tokenomics, but maybe the team is driven by the money ? or other shady things ?), and also the fact that I go ads for this browser. Getting an ad for the browser make me question: what are their incentives ? Why would they invest money to attract people ? What is their…

I have the wallet/bat token stuff turned off. Its not even turned on when you install Brave. The main reason I moved to Brave is Firefox's bizarre updating model on Ubuntu which causes it to randomly shutdown all the time. Plus on Android, brave just blocks a ton off ads, that firefox doesn't without extensions and fiddling about.

I have it installed via flatpak (on Pop!_OS), which turns off auto-updates, and gives me full control over when updates happen
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