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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

#541

Post by WorldMaker »

masfuerte wrote: post #195
lmm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standards were never the real problem; they were always a joke. I don't think Netscape/Mozilla ever once changed their behaviour to match a standard; rather the standards "committee" was in their pocket for some reason, and would rubber-stamp any proposal from their side no matter how stupid, from the box model onwards. Every "standard" from 4.0 onwards was a step backwards; eventually they approved enough pointless…

There is some truth in this. IE had a box model a bit like TeX's. Divs stacked inline and spans sat side by side so you easily make very sophisticated layouts. Navigator's box model was dumb as a rock in comparison. Divs started a new vertical context like they do now. So Navigator's model was standardised as the lowest common denominator. It would have been pretty much impossible at the time to retrofit IE's model i…

It's also useful to note that much of what people loved about the IE box model got immortalized into the standards as box-sizing: border-box. That bit of "required" boilerplate in almost every "Reset CSS" and CSS framework is a forever ode to IE had an easier box model to design with, and now it's the "opt-in standard" that most wild CSS opts in to.

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

#542

Post by WorldMaker »

Takennickname wrote: post #535
profmonocle wrote: post #311

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…

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)

Brave is a Chrome fork. It's not countering the Blink hegemony like Safari or Firefox.

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

#543

Post by WorldMaker »

mixedCase wrote: post #309
SanderSantema wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point isn’t necessarily to not use chrome but to use something not based on chromium in general, which brave is, e.g. Firefox or Safari.

That's not really the point. The point is to take away control from Google's user-hostile decision making, and that's a good chunk of the value proposition of Brave as a fork/patchset.

Some of Google's user-hostile decision making is backed by marketshare data. "This is what users really want, they trust us," Google says pointing to how massive Blink marketshare is. That is a cudgel they use in the standards processes and in disagreements with Apple and Mozilla that they have the most users. Brave contributes to those user counts and Google's outsized voice in the market and in the standards processes. It's great that Brave tries its best to turn off the worst things Google is doing in their fork/patchset, but they are still complicit in Google doing some of that in the first place by contributing to the marketshare of "Google's browser".

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

#544

Post by WorldMaker »

sph wrote: post #229
hliyan wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend: 1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones) 2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) 3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto) 4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)

Edge is just marginally better than Chrome as they do not yet have the hegemony on the web. But that is the end goal of Microsoft. I struggle to understand how you might skip Firefox because it was a hog in the past (it's free to try. It's been fine for years.), but are ready to jump in the loving embrace of another known bad, if not worse, actor. To me "I'm being spied constantly and my data is being sold for profit…

I don't think Edge is looking for hegemony in the web at this point. Chromium-based Edge is marketed like Brave but with more "Corporate" friendliness. Edge is Microsoft barely holding to a legitimate toehold in web standards processes, with a skeleton crew as small as possible of developers. This Edge looks like the late stages of IE6: Microsoft has to ship a browser with Windows, because browsers are an important part of every OS, doesn't want to cede control to someone else's brand so needed to rebrand a "white label product" (and Chromium is now the largest "white label" for better and a lot worse), but overall got tired of paying for development staff on a money losing "product" and wants to focus on products that actually bring in revenue. (Which is also why Edge is the noisy home of coupon products and all of Microsoft consumer AI ambitions and so forth. You can see that's stuff making the company money, so that's why they are putting the most work into that kind of stuff.)

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

#545

Post by bunga-bunga »

joshstrange wrote: post #286
bunga-bunga wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Microsoft did not sell computers and did not sue anyone trying to run their OS on non-Microsoft hardware. Safari can only be run on Apple machines manufactured by Apple.

Aside from selling hackintosh computers I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Apple going after someone for running macOS on third party hardware or running it virtualized. If you try to make a business out of it they will come after you but they are going after developers. Nowadays something like BrowserStack feels like a requirement anyways since I’ll never have all the devices I need to test.

You’re missing the point. Just because you can “pirate it” and not have the FBI at your doorstep it doesn’t mean Apple is faultless.

Also Browserstack is still using Apple devices and you have to pay for them.

These are all unnecessary justifications for the new IE

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

#546

Post by Pannoniae »

magicalhippo wrote: post #225
hliyan wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend: 1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones) 2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) 3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto) 4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)

> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.

You can disable (almost) all of that. My FF only has 3 processes overall. Needed shittons of about:config tweaking to achieve it and it's probably not security best practices:tm: but hey, it works and my browser stops eating all the RAM.

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

#547

Post by bawolff »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #143
bawolff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is weirdly obsessed with jpeg-xl. The logic for removing it totally made sense.

There's nothing weird about the obsession. It's the most technically impresive format so far.

There's more that goes into a product decision than technical superiority.

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

#548

Post by nerdix »

helloooooooo wrote: post #180
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…

Do end users hate Chrome? Or is this just the perspective bias of the crowds that frequent HN? It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.

Its pretty clear that isn't the case since there are viable alternatives and people have to go out of their way to install Chrome to begin with. If most people hated it, they would just install Firefox instead (or use Edge or Safari)

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

#549

Post by kingrazor »

depressedpanda wrote: post #522
kingrazor wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If your point is that you can run a Webkit-based browser branded as Firefox, you are correct. However, it's not using Gecko, so it's not actually Firefox. It's a browser whose web capabilities are controlled by Apple rather than Mozilla.

Interesting! I was not aware of this.

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

#550

Post by pertymcpert »

horsawlarway wrote: post #422
mrtksn wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please point me to the halves of the web which are divided by Apple.

https://www.apple.com/app-store/

So that's a website, but if you look at the URL, it's on the apple.com domain name. So that doesn't really count as "the web".

The "App Store" might look like a website to you but it's actually what we call a "native" app, which means that it's not a website at all but a computer program that runs on your iPhone if you have one.

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