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Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

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Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#31

Post by lucian1900 »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18
onemorepassword wrote: post #7

I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.

That ship sailed a long time ago. I see it as when they gave up on Friend Connect / OpenSocial as when they sort of gave up on the idea of open-first, and instead started focusing it competing feature-for-feature. Mozilla is the champion of the open web these days. Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is. And now Mozilla…

NaCl (in particular PNaCl) is merely a different approach. I would call asm.js crazy, but that's just me.

Something similar could be said about Dart, but there the language itself is not so interesting (merely not insane). The VM is potentially the language-independent bytecode and stdlib in a browser we've all been waiting for.

While Google have been behavin evil-ly lately, in particular related to Google+, NaCl and Dart are not examples of this.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#32

Post by michaelwww »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18
onemorepassword wrote: post #7

I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.

That ship sailed a long time ago. I see it as when they gave up on Friend Connect / OpenSocial as when they sort of gave up on the idea of open-first, and instead started focusing it competing feature-for-feature. Mozilla is the champion of the open web these days. Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is. And now Mozilla…

> Google started their proprietary ... Dart project because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is

No, they didn't. Google started Dart because they had a bunch of Java programmers who were having good success building JavaScript web apps such as Gmail with Google Web Toolkit. They thought to formalize it with Dart instead of using a hacked up Java dev environment. I have a client who needed a web app fast, so I took a chance on Dart and did it in half the time. The client doesn't even know I'm doing it in Dart. I'm shipping the minified js file which works on all modern browsers because the Dart team set out to bring jQuery up to a higher level. There's a bright side to all the dislike and misinformation about Dart though, because it gives me a competitive edge.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#33

Post by MatthewPhillips »

derefr wrote: post #29
samastur wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by specs are open? Published fully or developed communally? Fully published is obviously better than not, but is rarely enough. Openness is not a binary choice.

Developed communally, as part of the Chromium project. Not as a vendor-neutral working group or anything of the sort yet , mind you. But there's no reason it wouldn't move to become that if any other vendor was actually interested in coordinating on it--they're not hiding their cards inside Google's walled garden or anything.

You're incorrect, that's not how NaCl or Dart were developed. They were developed in secret years before released. They're alpha versions had all of the fundamentals established when finally presented to the public.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#34

Post by Andrenid »

onemorepassword wrote: post #7

I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.

This is actually the final step for me.

I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done.

Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of closed socialness and realname ridiculousness... but overall I always thought they were still on the right side of "Don't Be Evil".

I'm totally convinced this quiet attack on RSS is a not-so-subtle attempt to push people into G+, and even though I casually use G+ (about the same as I casually use FB or Twitter), G+ is NOT a replacement for RSS, and it's not how I want to keep track of all the sites I read. I don't want to "like" them or add them to my social networks. I just want to read their shit. Simple.

RSS doesn't care if you're logged in. RSS doesn't care if you use your real name. RSS doesn't care if you're accessing it from work, home, or anonymously via an internet cafe. And that's exactly how it should be.

Throw in the Picasaweb crap they're doing now too, FORCING you to use G+ Photos (which is a horrible horrible experience), and I'm done.

I've just installed Firefox on all my home computers and my phone, for the first time since Chrome came out, and will be looking for a new RSS aggregator.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#35

Post by MatthewPhillips »

derefr wrote: post #26
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship sailed a long time ago. I see it as when they gave up on Friend Connect / OpenSocial as when they sort of gave up on the idea of open-first, and instead started focusing it competing feature-for-feature. Mozilla is the champion of the open web these days. Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is. And now Mozilla…

You know, I keep seeing this "proprietary NaCl" statement around, and having played with it myself, I have a bit of a soapbox. There's nothing proprietary about NaCl: all the specs are open, and Google actively wants Mozilla and others to support them. To be charitable, though, I guess what most people mean by "NaCl is not open like Javascript" is that it's low-level --compiled binaries instead of readily-accessible…

NaCl and Dart were not created in the open. Both were secret projects within Google before their alpha versions were released; Dart was in development for at least 2 years before it was announced to the world. By that time there was no way a third party could have an affect on any of the fundamentals.

Also, for the record, PNaCl doesn't have a spec. It only has a reference implementation.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#36

Post by mistercow »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18
onemorepassword wrote: post #7

I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.

That ship sailed a long time ago. I see it as when they gave up on Friend Connect / OpenSocial as when they sort of gave up on the idea of open-first, and instead started focusing it competing feature-for-feature. Mozilla is the champion of the open web these days. Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is. And now Mozilla…

>Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is

I don't remember them saying that. I remember them saying that JS has insurmountable performance problems, but that's very different from saying that JS is as fast as it can get.

As for asm.js, it's another approach to the same problem. An insurmountable problem for a VM usually means that there's a limit to how well the VM can reason about arbitrary code. The clever thing about asm.js is that it gets around that by just restricting the language rather than inventing a new one. The clever thing about Dart is that you would rather write in it than kill yourself.

And yes, of course asm.js is meant to be written by compiling via emscripten, but that means trading far more dynamicness for speed than you would with Dart.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#37

Post by mistercow »

michaelwww wrote: post #32
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship sailed a long time ago. I see it as when they gave up on Friend Connect / OpenSocial as when they sort of gave up on the idea of open-first, and instead started focusing it competing feature-for-feature. Mozilla is the champion of the open web these days. Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is. And now Mozilla…

> Google started their proprietary ... Dart project because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is No, they didn't. Google started Dart because they had a bunch of Java programmers who were having good success building JavaScript web apps such as Gmail with Google Web Toolkit. They thought to formalize it with Dart instead of using a hacked up Java dev environment. I have a client w…

>The client doesn't even know I'm doing it in Dart. I'm shipping the minified js file which works on all modern browsers because the Dart team set out to bring jQuery up to a higher level.

I would feel very uncomfortable about that unless it's the sort of client that doesn't really have the tech background to assume you're writing it in JS in the first place. I think if someone is paying to have software written for them, they have a right to have some control over what language it's written in and what libraries it uses. After all, if they need to hire someone else to maintain it or add to it later on, they're going to have a far easier time finding a JS developer to do that than a Dart developer (at least for now).

And, of course, you have the right to charge twice as much to do it in JS if it's going to take you twice as long.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#38

Post by Kiro »

choko wrote: post #16

I don't understand what people use to see new information from multiple websites at once if they aren't using RSS. Are they actually visiting 10 or 20 websites a day manually? Do "normal" users stick to just a few websites?

You don't need updates from 10 to 20 websites. Find one or two good aggregators. HN and Facebook are enough for me.
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