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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

#61

Post by michaelwww »

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…

Related: Andrew Wilkins has written his NaCl module in Go http://blog.awilkins.id.au/2012/12/go-in-browser-llgo-does-p...

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#62

Post by derefr »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #55
derefr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the way in which something is developed before its first release has any bearing on whether its current development is community-driven. Everything was designed in secret at some point: within the head of whoever was thinking about it, before they decided to start talking about it.

> I don't see how the way in which something is developed before its first release has any bearing on whether its current development is community-driven. You don't? Go look at the nacl commit logs and count how many non-Google employees are contributing. That it was developed in secret is precisely the reason for this (not because they are against outside contributors today). If you develop a supposedly open technol…

> Whatever you may feel about NaCl, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't think it's good.

Microsoft and Apple have very obvious reasons to avoid supporting NaCl, whatever they think of it--it is the last step in nullifying the relevance of Operating Systems. A browser that runs code at native speed is an operating system, fullstop.

Mozilla is, as far as I can tell, just doing that same overly-idealist thing that Debian and the FSF do, where anything that's not specifically "the best kind of open" (GPLed) is a horrible monstrosity not to be allowed to besmirch the beauty of the web. Meanwhile, I don't expect to see a Photoshop or a Crysis for Firefox OS any time soon ;)

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#63

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

ok_craig wrote: post #52
Andrenid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 close…

I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox. There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whate…

Well, if you don't approve of their practises, you shouldn't keep using their products, should you?

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#64

Post by mike-cardwell »

ok_craig wrote: post #52
Andrenid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 close…

I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox. There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whate…

Chrome is created by an Ad company so that they can make more money selling Ads. People are willing to overlook this fact because they trust that Google wont put it's own desire to make profit over keeping the web open. People are losing the trust that this is the case.

If somebody comes up with some new technology that makes the web better in some way, but also means it's more difficult or impossible to target advertising, do you think Google will implement it? Do you think the makers of Bing will?

Am i the only one that thinks that a handful of Ad companies shouldn't be controlling how the web evolves?

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#65

Post by cremnob »

ok_craig wrote: post #52
Andrenid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 close…

I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox. There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whate…

It's about taking every potential data point they can have about you away from them (and thus the ability to monetize it). I switched to Firefox just the other day after reading that article about Chrome vs Firefox and also because the dev channel seems to have a tray icon in Windows now.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#66

Post by eCa »

ok_craig wrote: post #52
Andrenid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 close…

I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox. There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whate…

I read the parent as no longer trusting Google, and if you don't trust someone - don't use their browser.

It's about distrust, not hate.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#67

Post by Udo »

I think they're going to shut down Blogger next.

It's a neglected platform at best, and it too encroaches on some partial functionality that could be offered by G+.

Picasa is in the process of being absorbed completely into G+. We're in the middle of a massive consolidation. They're closing down and walling off everything they can. When the smoke clears Google will have transformed from an open standards company into exactly the same walled garden everybody else is offering.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#68

Post by pcwalton »

lucian1900 wrote: post #31
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…

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…

Why is asm.js crazy?

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#69

Post by pcwalton »

derefr wrote: post #62
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how the way in which something is developed before its first release has any bearing on whether its current development is community-driven. You don't? Go look at the nacl commit logs and count how many non-Google employees are contributing. That it was developed in secret is precisely the reason for this (not because they are against outside contributors today). If you develop a supposedly open technol…

> Whatever you may feel about NaCl, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't think it's good. Microsoft and Apple have very obvious reasons to avoid supporting NaCl, whatever they think of it--it is the last step in nullifying the relevance of Operating Systems. A browser that runs code at native speed is an operating system, fullstop. Mozilla is, as far as I can tell, just doing that same overly-idealist thing that Debian…

"Mozilla is, as far as I can tell, just doing that same overly-idealist thing that Debian and the FSF do, where anything that's not specifically "the best kind of open" (GPLed) is a horrible monstrosity not to be allowed to besmirch the beauty of the web. Meanwhile, I don't expect to see a Photoshop or a Crysis for Firefox OS any time soon ;)"

No, Mozilla is pushing asm.js as the solution for Photoshop or Crysis, because it's (IMHO) a technically better solution with better survival characteristics (backwards compatibility) than NaCl.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#70

Post by pcwalton »

derefr wrote: post #50
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> By that time there was no way a third party could have an affect on any of the fundamentals. It's not like NaCl is a market-dominating monopoly format like MS Word .doc now or anything. Going by usage, it's basically still a prototype. Anyone (e.g. Mozilla) who disagrees with the fundamentals of the design so thoroughly that they don't want to work with what Google came up with, could create a competitor to NaCl us…

> Anyone (e.g. Mozilla) who disagrees with the fundamentals of the design so thoroughly that they don't want to work with what Google came up with, could create a competitor to NaCl using the same basic idea (native-speed code execution using a pre-checked subset of machine instructions), and their version would have roughly 99% as good a chance of becoming dominant as if NaCl hadn't yet existed.

That's exactly what Mozilla is doing: asm.js.

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