Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love the Gifs. Perfect sentiment captured in each one.
Thats the spirit! :D
I liked them too. Where's the first one from? It looks familiar...
WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#32Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't needed to go these route. Telegram for example has clients for most platforms and a web client that works in every browser and doesn't require your phone to be connected to the internet for it to work.
Telegram is a bad counter-example for various reasons. LINE has a desktop client that works well though
Just curious - I remember some debate here about Telegram bug bounty from a while ago, other than that haven't seen any good/bad press about it. Why is it bad counter-example?
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#34[deleted]
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> perhaps it's using some encryption key that never leaves the device Don't they support multiple devices already (running the client on both a phone and a tablet)? Maybe they don't want to have this run on a desktop (either via API or JavaScript), because then curious people might reverse engineer it. Sort of like how Netflix has clients on locked-down Linux-based devices but doesn't support Linux desktops.
Netflix now works in Chrome on Linux.
Thats not really Netflix's fault though. Google Chrome (not Chromium) is the only browser on Linux that supports the DRM the TV/movie studios forced upon Netflix. With Windows Silverlight works in all browsers so they have access to the DRM.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#36> Your phone needs to stay connected to the internet for our web client to work... What? Is this true? I can't think of a reason why their devs would ever need the users phone to be online.
I suspect that the reason is that WhatsApp wants to make sure that the person behind using the web client is really the person behind the number. This is same reason Whatsapp has no api. They don't want the bot problem that tinder has.
People think the value of Whatsapp is that it is so pervasive. That's a big part of the value, but so much of the value is that whatsapp knows who you really are. You might have a few twitter accounts, a couple of facebook accounts. But you have only _one_ whatsapp account.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#37I would be interested to understand more about why WhatsApp made some of those decisions. The requirement to keep your phone connected to the Internet seems strange, perhaps it's using some encryption key that never leaves the device? Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much? Why has iOS been left out?
> Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much?
There is nothing the FileSystem API can do that others cannot, although it might be less convenient or less optimized. Even that shouldn't be true any more, but it still might in some browsers.
Regardless, this was a wrong decision by WhatsApp. FileSystem is no longer standards track. The API document itself says
> "Work on this document has been discontinued and it should not be referenced or used as a basis for implementation." http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/
Browsers should not implement it, and should in fact remove it, because it is nonstandard and never will be standardized. It is therefore dangerous for WhatsApp to use it - Google might do the right thing tomorrow and break their site, and it would be WhatsApp's fault.
However, Google has so far not shown much sign of intending to do the right thing here. As much as I admire many people at Google, and the company does many good things, this is a point that Google keeps getting wrong: Shipping nonstandard APIs, and keeping them active forever: FileSystem, NaCl/PNaCl, WebSQL, probably others I forgot.
I can only guess that Google simply finds those APIs convenient and uses them in its own websites, and has decided to never remove them. In other words, Google just doesn't care that they are nonstandard, which shows a lack of respect for the standards process. And as Google's market share rises over 50%, these are becoming de-facto standards, through an act of force.
One might say that this is an abstract "ethical" point, but WhatsApp shows exactly why it is not just that. Google keeping nonstandard APIs in Chrome for its own convenience opens the possibility of other websites using them. Either through ignorance - they don't know it's deprecated and nonstandard - or because they trust Google to not break them, and don't care about standards. The result is a web that works only in one browser.
Google, please do the right thing and remove nonstandard APIs.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#38[deleted]
Actually, IndexedDB allows you to store large amounts of data, is standardized, and is supported across practically all browsers.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#39Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#40Apple has ushered in a new era in which a high level of centralized control is considered acceptable to consumers. WhatsApp is obviously trying to keep total control, like apple. This doesn't explain all of their failings here. For example, I'm sure they will eventually find ways to address their control issues and still be usable in other browsers. They might never do a web interface that runs in iOS, due to apple's…
Its the opposite - Whats App is storing nothing which limits what they can do.
That hardly makes it 'the opposite', unless you presume only the most limited interpretation of the words.
The fact that whatsapp stores nothing has little to do with their cease and desist orders. 3rd party clients can still be built on a system that stores nothing.