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Chrome, 10 Years Later

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Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#21

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

RajT88 wrote: post #19
tppiotrowski wrote: post #14

> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way. This resonates with me. O…

> Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. Chrome now sends all of your URL's you are viewing to Google by default. So does Edge, to Microsoft. Big Tech is Malicious.

I think the point is that it becomes malicious, rather than starting out that way.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#23

Post by trap_goes_hot »

Nothing personal against the author, I'm sure hes a great guy and all, but I got a chuckle out of someone working at a company deploying the largest world-wide spying apparatus complaining about Microsoft's practices.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#24

Post by chungy »

It's sort of funny the paragraph about a custom title bar, that is always the first feature I disable whenever I deal with a new install of Chrom(ium|e). Don't really know why it tries to do it, but a right click and "Use system window title bar" and back to normalcy.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#25

Post by duped »

asddubs wrote: post #17
tppiotrowski wrote: post #14

> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way. This resonates with me. O…

to be honest, you can already kind of see the writing on the wall in that quote, too. google wanted more control over the browser, I don't really think that's a neutral act, because they had vested interests in controlling a browser from the start. Of course google's reputation was a lot better back then, so people generally didn't question it too much.

Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be.

You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better.

The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#26

Post by HWR_14 »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #14

> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way. This resonates with me. O…

It's the predictable consequence of the things built. I don't think you can absolve yourself of responsibility for how your work is used just because you didn't realize that companies exist to make money.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#27

Post by asddubs »

duped wrote: post #25
asddubs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be honest, you can already kind of see the writing on the wall in that quote, too. google wanted more control over the browser, I don't really think that's a neutral act, because they had vested interests in controlling a browser from the start. Of course google's reputation was a lot better back then, so people generally didn't question it too much.

Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be. You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better. The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.

I think it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Of course google didn't exclusively use their increased control over the web for strictly evil purposes, but it's more about whether someone who has a vested interest should be the one controlling browsers. It's kind of like a manufacturer being in charge over the safety regulations of their own factories. Sure, you can argue that they might know better than anyone what needs to be regulated, and might regulate things for the better where other manufacturers are worse than them, but there's also a huge conflict of interest built into the scenario.

Of course chrome was an improvement over browsers at the time, it's hard to dispute that, but that doesn't really mean that googles intentions were pure. Or that it wasn't a strategic move to place themselves into a position of having a grip on a central piece of internet infrastructure.

If a wal mart shows up in your town and drives all the smaller stores out of business you can also argue that they might have genuinely lower prices and a wider selection, but that's also just part of a larger strategy to assume dominance.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#28

Post by pavlov »

duped wrote: post #25
asddubs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be honest, you can already kind of see the writing on the wall in that quote, too. google wanted more control over the browser, I don't really think that's a neutral act, because they had vested interests in controlling a browser from the start. Of course google's reputation was a lot better back then, so people generally didn't question it too much.

Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be. You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better. The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.

From this narrow perspective, Internet Explorer was the exact same story. Starting around version 4.0 it really was a better browser than Netscape, implemented the new standards better, and also did essential new things that other browsers couldn’t (XmlHttpRequest anyone?). IE’s dominance really made the web better because developers could write to a single standard and end users had a unified browser UX.

Now, I disagree with this definition of “better” because it doesn’t consider the indirect effects on the open web platform. But my opinion is presumably a minority one because the community has sleepwalked into the same situation with Google and Chrome.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#29

Post by Ygg2 »

RajT88 wrote: post #19
tppiotrowski wrote: post #14

> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way. This resonates with me. O…

> Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. Chrome now sends all of your URL's you are viewing to Google by default. So does Edge, to Microsoft. Big Tech is Malicious.

Pretty sure Firefox does that by default. It gets highly annoying, sometimes.

Re: Chrome, 10 Years Later

#30

Post by encryptluks2 »

culi wrote: post #16
encryptluks2 wrote: post #11

I actually really like Chrome, well Chromium, despite the negative perception about Manifest v3. I truly hope that they work out the kinks quickly enough to resolve some of the concerns. I do get that the new API in some ways is safer for the average user, but there are power users that should be able to do what they want. Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the c…

> Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith I don't think you've kept up with the way Google has treated certain extensions if you're still considering the possibility that it's in good faith Anybody remember AdNauseam (still available on Firefox)? It's an adblock that doesn't just block ads but in the background silently clicks…

I agree that they've made questionable decisions, but if an extension is clicking on ads in the background wouldn't that be considered a violation of their ToS for related products that they control.. essentially, a way to game ad revenue? If someone released an extension to silently DDoS ad organizations in the background, even if the user was aware of the purpose, then I'd imagine it would still be against their ToS. Extensions like this can still be installed from a packed extension. I don't think Apple would do anything different if there was an app in their app store that did things in the backgrounds to violate their policies.
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