A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:43 AM UTC

This is just a list of antichrome rhetoric which isn't based off truths, but rather are propagated by people who hate Google.

>The "Manifest v3" sabotage of content blocking extensions:

Manifest v3 does not change anything that would sabotage content blocking extentions.

>The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL

Chrome did not sabotage JPEGXL. The chromium team didn't think the format was worth supporting due to lack of broad interest and support costs. They recommend using a WASM based decoder if you would like to use JPEGXL.

>#WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes

The current web is what you get when there is no environment integrity. The web is already hurting from bad actors. Adding signals attesting to environment integrity could help the web fight against the harms caused by bad actors. It isn't DRM either.

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

#222

Post by capableweb » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:44 AM UTC

Timber-6539 wrote: post #202

Browser wars tend to get preachy at times and border on religious fanaticism. Chromium is free to fork. That's the only thing that matters. I'm not going to give up sweet convenience so that I can make a claim that am sticking it to the man. That's ridiculous.

Both Firefox and Chrome owe their existence to people who were religiously fanatical about building better browsers than the status quo. Without those people, you wouldn't have your convenience in the first place.

Whats to say history cannot repeat in this case?

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

#223

Post by bjord » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:45 AM UTC

ccity88 wrote: post #212

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

I would love to use Firefox, Brave, even Safari, but I'm quite literally locked into the Google eco-system. My work emails are G-Suite, so having chrome means I can sync data from sheets, slides, docs etc. I stupidly moved everything personal to a Gmail address too back in 2016 when things weren't looking so grim, and cloud only was a hype so I'm kind of locked into using chrome for personal use too as I can't get aw…

I, too, use a lot of Google services (plus Android), and Firefox works fine for me. Is it offline sync that you need?

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

#224

Post by satao » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:45 AM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #207

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

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)

Safari for personal use, Firefox for development (with sometimes Chrome's devtools when needed).

Firefox is much less of a memory hog than Chrome, in my use case.

Safari is the best for browsing. I just don't like its devtools.

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

#225

Post by magicalhippo » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:46 AM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #207

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

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.

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

#226

Post by saint_yossarian » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:46 AM UTC

Garvi wrote: post #190

fsflover wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slower on which websites?

I can confirm. In my experience on edge-case hardware, a raspberry pi 2, Chrome will play 1080p video while Firefox will stutter. And since raspberry pi's are treated as TVs, I get absolutely drowned in ads on Chrome. To be fair, on my other machines I rarely see any ads(ad blockers), so to have my video interrupted by an ad on youtube is way beyond acceptable. I am now using screen mirroring software "moonlight" to…

Make sure you turn off the "Ambient" mode on YouTube, it's a huge CPU hog and pretty useless anyway.

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

#227

Post by joshuaissac » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:47 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #73

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…

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when…

> The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently

This was required for compatibility with Netscape. Developers coded for the Netscape box model when it was dominant, so Microsoft had to follow the same model to prevent the pages from breaking when viewed in Internet Explorer.

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

#228

Post by goku12 » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:47 AM UTC

k__ wrote: post #107

dbish wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is built on chromium. Cool concept, but not a new browser

They often say they don't use problematic features.

That's like people who don't like what Chromium does, but still uses it along with uBlock. It feels to me like the web needs another engine, not chromium reskins, to stay healthy.

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

#229

Post by sph » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:47 AM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #207

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

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" has much more weight than "once upon a time I had to restart the browser every other day"

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

#230

Post by threeseed » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 11:47 AM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #113

mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

Safari was always behind on Web specs that could replace apps in the app store. It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :) - Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives - Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)

People have been making this tired argument for literally over a decade.

Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are.

So no there is no conspiracy by Apple to prevent the rise of web apps.