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Re: Browsers

#231

Post by gpshead »

sangnoir wrote: post #221
XCabbage wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What will Microsoft gain if they Win?" Uh, money? It might not exactly be a noble incentive for a lawsuit, but it's sure as hell an incentive, isn't it?

I wonder what sort of information Google might dredge up during discovery that Microsoft wouldn't want to see the light of day. I'm no lawyer/accountant, so I don't know what amount of money would be worth that risk. With a lot of legal issues, sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

hiybbprqag for one - https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

Re: Browsers

#232

Post by WorldMaker »

gsnedders wrote: post #160
wyqydsyq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have missed the part of my comment that said "since IE6" AFAIK the box-sizing box model you mentioned was implemented since the beginning of Trident, well before IE6 came about. XHR was available from IE5 onwards (only accessible via ActiveX object, it didn't become available as a native window property in JS until IE7 but the feature was still available), so again isn't "since IE6". If you think whether…

> From that point onwards they have been playing a perpetual game of catch-up, constantly lagging behind other browsers in implementing new specifications and features. There are definitely examples: IE8 was the first browser with separate content processes (before Chrome was announced). CSS Grid was heavily pushed by MS (and shipped, prefixed, in IE10). Ultimately, being in a game of perpetual catchup in unsurprisin…

It's not just the interregnum/break that made it a game of perpetual catchup, though. Google certainly helped a lot to keep the goal posts moving. Web SQL, SPDY, QUIC, VP8, VP9, WebRTC, etc and so forth, are just some of examples of Google pushing half-finished standards into Chrome, then encouraging devs to use them (even in prefixed forms, where applicable), well in advance of standards processes.

It's easy to be "standards compliant" when you are the ones building the standards and everyone else has to work to support your bugs/mistakes/half-finished backward incompatible solutions, because real world sites already rely on them. (That's exactly the IE6 problem in a nutshell.) When many of those real world sites that folks rely on are Google-owned properties themselves (looking at you, tube), there is almost no way to keep the goal posts from moving.

Re: Browsers

#233

Post by scarface74 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #228
scarface74 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Safari’s desktop market share is minimal and it really only competes with Chrome directly on Macs. No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.

> No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones. Mostly facetious, but who except Americans cares about iOS anymore? Total iPhone market share is down to ~15% of smart phones worldwide. Android has the big lead now and doesn't look like it will relinquish it soon. Chrome only feature, works on ~85% of smart phones today? "Ship it," says the bottom line.

It’s not about market share. It’s about where the money is.

Being equally facetious. No one cares about a bunch of poor people buying $40 Android phones running 4 year old operating systems...

Look at the countries where iOS market share is above 30% and compare it to per capita GDP

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe

Re: Browsers

#234

Post by danShumway »

rictic wrote: post #213
pritambaral wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently, all of Google's services work on non-Chrome browsers. Google Earth is Chrome-only, because they use the Chrome-only NativeClient. Google Hangouts dropped calling support on non-Chrome browsers for quite a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889018 YouTube (and perhaps GMail) is extra slow on non-Chrome browsers because they use a dropped-and-never-standardised feature that is available only on…

> YouTube (and perhaps GMail) is extra slow on non-Chrome browsers because they use a dropped-and-never-standardised feature that is available only on Chrome, and force a slow polyfill on Firefox (and perhaps Edge): https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185 I work on the Polymer team at Google, and have worked with YouTube on this. I can promise you that the folks at YouTube are working very hard on por…

> there were just some changes between v0 and v1 that are hard to paper over

From my point of view, the moral of this story is that Chrome shouldn't be shipping v0 specs that are on by default.

It's not that people like me want to be cynical conspiracy theorists, it's just really frustrating to watch Google ship an unfinished API that's on by default, integrate it so tightly into its core products that it can't be easily updated after the spec changes, and then just kinda... sit on it. And it's really convenient that whenever Google messes up standards, it just happens to mess them up in a way that makes Chrome look better to normal users for all of its core products.

Heck, it's frustrating that Chrome is still shipping the v0 implementation. I don't want to be vindictive or bitter, but engineers on the Polymer team clearly thought the polyfill was fast enough for Firefox. They don't think it's fast enough that Chrome could be using it now?

I don't think I'm being a conspiracy theorist when I say that probably the reason why Chrome still ships with a working v0 implementation is because Youtube uses it. And it makes me feel weird to have a dominant browser deciding to contradict a standard because it makes a Google site fast. I think that's problematic and harmful for the open web.

So even though I know that the team's intentions are good, the intentions do nothing at all to mitigate or fix the harm. And I'm sure you can understand that when people talk about the dangers of a browser monoculture, it is exactly this kind of thing that we're afraid of. A lot of us feel like Google dev teams don't really have much respect for standards or community processes. Google tends to have an attitude that standards will always go the way it wants, and if other browsers are behind on that, we just need a little polyfill or stopgap or something until they catch up. Certainly they won't decide to go in a different direction.

Is that going to get better when Chrome has 95% market share? Won't Google devs feel even more emboldened to ship v0 implementations that disregard the standards process? Are there any new safeguards or internal policies being put into place to prevent devs working on Youtube or Gmail or Maps from building core infrastructure around browser APIs that haven't been standardized yet?

Re: Browsers

#235

Post by pcwalton »

magicalist wrote: post #224
Mil0dV wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Features like empty divs on top of video? Could be by accident ofc, but the entire story makes this unlikely.

> Features like empty divs on top of video? Could be by accident ofc, but the entire story makes this unlikely. I'd suggest inspecting a few sites you watch video on. An empty div is the least weird thing you'll find.

I highly suspect that the issue is that Windows video playback can only use scanout compositing if there is nothing on top of the video. Scanout compositing is significantly more energy-efficient than standard framebuffer compositing because it avoids a memory copy each frame.

This ultimately comes down to hardware limitations. GPUs are limited as to what they can compose during scanout, because of memory bandwidth limits. Each plane that you can alpha-blend together at scanout time multiplies the amount of memory fetches per dot you have to do. On today's high-DPI displays, the bandwidth going out to the display is very high to begin with, so you can't afford to multiply that by much. That is why putting something on top of a video is tricky: you're adding another layer to be alpha-blended on top, increasing your memory bandwidth by 50% over the two layers you already have (RGB for the background plus YUV for the video). The user's GPU may or may not support that--as I recall, prior to Skylake, Intel GPUs only had two hardware planes, for instance.

I'm not surprised that Microsoft just used "are there any DOM elements over the video?" as a quick heuristic to determine whether scanout compositing can be used. Remember that there is always a tradeoff between heuristics and performance. At the limit you could scan every pixel of each layer to see whether all of them are transparent and cull the layer if so, but that would be very expensive. You need heuristics of some kind to get good performance, and I can't blame Microsoft for using the DOM for that.

Re: Browsers

#236

Post by scarface74 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #230
sys_64738 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has already conceded the mobile space. They're doubling down on desktop dominance.

If they were doubling down on desktop dominance they'd be doing something more interesting with Edge than conceding it to the competition. (Microsoft is doubling down on Azure and DevDiv, if anything.) This seems only to put the desktop at risk, especially with (EdgeHTML-powered) HTML+CSS+JS as the "third pillar" of the original Universal Windows Platform strategy, this only seems to further feed questions about Micr…

What's to stop Chromebooks from attacking Windows for just being the junk drawer of old Win32 applications and games around a Chrome OS knockoff?

That’s all Windows has been for years. There hasn’t been anything interesting happening nor any serious money invested in writing PC software for well over a decade. The only non game companies making any money selling desktop software are Microsoft and Adobe.

Re: Browsers

#237

Post by MkMoksha »

JoshuaJB wrote: post #124
sonnyblarney wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern is not 'now' it's 'later'. Google is a business like any other - and when they have the power to lever a monopolized situation - they will. For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's? Or what if they integrate technology that de-facto collects usa…

"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

Well why microsoft made IE default browser on windows pc and why SharePoint doesn't work well with non IE browsers and why excel still can't Handel vba loops and why Skype takes few seconds when multiple users ping one user and Microsoft still charges for licensing.. Its the battle to be lesser of the evils

Re: Browsers

#238

Post by magicalist »

pcwalton wrote: post #235
magicalist wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Features like empty divs on top of video? Could be by accident ofc, but the entire story makes this unlikely. I'd suggest inspecting a few sites you watch video on. An empty div is the least weird thing you'll find.

I highly suspect that the issue is that Windows video playback can only use scanout compositing if there is nothing on top of the video. Scanout compositing is significantly more energy-efficient than standard framebuffer compositing because it avoids a memory copy each frame. This ultimately comes down to hardware limitations. GPUs are limited as to what they can compose during scanout, because of memory bandwidth l…

> You need heuristics of some kind to get good performance, and I can't blame Microsoft for using the DOM for that.

which, again, that's fine, but mayyyyybe they were a little lax in checking performance on nearly any other popular video site on the web to see if that heuristic is a good one?

Or maybe changing page layout in an extremely common way wasn't an effort to undermine a hyper specific benchmark?

Re: Browsers

#239

Post by WorldMaker »

scarface74 wrote: post #233
WorldMaker wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones. Mostly facetious, but who except Americans cares about iOS anymore? Total iPhone market share is down to ~15% of smart phones worldwide. Android has the big lead now and doesn't look like it will relinquish it soon. Chrome only feature, works on ~85% of smart phones today? "Ship it," says the bottom line.

It’s not about market share. It’s about where the money is. Being equally facetious. No one cares about a bunch of poor people buying $40 Android phones running 4 year old operating systems... Look at the countries where iOS market share is above 30% and compare it to per capita GDP http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe

That feeds the point about market share though, at what point is iOS too much of a luxury brand that doesn't support the effort to get over that hump of "works in Chrome, ship it"?

"I don't care if the Maserati owner can't buy these wiper blades, because look how many more GMs and Fords there are on the road every day. I bet the Maserati owner flogs themselves if they accidentally even drive in the rain, how often do you think they replace their wipers?"

iOS market share, and it's luxury brand demeanor, leaves it at great risk. I don't know where that line is, myself, but pinning hopes on iOS preventing a browser monoculture seems increasingly desperate looking at current world figures.

Re: Browsers

#240

Post by WorldMaker »

scarface74 wrote: post #236
WorldMaker wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were doubling down on desktop dominance they'd be doing something more interesting with Edge than conceding it to the competition. (Microsoft is doubling down on Azure and DevDiv, if anything.) This seems only to put the desktop at risk, especially with (EdgeHTML-powered) HTML+CSS+JS as the "third pillar" of the original Universal Windows Platform strategy, this only seems to further feed questions about Micr…

What's to stop Chromebooks from attacking Windows for just being the junk drawer of old Win32 applications and games around a Chrome OS knockoff? That’s all Windows has been for years. There hasn’t been anything interesting happening nor any serious money invested in writing PC software for well over a decade. The only non game companies making any money selling desktop software are Microsoft and Adobe.

That perspective is indeed why I think Microsoft is leaving themselves extremely vulnerable here (and I worry as tiny, tiny little shareholder). I don't think it is entirely true, mostly because of the giant amount of "dark matter" PC development that remains in the enterprise and industrial worlds, but it definitely feels true at least in the consumer space.
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