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

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

#321

Post by magicalist »

detuur wrote: post #71
yankput wrote: post #31

How is jpeg xl “hostile”, it’s just a new format. Does Chrome really need to support every new image format?

It was/is a very well thought-out format that had a lot of industry signalling they were willing or even enthusiastic about supporting it, which happens virtually never for new image formats. All the major browsers were working on support, many image processing pipelines were being updated. Everyone agreed that it was not just a major improvement, but actually the best option out of all the contenders out there. Even…

> Everyone agreed that it was not just a major improvement, but actually the best option out of all the contenders out there.

Wikipedia tells me the first of four parts of the jpeg xl standard was finalized less than two years ago, and the last part (barely) less than a year ago.

The idea that

a) browsers are bad if they're not adding a year-old image format to the web forever and

b) "everyone" knows what they're talking about with an image codec finalized less than a year ago

is pretty ludicrous.

It's a good format, it'll gain adoption.

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

#322

Post by mrblampo »

Sounds like the thing about "ad blocker sabotage" is about replacing the Web Request API with something called declarativeNetRequest. I've been sifting through documentation but have had trouble seeing why this is any kind of a downgrade for ad blockers. Can someone explain?

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

#323

Post by aequitas »

amelius wrote: post #16

Webmasters should really fight back and show annoying popups when the user agent equals Chrome. These popups could nudge the user towards e g. Firefox. Perhaps EFF.org could provide a reference implementation of such popups.

This is one of the ways Chrome obtained its market share. I remember years back when working at one of the biggest Flash/HTML5 game platforms at the time, we where paid serious money by Google to include a banner to switch to Chrome when we detected a different browser.

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

#324

Post by gorhill »

goku12 wrote: post #247
krishnaislove wrote: post #189

Unless a big enough competitor comes along, they'll not change.

The solution for the current web browser situation isn't another competitor. There will probably never be another big competitor. The reason is that merit isn't the primary reason how Chrome won the majority market share. There was a twitter thread that I have been trying to dig up ever since the WEI debates began. It was from a Firefox developer who explained how Chrome managed to get its users. Many Google websites…

> a twitter thread that I have been trying to dig up

https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871245021220875

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

#325

Post by dspillett »

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…

Chrome is the new IE 4 & 5, when MS were still doing the extend and extinguish thing, implementing crap their way, standards be damned.

Safari is the new IE 6, when MS stagnated because they had won in large enough areas not to really care any more and designers were forced to hold back on using things for compatibility's sake. If we're more generous, maybe Safari is more like IE 9/10/11 when MS at least tried to be more up-to-date but were behind and non-compliant enough to be a significant pain. Though for us IE11 is still the current IE11 as one or two clients still have a few users on it, we can say “not supported” all we like, but we'll still get complaints if things flat out don't work (display issues and slowness we can tell people to deal with, dysfunction we can't).

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

#326

Post by another_bear »

insanitybit wrote: post #260
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…

Manifest v3 has been delayed and was/is pretty legitimate, I don't think most people really know wtf they're talking about when it comes to v3. JPEGXL doesn't exactly seem like that big of a deal and is now being developed again - sounds fine, Chrome went "seems like no one wants this" and then people said "we want this" and now it's being worked on. WEI isn't even properly proposed yet, it's so early. So these 3 thi…

[flagged]

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

#327

Post by remram »

Kiro wrote: post #203
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…

Why would I need an excuse? I'm free to use whatever I want.

> people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome

Did you miss the first part of that sentence?

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

#328

Post by SergeAx »

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…

I believe Chrome was about web apps (e.g. Gmail, Maps) in the first place,and yes, it was an undermine of Windows domination on desktop. Data collection and ads outside search came later.

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

#329

Post by jefftk »

addandsubtract wrote: post #282
omgmajk wrote: post #209

* The "Manifest v3" sabotage of content blocking extensions: https://archive.is/i2vGD * The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL: https://archive.is/2ihEV * #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes: https://archive.is/S912x

That's a pretty short list. I would argue the list should start 7 years ago with AMP.

AMP was Google's Search team, not Chrome team, and the Chrome team wasn't very happy about it.

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

#330

Post by tatersolid »

0x008 wrote: post #255
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…

my excuse is that my company VPN is tied to chrome.

What VPN product does this? Typically even “SSL VPNs” work at the OS/network interface level.
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