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Chrome is Not the Standard

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Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#351

Post by LoSboccacc »

abritinthebay wrote: post #266
tracker1 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with IE6 both as it became the defacto standard browser everywhere, and for the years it took Mozilla Phoenix^wFirebird^wFirefox to take hold as the defining force, and then Chrome coming to dominate. When IE6 came out it was kind of a breath of fresh air... it allowed for a lot of things, and the v4 browsers finally fell off the map. IE 5.0.0 had some hideous bugs on stamped CDs (Office 2000, Windows 2000)…

People do forget that IE was legitimately a good browser for quite a while - starting around IE3 it really did quite well. Plus I'll take IE4 + NN4 issues vs IE6/7/8 issues in 20-freaking-14 (or beyond, argh). IE9 at least fixed a lot . At least the early IE vs NN stuff was fast to change and interesting . IE6 issues were the exact opposite :(

The real explorer issue was that xp refused to die for the longest time. When those browser came out they were kinda fine in context, they got lot of hate a decade later when the world moved onto new standard but you still had 10%+ users living in the past

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#352

Post by hungryfoolish »

bsimpson wrote: post #336
tannhaeuser wrote: post #305

The thing is that Google owns WHATWG (who write and edit HTML specs) so the difference between Web "standards" and "what Chrome does" is moot. Other browser vendors have no choice other than to follow suit. I'm putting "standards" in scare quotes since what WHATWG publishes - the "living standard" thing - doesn't qualify as standard in my book. It's a tragedy to see so much well-intentioned work being weaponized. Act…

"The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software in 2004." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG

Yes, but it's been pretty much taken over by Google now. All but one of the WHATWG spec editors are from Google. No editor is there which is from a non-browser vendor.

IMO it makes a strong case for the still existence of the w3c html spec.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#353

Post by userbinator »

booleandilemma wrote: post #327
throwaway284534 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here here. The author clearly hasn't worked with Apple's implementation of Audio Context either. Granted the bar is pretty low compared to Chrome, but wow! What a mess. Safari consistently has latency and bit rate issues when playing even the smallest files.

Actually it’s “hear hear”. This comment has been up for 3 hours already, I’m surprised I’m the first word nazi to correct it :)

"Hear, hear" on a comment about Audio Context? ;-)

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#354

Post by Gaelan »

city41 wrote: post #132

I switched to Firefox, and I was blown away to find that Google Meet (the new Hangouts) does not work. You just get the message "Meet doesn't work on your browser". I'm also impressed at how many of my job's internal websites don't work. This doesn't bug me as much, but it's obvious the devs who created them didn't even do a sanity check in Firefox.

What happens if you lie about your user agent?

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#355

Post by damnyou »

lukeschlather wrote: post #211
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found a lot of people are quite naively idealistic around browser development. The rendering, JS engines in Firefox and Chrome are state-of-the-art and take small armies to build and maintain. Mozilla has to strike a balance between revenue seeking and consumer protection seeking behavior that I would imagine is quite difficult to maintain. Lots of people here additionally are up in arms their incredibly specifi…

> Lots of people here additionally are up in arms their incredibly specific workflow was upheaveled by a movement to webextensions planned like 2 years in advance. Maybe their incredibly specific workflow involves a piece of multi-million dollar equipment and updating to a new API involves reflashing its firmware for some crazy reason. (alternately, 100 $200 pieces of equipment in hard-to-reach places that must be ma…

Sounds like a lifecycle management failure. Hope this is a good learning opportunity for next time!

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#356

Post by sowbug »

ori_b wrote: post #230
sowbug wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major browser vendor has a proprietary extensions platform. It's a good thing; it enables innovation and solution-building without needing to leave the web platform entirely. Chrome, Firefox, and Edge have Native Messaging. Safari's extensions platform uses "native APIs and familiar web technologies." Yes, like ActiveX.

In short, nobody is breaking web standards, because they didn't submit their changes to a standards body. Because it's not standardized, it doesn't count as breaking standards. Now, if they did submit to a standards body, and it got approved, it would be standardized. Therefore, it doesn't count as breaking standards.

Hey, if you want every browser to be identical, that's your right. I happen to think that competition among browsers is a good thing, and that means that they'll always be at least a little bit different. Shouldn't it matter which browser you use?

No major browser vendor (in the modern era, at least) wants to break interoperability -- that's the bright line that separates innovation from fragmentation -- and you'll find that each works hard to stay on the right side of that line, often slowing their rate of innovation to do so.

(And no, saying extensions platforms don't count isn't just language-lawyering, as I think you're trying to suggest. Most extensions platforms, particularly ActiveX and old-style Firefox add-ons, are deeply dependent on the host OS or the specific user agent's implementation, or else they operate in contexts that just don't make sense in the web's origin-based security model. I wouldn't go so far as to say it would be impossible to standardize an extensions platform, but standardizing one would necessarily give rise to a separate platform (the extension to the extensions platform) that was host-OS-specific or user-agent-specific. As I said earlier, there are legitimate needs to get stuff done that can't and shouldn't be done on the web, but that don't require abandoning all web technologies. Maybe you're right that the intent of ActiveX was to kill the web. That doesn't mean that it didn't also solve real problems that the web couldn't solve at the time and still can't today.)

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#357

Post by dblohm7 »

hungerstrike wrote: post #204
WorldMaker wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it does change your argument: you are clearly missing a for now , so long as it pleases Google. You can imply that if Google did something to upset consumers they may flock to an alternative Blink-based browser or Chromium, but Google and Chrome are the brands they know, they don't know or care about Blink or Chromium. You may believe that Google are entirely generous and would never upset the open source bala…

Incorrect. We have the source, we can do whatever we want with it. Nothing that you said changes that.

Do "we" have the budget to do that?

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#358

Post by frik »

userbinator wrote: post #30

developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” Indeed, perhaps "holding the web back" is a good thing if it means websites will be more accessible overall, to even less common browsers like NetSurf, Dillo, and all the other text-based ones. IMHO the "feature war/race" between the major browser vendors has had an overall negative effect, as if all sites somehow need to turn into ridic…

Chrome is not the standard, BUT WebKit is!

About 90% of all users worldwide use a WebKit(/Blink/KHTML) based browser on all platforms (and mobile is a lot bigger than desktop).

Firefox/Servo, M$ IE/Edge, Dillo, Link, etc are minor browsers, I hope sites will continue to work almost okay with them too.

For traditional enterprise the new IE6 is IE11, it's still going strong in Win7-Win10. You can thank M$ that they forked IE11 trident engine and named it Edge instead of IE12. And IE11 is supported until at least 2020.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#359

Post by rlv-dan »

userbinator wrote: post #30

developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” Indeed, perhaps "holding the web back" is a good thing if it means websites will be more accessible overall, to even less common browsers like NetSurf, Dillo, and all the other text-based ones. IMHO the "feature war/race" between the major browser vendors has had an overall negative effect, as if all sites somehow need to turn into ridic…

> means websites will be more accessible overall, to even less common browsers

Not to mention more accessible to people with disabilities. A forum like wc3 needs to make sure that new features works for everyone and all use cases. Call me judgmental, but I doubt that Chrome developers have the will or ability to foresee all such cases when whipping up cool new features.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#360

Post by simonh »

bhawks wrote: post #207

I wish the author discussed the fact that Apple doesn't allow any other browsers to target the iOS platform. Chrome / Firefox are forced to be thin wrappers against the webkit engine instead of bringing their own technology. No other platform has policies like this and it greatly impacts the web platform and changes the dynamic of web standards in a way no other browser developer could.

>No other platform has policies like this

MS has a similar restriction on their App Store. Browsers are only allowed to use the MS rendering engine.

Also plenty of feature phones only allow use of the integrated browser. You might think that’s an unrelated issue, but it’s not. From a regulatory perspective, how do you differentiate between those, feature phones that allow a limited range of installable apps, games consoles with game offerings controlled by the console vendor, and the App Stores? There are even children’s educational toys with downloadable apps.

Vendor control of software access on their platform is actualy everywhere and some platforms like games consoles are defined by the concept so completely we often don’t even notice it. Dont like the games offered by Sony? Buy a Switch or an XBox. Don’t like the software offered by Apple? Buy an Android. But you don’t get to tell people which of these platforms they can or can’t choose.

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