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Chrome is Not the Standard

chriskrycho.com

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Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#381

Post by starik36 »

NightlyDev wrote: post #169

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well" Well, clearly this person doesn't have much experience with web development... The webengine in iOS is the biggest pile of crap I've ever worked with since IE6. "Oh? You want to click this? OK, let's wait for 300 ms just in case you want to double tap to scroll!" "We finally fixed it, no more delay on cl…

I disagree. The IE6 of today is IE11, not Safari. Just look caniuse.come for practically any modern feature. It either requires you to pollute your code base with polyfills or doesn't work at all. Every day bring another fun barrier. Today it was Promises (https://caniuse.com/#search=promise), tomorrow, I am sure, it'll be something else.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#382

Post by dijit »

The-Compiler wrote: post #363
dijit wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is incredibly notable, since qtwebengine is not supported -at-all- on my chosen platform (FreeBSD) OT: heard you were going to CCC, I'd appreciate it if you swung by the DarkScience Assembly if you get a chance. :D And great work on qutebrowser!

Is it? https://www.freshports.org/www/qt5-webengine/ I'll try, but as usual I'll probably have a lot of things I want to do :D I'm usually at the Swiss Chaos assembly FWIW, and there might be a qutebrowser meetup as self-organized session some day. Thanks! :)

Yeah i have that port installed. Getting the python bindings seems impossible.

Also. That port is quite the hack. :(

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#383

Post by millstone »

jononor wrote: post #329
0x0 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficient javascript needs to be JIT'ed, but that means your app needs to be granted API access to map writeable memory as executable, which is a security risk they are not willing to grant third party developers. So a third party browser/js engine will likely be quite slow. I guess this would give users of a bad impression of iOS perfomance as a whole then, if other browser engines were allowed and became popular?

If other browser engines became very popular it says something about how bad/limited the default offering is. It usually takes a lot of work before people switch away from defaults. People continued to use IE for years for example

Chrome as the sole advertisement on the most valuable piece of web real estate in the universe might have been a factor too.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#384

Post by gaius »

voidlogic wrote: post #325
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…

>developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” Oh get off my lawn! Anyone to complains about Chrome vs. FF Quantum vs MS Edge doesn't know or remember the dark of days of IE 5 and IE 6. The lowest common denominator these days is exponentially better than it has ever been. Slight tangent, but I was happy to see the other day the Google hangouts works on Firefox again (I don't know i…

doesn't know or remember the dark of days of IE 5 and IE 6.

I remember that when IE6 was first released it was the fastest, most reliable, most standards compliant and feature rich browser. That's why it took over the corporate world. It was the Chrome of its day, if you will. How did that work out?

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#385

Post by yeukhon »

chriskrycho wrote: post #242
beisner wrote: post #194

At what point does the dominant market leader become the standard, though? Chrome currently has roughly 60% market share in both desktop and mobile. No other browsers are forced to comply, but web developers will prioritize targeting the platform where their users are. We see this today where tons of things are broken on the long tail of older versions of IE, and developers largely ignore them. I'm not saying that I…

If web developers refuse to treat it that way, the web stays healthier overall. Consider this post an argument for why we shouldn't let any single browser have that kind of dominance. (I'd say the same it if were Firefox, Safari, or Edge in this spot.)

When you have dominance, and most of your users want to use Chrome, as developers you will tend to use Chrome to compare to other browsers. “I wish Firefox has this feature” kind of statement.

This is natural. Whether it is urban architecture to medical practice, someone’s idea dominated the rest, and we use the dominant one as reference and as a tool for comparison.

This is called competition.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#386

Post by digi_owl »

komali2 wrote: post #101
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…

I think there may even be a chicken and egg situation going on - for some reason, media websites such as CNN are pushing giant rich media content objects at us like videos, which obviously are meaningless to a text browser. Even webdev blogs are being posted with big GIFs every paragraph or two. I'm not sure why content creators are feeling the need to go multi-media - perhaps it's getting harder and harder to tell w…

I find myself thinking of a line regarding early computer games development.

About how whenever game devs got a new toy to play with (faster CPU, better audio, etc etc) for years the games released would be heavy on bling and lite on content.

I suspect something similar happens in other parts of the computing world, and the web has long since hit its tech equivalent of "eternal september". Meaning that these days there are so many new "toys" coming into the web world that people can't help include them into whatever they are making, even if it makes little to no sense to do so in the long run.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#387

Post by alwillis »

bhawks wrote: post #272
chriskrycho wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point, but it's ancillary to what I'm getting at here. (And, contrary to sibling comment, I'm well aware that "Chrome on iOS" is just a wrapper around the Webkit view.) There's an important role of competition, and I sometimes do wish that Apple allowed alternative implementations. On the other hand, alternative implementations are also alternative vectors for security holes, and one of Apple's p…

Two points: 1. Today we have 4 browser implementors. Only one of them doesn't also own an operating system (FF). We lost opera year or two ago. I would argue that a significant factor in this shrinking landscape is the fact that Apple has locked away ~10% of the market forever (and this 10% is not a random sampling - it includes many high value customers). Sure implementing a browser is technically challenging - my a…

1. Today we have 4 browser implementors. Only one of them doesn't also own an operating system (FF). We lost opera year or two ago. I would argue that a significant factor in this shrinking landscape is the fact that Apple has locked away ~10% of the market forever (and this 10% is not a random sampling - it includes many high value customers). Sure implementing a browser is technically challenging - my argument is that Apple's policy has altered the environment in such a way that there is no longer any reward for overcoming that challenge unless you have an operating system or some other large interest that requires you to make a browser. This will have effects on the web as a platform for years to come.

You are wrong. I get you’re making a political argument because you have something against Apple, but what you’re suggesting is just wrong on the merits.

Apple’s global iPhone marketshare is around 15%; it’s 35-40% in the US.

When the W3C was going to shove XHTML 2 down our throats, where you had to have perfectly conforming XML markup to have a valid webpage, Apple helped form with Mozilla and Opera, the WHATWG that lead to HTML5 and web standards that made sense.

It was Apple that said no to shipping Flash on the iPhone, which was the beginning of the end for proprietary media plugins.

You seemed to forget about the ecosystem of open source developers that have lead the charge on implementing new open standards; Igalia was obviously able to work with Apple (and Google) to implement CSS Grid: https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2017/03/16/css-grid-layout-is...

Much of the variable font spec is based on Apple’s TrueType GX technology from the 1990s: https://atadistance.net/2016/09/20/truetype-gx-model-lives-o...

Sure, they were behind on several important technologies, but they’ve made a ton of progress this past year or so. I created a Service Worker in the latest Safari Tech Preview that shipped two days ago: https://webkit.org/blog/8042/release-notes-for-safari-techno...

You also might want to check the feature list; you might be surprised: https://webkit.org/status/

Apple is a convenient target for a lot of things; I get that, but I can’t see how anything you’ve said holds up when we take an objective look at things.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#388

Post by The-Compiler »

dijit wrote: post #382
The-Compiler wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? https://www.freshports.org/www/qt5-webengine/ I'll try, but as usual I'll probably have a lot of things I want to do :D I'm usually at the Swiss Chaos assembly FWIW, and there might be a qutebrowser meetup as self-organized session some day. Thanks! :)

Yeah i have that port installed. Getting the python bindings seems impossible. Also. That port is quite the hack. :(

Looks like there's some work-in-progress here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12964

And yeah, QtWebEngine is quite a beast to package, I can imagine that it's even worse on BSD...

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#389

Post by bonesss »

rlv-dan wrote: post #359
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.

In fairness: modern web browsers and platforms are wildly better for users with impairments than the historical baseline, and the accessibility story for many kinds of hot new shiny-shiny is to straightforwardly ignore the content.

I mean... at least in it's prototypical form new kinds of multimedia content, previously unavailable, can continue to be unavailable without degrading the existing content. To the degree that blind people, for example, want to enjoy VRML2020 it's not unreasonable to wait a few release cycles for specialized support and have that content ignored until such a time.

General accessibility of content, ie a preference for flash over HTML, is a content provider issue, not a browser issue.

Also: the Chrome team builds the browser that runs most of the web clients on the world (and soon in history)... it's been a leader in accessibility and standardization for years. Judge as we will, they're better positioned than most to analyze consequences and the market, and have a notable track record.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#390

Post by alwillis »

bhawks wrote: post #272
chriskrycho wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point, but it's ancillary to what I'm getting at here. (And, contrary to sibling comment, I'm well aware that "Chrome on iOS" is just a wrapper around the Webkit view.) There's an important role of competition, and I sometimes do wish that Apple allowed alternative implementations. On the other hand, alternative implementations are also alternative vectors for security holes, and one of Apple's p…

Two points: 1. Today we have 4 browser implementors. Only one of them doesn't also own an operating system (FF). We lost opera year or two ago. I would argue that a significant factor in this shrinking landscape is the fact that Apple has locked away ~10% of the market forever (and this 10% is not a random sampling - it includes many high value customers). Sure implementing a browser is technically challenging - my a…

Security is a core principle for all browser implementors - due to the nature of a browser you won't get far without it. Privacy is a can of worms - all implementors will pay lip service to it. Whether or not they deliver on it is another topic entirely. A blanket ban on browser development in the name of security is heavy handed.

As I mentioned previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985884) WebKit is a core part of the iOS operating system and is tied into a bunch of things, including Apple’s brand.

In addition to all of the technical, security and privacy issues, there’s also user experience, especially with something as core as the browser on a mobile platform.

We’ve already seen that Google can’t be trusted on iOS--it was fined $22.5 million by the FTC for essentially bypassing Apple’s iOS platform privacy features not that long ago: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/googl...

90% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, so why would Apple and its users want Google’s browser to have low-level access to its operating system?

If Google could run Chrome natively on iOS (instead of using WebKit), would it be free to disregard Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature (https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...), which uses machine learning to stop cross-site tracking via 3rd-party cookies?

Everything is a trade-off when it comes to technology; I’m fine with Google and some of the other companies deciding which privacy features they will or won’t use.

BTW, my new favorite iOS browser is Brave (https://itunes.apple.com/app/brave-web-browser/id1052879175?...), which by default blocks all ads, trackers and fingerprinting methods by default. Not loading all of that crap makes it run really fast.

And if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to pay content creators with the Basic Attention Token (BAT), based on Ethereum’s ERC20 token standard, in 3-6 months.

If this catches on, it could impact Google; lets see if they allow it on the Play store, especially after payments are implemented.

Clearly there can be browser innovation without giving in to companies like Google who don’t respect users’ privacy.

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