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Chrome is Not the Standard

chriskrycho.com

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Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#391

Post by alwillis »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #314
chriskrycho wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only did I not whine about something in a written document, I never once mentioned WHATWG or anything other standards body. (That was intentional.) I explicitly call out the vendors and their mutual implementations . The "standard" I care about is the truly living standard of what every browser implements. The point here is that the _de facto_ standard is not Chrome, and if it were that'd be a bad thing. (We've b…

Every browser has never implemented exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, and never will. There will always, at least, be bugs. A "de facto standard" of "what browsers implement" is no standard at all. This is why standards matter. "What the actually existing software implements" is what you have when you _don't have standards_. The vendor-dominated, standard-changes-every-day WHATWG "living standard" is…

Every browser has never implemented exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, and never will.

Igalia implemented CSS Grid for both Blink and WebKit: https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2017/03/16/css-grid-layout-is...

And remember, Blink is a fork of WebKit, so they're not very different. So it can be done and we need more of this.

They're also working on some other stuff for Apple and Google. Never say never.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#392

Post by gurkendoktor »

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…

Most of your complaints are related to how iOS handles web apps that you've saved to the home screen, which is a feature that is completely orthogonal to Apple's rendering engine.

I agree that iOS home screen apps are in a pretty bad state, but Google is also discontinuing Chrome Apps and that doesn't make Chrome a worse HTML renderer.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#393

Post by headmelted »

dao- wrote: post #378
headmelted wrote: post #232

This isn't new, though. I think people forgive Google for more because they like them. IE did exactly the same thing before Chrome and was roundly (and rightly) admonished for it. In fairness, Chrome's proposals do seem to be designed with the open web in mind - at least insofar as being items that other projects could reasonably be expected to implement in their engines if they chose to do so. There's nothing so egr…

NaCl was as bad as ActiveX but less successful, thank God.

Was it though?

I wasn't a fan of NaCl, and WebAssembly (for example) is a much better fit for an open web, but it was at least platform agnostic (if support was provided by the vendor) and ran in a reasonably strict sandbox. ActiveX was neither of these things.

All that said, having any one browser be the standard is as terrible for the open web now as it was in IE's heyday. Just because Chrome is less awful doesn't solve the single-vendor problem.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#394

Post by sundarurfriend »

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.

I don't know how much of Google's thinking is "this will move users to Chrome" and how much is "we can't be bothered to make it work there", but it has helped me in my attempts to move away from Google services. I was a big fan of Hangouts and once upon a time used it as pretty much my main mode of online communication (and made many friends aware that such an app exists on their phone). But now that I can no longer rely on it working, I have disabled that part of Gmail and haven't opened the mobile app in months either.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#395

Post by smarx007 »

alwillis wrote: post #374
tpush wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given this it's really a shame that Apple does not allow other browser engines on iOS. Would be a prime opportunity for competition to raise the overall quality level.

Given this it's really a shame that Apple does not allow other browser engines on iOS. Would be a prime opportunity for competition to raise the overall quality level. WebKit is a core part of iOS; lots of APIs use it for lots of things. You just can't swap it out for something else without breaking things. Lets not forget the security and power usage issues as well; the last thing iPhone users would want is a render…

Didn't MS also say that IE is a core part of Windows?

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#397

Post by FroshKiller »

VikingCoder wrote: post #231
brians wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reduction in bug rate should we expect for each, day, $100M invested?

I can't tell you how many more meters per second you will get if you push harder on the gas... But I can tell you that pushing harder on the gas is likely to get you where you're going quicker. Do we really need to discuss exact m/s before you're willing to push harder on the frickin gas?

"Measure twice, cut once."

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#398

Post by mattmanser »

gaius wrote: post #384
voidlogic wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

There was an incentive for MS to hold the web back, which isn't there now, although there's an incentive for Google to wall it up.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#399

Post by blacklight »

gaius wrote: post #384
voidlogic wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

They released a good product, but weren't prepared to keep it up-to-date with the expectations that a de-facto industry standard should be able to handle.

The web kept on moving after IE6 was released - XHR, jQuery, and later on HTML5 and CSS3. Being a browser entirely developed and maintained by a private corporation subject to the shareholders priorities more than the Acid3 test results, Microsoft decided to ignore the calls to adhere to the new standards for as long as it could, and started developing its own internal awful standards to patch the lack of adherence to the W3C standards (ActiveX, VBScript, Silverlight...).

When Microsoft realized that a privately held company alone couldn't win a fight on your-own-propretary-standards Vs. what the rest of the world wants, it was too late. IE had become an unmaintainable patched monolith that had seen its market share drop from 90% to 20%, losing to the new rivals. They had to basically trash the old code and start from scratch with Edge to still be vaguely competitive.

Microsoft's story taught us that you can't push for your own standards while ignoring what the community wants and expect to survive for a long time. Google seems to have learned that lesson over these years (that's why Chrome still dominates the market), but if they start favoring their internal corporate priorities over the most pristine standard adherence, they might drift into the Microsoft case ad well.

Re: Chrome is Not the Standard

#400

Post by jhbadger »

gaius wrote: post #384
voidlogic wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

The main issue with IE6 was that it was Windows only, making life miserable for those not using Windows. Chrome is on Linux and OSX as well. So there isn't really the "I can't access this site because I don't use Windows" problem that was a real problem then. Even if your favorite browser is Firefox, Edge, or Safari, you can still have Chrome on your system for Chrome-only sites.
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