Opinion: Chrome is Turning Into the New Internet Explorer 6 (theverge.com) 294
Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: Chrome now has the type of dominance that Internet Explorer once did, and we're starting to see Google's own apps diverge from supporting web standards much in the same way Microsoft did a decade and a half ago. Whether you blame Google or the often slow moving World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the results have been particularly evident throughout 2017. Google has been at the center of a lot of "works best with Chrome" messages we're starting to see appear on the web. Google Meet, Allo, YouTube TV, Google Earth, and YouTube Studio Beta all block Windows 10's default browser, Microsoft Edge, from accessing them and they all point users to download Chrome instead. Some also block Firefox with messages to download Chrome. Hangouts, Inbox, and AdWords 3 were all in the same boat when they first debuted.
It's led to one developer at Microsoft to describe Google's behavior as a strategic pattern. "When the largest web company in the world blocks out competitors, it smells less like an accident and more like strategy," said a Microsoft developer in a now-deleted tweet. Google also controls the most popular site in the world, and it regularly uses it to push Chrome. If you visit Google.com in a non-Chrome browser you're prompted up to three times if you'd like to download Chrome. Google has also even extended that prompt to take over the entire page at times to really push Chrome in certain regions. Microsoft has been using similar tactics to convince Windows 10 users to stick with Edge. The troubling part for anyone who's invested in an open web is that Google is starting to ignore a principle it championed by making its own services Chrome-only -- even if it's only initially.
It's led to one developer at Microsoft to describe Google's behavior as a strategic pattern. "When the largest web company in the world blocks out competitors, it smells less like an accident and more like strategy," said a Microsoft developer in a now-deleted tweet. Google also controls the most popular site in the world, and it regularly uses it to push Chrome. If you visit Google.com in a non-Chrome browser you're prompted up to three times if you'd like to download Chrome. Google has also even extended that prompt to take over the entire page at times to really push Chrome in certain regions. Microsoft has been using similar tactics to convince Windows 10 users to stick with Edge. The troubling part for anyone who's invested in an open web is that Google is starting to ignore a principle it championed by making its own services Chrome-only -- even if it's only initially.
Monopolies gonna monopolize. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Monopolies gonna monopolize. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see a problem when it comes to beta sites, but for full production the site has to be W3C compliant, just use the HTML and CSS validators to ensure that the site follows all standards. But when it comes to JavaScript then it's a headache of its own, primarily on Microsoft browsers where those browsers have a tendency to do things differently.
But a site that depends on JavaScript is in general a pretty crappy site.
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I don't see a problem when it comes to beta sites
Does Google have sites which aren't in beta?
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What are you doing on /. if you cannot even tell the difference between a browser and a website.
Re:Monopolies gonna monopolize. (Score:5, Informative)
But when it comes to JavaScript then it's a headache of its own, primarily on Microsoft browsers where those browsers have a tendency to do things differently.
But a site that depends on JavaScript is in general a pretty crappy site.
That's pretty old-fashioned thinking. Today Edge is fast and holds to standards pretty well, while all of the most used and useful sites use a lot of Javascript. I wouldn't call any map site a "pretty crappy site" just because you have to have Javascript turned on to pan and zoom the map. That's the core functionality of the thing, trying to do some crappy workaround with arrows on each edge of the map where you click an arrow and the entire page refreshes with the map moved that direction is a stupid way to avoid Javascript.
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trying to do some crappy workaround with arrows on each edge of the map where you click an arrow and the entire page refreshes with the map moved that direction is a stupid way to avoid Javascript.
Some anti-JavaScript hardliners here and on SoylentNews have stated that they actually prefer what you call "a stupid way to avoid Javascript." Or they would prefer to download, audit, compile, and install a native map viewer application distributed in source code form.
Re:Monopolies gonna monopolize. (Score:4, Interesting)
trying to do some crappy workaround with arrows on each edge of the map where you click an arrow and the entire page refreshes with the map moved that direction is a stupid way to avoid Javascript.
Some anti-JavaScript hardliners here and on SoylentNews have stated that they actually prefer what you call "a stupid way to avoid Javascript." Or they would prefer to download, audit, compile, and install a native map viewer application distributed in source code form.
I've been creating web sites since the 1990s. I still believe that a site should "work" with JavaScript disabled. I like the idea of using AJAX type technologies to just refresh a small portion of the page (eg. scroll or zoom the map), but if JavaScript is disabled clicking on the buttons should cause the whole page to load with the desired adjustment applied.
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it isn't just sites though, I've viewed jpg images on a site using Chrome and when savign them to disk, it saves them as webp format. Annoying as hell as there's little way to save them in their native format.
Its little things like this where Google wants you to use their ways, and gives you no alternative so you just put up with it.
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But a site that depends on JavaScript is in general a pretty crappy site.
Yesterday I tried looking at Google’s security blog with JavaScript disabled for the site (my default setting)... guess what didn’t work?
They expect standardization by beta end (Score:2)
I assume the logic is that if a web platform feature is at Candidate Recommendation [w3.org] status at the start of beta, it's likely to be at least a Proposed Recommendation [w3.org] once beta ends.
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I guess due to being in an older crowd...I don't know anyone that uses Chrome really.
I looked at it a couple of days years ago, but never really got into it, never found a reason to.
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However I am curious. Chrome, seems to score highest on the HTML5 Compatibility Test, compared to other browsers. Perhaps they are using open standard features that other browsers just hadn't supported yet, causing it appear to be following its own standards.
That being said, usually services are designed to work with other browsers and keeping features a bit behind, as to support the general population. Telling people to use chrome is bad form.
Not exactly Internet Explorer. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference.
Internet Explorer back then, locked you into a shit ton of closed source proprietary secret poorly documented stuff (embed OLE objects/ActiveX extensions night mare).
There was no sane way to make a web app specifically made for IE to run on anything else except the specific version of IE that it was made for.
Google Chrome mostly relies on open standard. Take another browser that complies with the same open standard, and you can more or less access the same web apps.
Chrome's source code is even accessible. When in doubt you can check how they've implemented some non-compliant stuff.
In practice, very few web apps run in Chrome but completely fail in Firefox, despite both using entirely different engines.
Yes, a lot of web apps fail in Microsoft Edge /Internet Explorer or in Safari, but has more to do with those being bullshit browser which aren't up to date with standard (microsoft's stuff even more so) than Chrome being a proprietary target.
And then, there's the whole anti-trust / profit angle.
Back during the internet explorer scandals, Microsoft was profitting from selling software. By making sure that as many websites and webapps only work exclusively with IE, Microsoft made sure that people desperately need to buy Windows from them in order to get the bundled in Internet Explorer.
Nowadays, Google doesn't profit at all from Chrome. Their hugest profit driver is matching *results* (though not the search results themselves in Google.com, mind you. But matching ads to serve best to end users. And matching content to keep youtube users hooked while they play ads. etc.)
They don't give a shit if you use their browser. They want to use *a* browser, *any* browser, might as well be Firefox if not Chrome (which they *also* finance - Google is pouring money and financing what some could wrongly consider their "main competition").
As long as you end up using this browser to go online, where they can thrown ads at you and sell your eyeballs to the highest bidding advertiser, and where they can monetize the shit out of all the online behaviour data they can gather about you.
Chrome isn't a product on which Google is making money (directly).
Chrome is just one of the possible tools that make their actual business (profiting of users going online) possible.
You can hardly suing them for antitrust violations, Chrome is free (i.e.: "gratis" as in beer) as well as major part free software (i.e.: "libre" as in freedom to look into it and build your own browser).
Re:Not exactly Internet Explorer. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's already too much Chrome-specific stuff and the point is: it's growing. Sure, Chrome started as fully standards-based, but then so did IE in the (very) early days when it was the best browser around. Then the years went on, and the IE-specific stuff grew until we had the world of IE6.
Chrome is starting to look like it's on that trajectory. Sure, it's still mostly standards-based, but its trajectory is away from that, and in fact looks very much like the trajectory from IE3 to IE6.
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I've not really used Chrome, except trying it a day or two years and years ago.....what things out there are chrome specific?
What would I be missing since I don't use chrome? I do mainly FF when on linux and windows, Safari when on a mac, and occasionally when something only works on IE....IE.
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There's already too much Chrome-specific stuff and the point is: it's growing. Sure, Chrome started as fully standards-based, but then so did IE in the (very) early days when it was the best browser around. Then the years went on, and the IE-specific stuff grew until we had the world of IE6.
This is the problem with the standards organizations, companies do not want to be limited by the standard but adding to it takes far too long. So instead you get companies like Google and Microsoft creating technologies that enable new features beyond the standard. Microsoft had this with IE and ActiveX, now web standards have caught up in terms of functionality such that Microsoft has been able to abandon proprietary extensions because the standard is capable. This will likely come around for Google as wel
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You just described IE6 (which was free) and Microsoft (which bailed out Apple).
Nope. (Score:3)
You just described IE6 (which was free)
Nope.
it only works on microsoft windows.
it's only a free bonus for people who have already shelled out money to microsoft.
By making people dependent on IE, Microsoft makes sure to increase the sales of Windows.
By making people dependent on Chrome, Google is supposed to profit how ?
and Microsoft (which bailed out Apple).
Which served them in proving that they are not covering 100% of the market of selling operating systems on personal computers.
"Look there's also Apple selling OSes ! They are still alive".
Google is selling what again ? Mozilla is
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
Google profits from Chrome domination by intensive tracking data gathering, which they convert to ad revenue. So no, they're not profiting directly from Chrome, but they are profiting indirectly, through ad revenue and Chrome-only products (Chrome is the only browser compatible with Chromecast, for instance).
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There's a difference.
Internet Explorer back then, locked you into a shit ton of closed source proprietary secret poorly documented stuff (embed OLE objects/ActiveX extensions night mare).
Locked in? As I recall, ActiveX extensions are things you install voluntarily.
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Yes, and you installed them 'voluntarily' when, say, your company used a 'web based' product that was little more than a wrapper around an ActiveX 'control', which was essentially a Windows app that 'ran in the browser'.
And all of it was proprietary - and could only have happened in a world where it was safe to say "targeting Windows only is enough". Thankfully, that is not today's world. And, even if Google were attempting to steer the web toward Chrome-only features (and they're not - despite the compla
Re:Not exactly Internet Explorer. (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is trying to tie you to a platform. Not to a hardware or OS platform, but to their web platform, ie. Google services through a Google browser. While they do not tie you to a specific platform, their apps and services work best on Android phones, connecting to Google devices such as Chromecast and their various other devices.
They're not forcing you, they are making you take the easy way, "voluntarily" do everything in the Google ecosystem, to increase their data gathering.
Google Earth blocks Fx 57 on GNU/Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Some also block Firefox with messages to download Chrome.
Not if you're on Linux. They seem to only bully MS users. They know GNU/Linux users know better.
My experience differs from yours on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Firefox 57.0.3 (64-bit), visiting https://www.google.com/earth/ [google.com]
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And "Learn More" doesn't tell you what's wrong, it just tells you to download chrome again. Same message in Safari FWIW.
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What happens when you visit the URL in Chrome (which is a Safari wrapper) on an iPad?
Antitrust (Score:2, Flamebait)
Break up google. But most people are not capitalists and would disagree. Let the corporations rule!
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Definitely it's time for some anti-trust action on both sides of the Atlantic.
Washington and Brussels, I'm looking at you. More so Brussels at the current moment, since if Ajit Pai is anything to go by, this administration isn't going to do anything about the issue.
If Microsoft had an anti-trust case brought against it for its business practices, surely Google deserves the same treatment. They are doing the same things, if not worse.
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Has any US administration done anything ever about this kind of shenanigans? Remember the dancing monkey?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
That was because MS was basically rewarded for their monopolist behaviour back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
How so ? (Score:2)
How could you start an antitrust suit on the grounds of Google Chrome ?
Google Chrome is given away for free (unlike the IE counter example, which was only available to those people who did buy Windows from Microsoft).
the source code of most of the parts (all the important one) is available to anyone (so anybody can re-implement a chrome-clone on their system of choice).
Google doesn't make a single penny directly out of Chrome.
In fact they don't even need you to use their browser, they just want you to use a
Re:How so ? (Score:4, Insightful)
How could you start an antitrust suit on the grounds of Google Chrome ?
They are modifying their websites to discourage or prevent the use of competing browser software.
Google Chrome is given away for free
The price of the product isn't actually relevant. Internet Explorer was given away "for free" too, but you paid for the OS.
In the case of Google Chrome: when you use the browser it feeds Google information about you, so in a sense Google
receives OTHER compensation than direct payment, but there's still a payment for the product in the form of lost privacy and
Ad Dollars gained from more-effective targeting; ALSO Chrome feeds into OTHER Google services by incorporating them directly.
Google doesn't make a single penny directly out of Chrome.
False. As explained Chrome has integrated Google products such as Search defaulting to Google's service, which Google is paid ad dollars for.
Chrome is able to track your browsing and what you type into the Title bar and share valuable info with Google that makes it DIFFICULT for other Ad agencies to compete with Google.
Google doesn't give a shit about which browser, as long as you use *A* browser, and go online,
Clearly that is false, otherwise Google would not be so often prompting users to use Chrome or making websites say they Work better in Chrome, or blocking access to Edge users and sometimes FF users, As explained in the original article.
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Capitalism can be anything you want it to be, use your imagination.
Like the means of production being owned by the people?
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None of the means of production are owned by squirrels, as far as I know, all by people. Of course, concentration matters. The nice thing about Capitalism is that it's fully compatible with the means of production being owned very broadly by the people: it's just a matter of stock ownership. Before the '08 crash around 2/3s of Americans owned stock (directly or indirectly), which is a pretty good distance down that road.
But the Pareto Principle is going to happen with any economic system in which people
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Sure, if they can work around big government run by the capitalists. Worker owned businesses, co-ops, credit unions are all examples of the people owning the means of production/banking.
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you know though, if you define 'the people' as the 'nation state', you get fascism.
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I think the parent was referring to free market from dictionary.com
Free market
noun
1. an economic system in which prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear of monopolies.
Once you get monopolies competition no longer works to set prices or drive efficiency.
Free market vs. unregulated market (Score:2)
I guess some of the confusion about the meaning of "free market" comes from the habit of some right-libertarians to confuse it with "unregulated market" when they fail to see monopolist practice as private coercion.
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No. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production (capital). Whether or not that leaves you with the ability to start your own competition or take your business elsewhere is completely beside the point.
Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
If Microsoft wants to complain they might want to fix their crappy browser first. Every time I've tried to use Edge it stutters or freezes.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the fact that Microsoft continually finds new ways to harass or trick me into using Edge. Microsoft is in no position to complain.
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No worries, the keys are like right next to each other.
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Agreed. Microsoft browsers are the reason we cannot have nice things on the Internet. I still spend far too much time making sure things work on IE 11 which could be spent on meaningful work.
Even though I generally agree with the content of the article, the title made it hard to read it objectively. IE 6 was a horrible browser browser which didn't comply with web standards and caused a generation of developers to hate web development. Chrome is none of those things. The practices of Google mentioned in the
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The use of the browser as a general purpose interface is stupid and dangerous
What general-purpose interface that isn't a web browser would you prefer? Or would you prefer to require each application's developer to make the application six times: once for Windows 7 desktop, once for UWP, once for macOS, once for iOS, once for X11/Linux, and once for Android?
https://tech.slashdot.org
People like you are using an unencrypted text based and inherently insecure technology
What's so unencrypted here?
It doesn't help (Score:5, Insightful)
My plug ins work (Score:3)
that Firefox 57 just broke a mountain of plugins (mine included) and makes fixing said plugins difficult if not impossible (still wrestling with that).
Every plug in that I use still works fine and seemed to make the transition without any issue. Your mileage may very of course.
My Greasemonkey scripts broke (Score:2)
As for my own plugin, it uses FFMPEG to do conversions, which again is damn near impossible without file system access. And that's before I get into making it all play nice in the new multi
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since I can't just copy the files over they don't work. I'm stuck putting everything in one ginormous file.
That's been true for years. Are native applications distributed as a pile of .o files to link together at runtime, or as a single .exe file?
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This is bug 1325692, which was marked "wontfix" for Firefox 57.
Yes? That's not surprising given that Firefox 57 is already out. It's not marked as WONTFIX in general, just for the Firefox 57 release. Firefox 57 had some pretty hefty triaging since it was such a major change.
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Bug 1325692 was reported 2016-12-23, just shy of eleven months before the 2017-11-14 release of Firefox 57.
Yes, again this is not especially surprising. It's not that they won't fix it, it's that Firefox 57 was such a huge change that they had to aggressively triage bugs.
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Firefox also refuses to implement FIDO U2F for cheap, reliable two-factor authentication. Right now, only Chrome and Opera support this functionality, and this is the only reason I am not using Firefox at the moment.
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I have installed Firefox 57 and it has been working find since
[NO CARRIER]
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Don't go blaming Firefox that you're stuck on dial up.
Blame Congress instead.
FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also been horribly unstable for me since the 57 update. Not a crash for years before. Practically a daily occurrence when 57 first came out.
Works fine for me. Hasn't crashed once yet on me (and hasn't in years before that) and it's considerably faster than previous versions. I've run it on Windows, Macs and Linux on somewhere north of 20 machines. Color me dubious.
So far, Firefox 57 is somewhere around Windows 10 on the scale of new versions I don't want anywhere near my machines, but given security risks, staying on an older version is not practical in the long term.
Vague and unsupported assertions of instability from an Anonymous Coward. Very believable.
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It's also been horribly unstable for me since the 57 update. Not a crash for years before. Practically a daily occurrence when 57 first came out.
Works fine for me. Hasn't crashed once yet on me (and hasn't in years before that) and it's considerably faster than previous versions. I've run it on Windows, Macs and Linux on somewhere north of 20 machines. Color me dubious.
You must be a Gnome developer. "It works for me therefore it's definitely you, not the software".
Anyway, why is this even surprising, it's clearly a major change for 57, there's going to be problems along the line. Problems can be fixed, but denying that anyone has them is not going to help.
Trolling (Score:2)
You must be a Gnome developer. "It works for me therefore it's definitely you, not the software".
Nope. Not a developer at all nor any interest in becoming one. Actually I'm an industrial engineer as well as an accountant by trade. But I have been a user of literally every major browser since Mosaic back in 1993. I've used Firefox as my primary browser since its release. If something meaningfully better came along I'm not brand loyal but I regard Chrome (and Safari and Edge) as fine but not any better.
That said you have to be able to replicate a problem to fix it. I have no doubt that some install
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Why is your personal, anecdotal experience more valid than mine? I also run Firefox on a range of different machines, on a range of different platforms, with a range of different extensions installed. I do a lot of web development work, so I have all the major browsers running on test setups regularly.
I'm happy for you if you're happy with Firefox 57. Unfortunately, that doesn't help me or anyone else in my position. I am reminded daily of several useful things that I no longer have because the extensions t
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It's very stable on my machines. But I only use AdBlock on it. No other plugins.
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Yes, I'm fairly sure the new extensions are the cause of those problems, because I have observed far more instability on systems with several extensions installed than those with few or none. Since one of the biggest selling points of the new architecture in 57 was that it was supposed to isolate these things better and thus improve stability and security, that's still rather disappointing, though.
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I've wondered about doing the same, as my observations have been strikingly different on different systems. Clearly something didn't work right in some cases, but it's certainly possible based on my experience to date that it was due to some sort of profile corruption or failure to migrate extensions on some of the machines I use that is the root cause.
Bug 1325692 is still NEW (Score:3, Insightful)
This "new API, which Mozilla gave more then a year's notice of," launched without counterparts to several categories of functionality present in the old API. This was despite extension developers giving Mozilla "more then a year's notice of" the fact that these categories of functionality were missing in the new API.
Need a specific example? Let me know when the request for a way to rebind shortcuts [mozilla.org] becomes RESOLVED FIXED or even ASSIGNED. Right now, it's marked as "NEW" which means "will not be worked on by
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Web standards? (Score:2)
This is what we get for doing away with real standardisation and allowing "evergreen" browsers and nonsense like "living standards" to take over.
The only meaningful standards left today, for a lot of practical purposes, are the de facto ones of what works in the browsers your visitors are using right now. Anything else can change tomorrow anyway.
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They're the ones responsible for Adobe Flash (nee Macromedia Flash) becoming the de facto standard for multimedia on the web. Web designers begged for a way to implement things like in-line video and audio, and dynamic web menus via HTML. The W3C refused to add those features. So web designers looked for other ways to do it. And lo
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It appears you object to integrating audio and video features into a text based platform. Would have preferred making a separate audio and video based platform for use alongside the text based platform? If so, what would this platform have looked like?
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This is what we get for doing away with real standardisation and allowing "evergreen" browsers and nonsense like "living standards" to take over. The only meaningful standards left today, for a lot of practical purposes, are the de facto ones of what works in the browsers your visitors are using right now. Anything else can change tomorrow anyway.
From your UID you should be old enough to remember all the de facto extensions back in the Netscape vs IE days, when did we ever have real standardization? The W3C was always more of a working group than a stamp of approval, the recommendations were basically the things they agreed on and everything else they did their own way. They had a few showcase Acid tests but never anything like a compliance suite.
And just because something is a standard doesn't make it a good standard, "design by committee" is not a
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I first learned web development with little more than the W3C's own documentation and some browsers to experiment with. It's true that browsers always had their quirks, but in the early days you were talking about, things like HTML and CSS did basically do what the documentation said. You didn't lose much if you just avoided the browser-specific oddities as much as possible, and since browsers in those days were at least relatively stable, the quirks were well understood and workarounds for the major ones w
They're close (Score:3)
2 Years ago, MS still held an incredible 50% of desktop browser share:
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=201/ [netmarketshare.com]
Now, they are down to 20%:
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0/ [netmarketshare.com]
Despite being literally shoved into users faces, the introduction of Edge didn't draw users away from Chrome. No, it seemed to send IE users running to it instead.
Chrome now has a commanding presence on desktop and we've already seen Google start to flex their muscle a bit in the same way Microsoft did when they controlled the world with IE. Make no mistake, Google has nowhere near that level of stranglehold but since the vast majority of browsers are Chrome they are the big dog now and they can get away with a lot biting.
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Well, the link to the past seems broken since netmarketshare designed the website since the last time I used. But it looks like IE/Edge combined is now more like 17%.
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Google has nowhere near that level of stranglehold
Yeah, there are a couple of major differences. First, isn't Chrome open source? At least most of it? It's hard to argue that Chrome is ensuring vendor lock-in to the extent that the source code is available to be forked. But also, Chrome isn't really able to leverage such a dominant OS to force the browser on people. There's Android and ChromeOS, but neither really give Google the level of control over the computer market that Microsoft had back in the day. Web developers are generally not going to cr
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But then Microsoft launched Edge and it was a crushing blow to Microsoft's market share.
It doesn't help that Edge is a beta-quality browser. It does a lot of things reasonable well, most of them even pretty good and it tries to comply to standards. However, some stuff not works at all. Some stuff is horrible slow. And the browser itself is not a pinnacle of stability and also not free of weird non-reproducible quirks.
Admitting, that fits the general windows-10 way of doing things: more features coming faster, but at the cost of reduced stability.
In my personal point of view, Firefox is back as
subject (Score:3)
Even if you're convinced that Webkit is strictly speaking better than anything else, it's not like people don't have Webkit alternatives. In Windows-land, I've found that having Chromium installed is most likely an incidence of malware, as there are any number of pre-fucked Chrome-alikes, but there's always Vivaldi or Opera, which are both completely functional and IMO indistinguishable from Chrome.
Ironically, now that Edge has some level of Add-in support and there's both "mainstream" Chrome-like Firefox and Greybeard "Pry my addons from my cold, dead hands" Palemoon, it's not like there aren't any non-Webkit alternatives out in the world, either. It is a bit of a shame that for most web developers "mobile web" = Webkit, but that's also somewhat reasonable given the prevalence of Apple and Google devices.
I suppose the question comes down to whether the value of the actual Google services integration (profile sync, better Youtube experience, cloud print, desktop sharing) is worth ceding control of the whole browsing experience to Google. I don't really use any of that stuff so I can't say, but no, letting a giant ad company control my internet experience really isn't any better than when we were pissed a Microsoft for trying to do the same thing. I'm not really seeing how Google got to this point on the desktop. Firefox and Safari were never THAT bad. Is it really just a matter of marketing?
Google did it through integration and UX (Score:3)
I suppose the question comes down to whether the value of the actual Google services integration (profile sync, better Youtube experience, cloud print, desktop sharing) is worth ceding control of the whole browsing experience to Google. I don't really use any of that stuff so I can't say, but no, letting a giant ad company control my internet experience really isn't any better than when we were pissed a Microsoft for trying to do the same thing. I'm not really seeing how Google got to this point on the desktop. Firefox and Safari were never THAT bad. Is it really just a matter of marketing?
First let me say that I am no fan of Google's products outside of search and maps. I simply don't like their tracking. But I can certainly see how they got to where they are. They tackled and conquered amazing problems with their products. Earth, maps/streetview, search, android/play, docs, and drive just to name a few. And Chrome. They took the browser market. I think that they did all of these things with good ol' engineering. They raised the bar, and not through promises but by delivering product
Aww. (Score:5, Funny)
As they say - What goes around, comes around.
What about Safari? (Score:3)
Sure you can install Chrome, Firefox, Opera or whatever on macOS, but on iOS even the other browsers are just a GUI attached on top of Safari, i.e. WebKit.
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A sufficiently funded developer of a web application can rewrite it in Swift or Objective-C++ as a native iOS application and offer it through the App Store.
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Not really. Because to get any kind of usefull javascript performance you need to write a jit compiler, and that is not allowed to iOS.
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By "rewrite it as a native iOS application" I don't think he meant "create an 'app' that's really just a crippled web browser to show your web app."
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rewrite it in Swift or Objective-C++
to get any kind of usefull javascript performance you need to write a jit compiler
What does "a jit compiler" have to do with an application that has been rewritten in Swift or ObjC?
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Don't port the browser; instead, port the individual apps. For example, don't port Chrome; instead, port Google Earth.
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You want it to pass through [the cost of a native iOS rewrite of a web application] to you in terms of more expensive product?
Yes. Offer the web version to the public without charge, and paywall the special version for (generally richer) users of iOS.
Firefox (Score:2)
Google has been at the center of a lot of "works best with Chrome" messages we're starting to see appear on the web.
This is one of the (lesser) reasons I still use Firefox. Already been down this road once with Microsoft. Don't need to do it again with Google. Nothing particularly against Chrome but any particular browser getting too much market share is a bad thing.
On the other hand I haven't really seen any sites yet that actually require Chrome. Back in the day when IE6 was dominant it actually got kind of hard at times to use the web without resorting to IE6 now and then.
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Why didn't WebExtensions fix this? (Score:2)
Several business applications support certain features in Chrome and not Firefox, or have Chrome extensions but not Firefox extensions.
I thought the WebExtensions transition was intended to let Chrome extension developers upload their extensions to addons.mozilla.org nearly unchanged. If a particular extension's publisher has stated its business decision to deliberately make it exclusive to Chrome Web Store, please name and shame.
It might happen, but it's a big stretch right now. (Score:4, Insightful)
I was a web developer in the IE6 days. We're nowhere near where we were then. A few Google specific sites blocking Edge is hardly the horribleness that was IE6. With IE6, many, many, many companies thought of it as a software platform to develop software on. You also essentially HAD to have workarounds for IE6 because it didn't support standards.
I'm not in love with Google, and they can most certainly do wrong. But we aren't anywhere near what IE6 was, and I don't see the same thing happening with Chrome.
Also, Google's business model isn't the same as MS's. MS sees the web as a threat to its business model. The web IS Google's business model. They don't really have a huge interest in you using Chrome, they just want the web to grow in popularity. If other browsers adopt the same web standards, that's good for Google, not bad.
Now, that's not to say Chrome's popularity isn't an issue. We need more diversity and less centralization. But for a variety of reasons I find it hard for the same IE6 situation to repeat itself. The world in 2018 isn't the same at it was in 2002.
Missing web platform components (Score:2)
Google Meet, Allo, YouTube TV, Google Earth, and YouTube Studio Beta all block Windows 10's default browser, Microsoft Edge, from accessing them and they all point users to download Chrome instead.
I imagine this is an attempt to provide an easily understandable alternative for non-technical users should detection of necessary video codecs or JavaScript APIs fail. Though not as far behind standards as IE was during the IE 6-8 era, Edge is also perceived as lagging, as is Firefox ESR at times. What is a web application supposed to do when a necessary component of the web platform is missing? Is it recommended, for example, to implement an entire video codec in JavaScript as a polyfill?
Would the followi
When Debian's Chromium is "no longer supported" (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, it's particularly alarming when the Debian Stable version of Chromium is showing as "no longer supported" by Google Docs. I ran into this warning several times, and it's one of several reasons I had to break my addiction to Google Docs. I can understand Google's desire to add functionality to their Google Docs platform, but to break Docs' functionality in fairly recent versions of their own open-source browser baffles me. There are reasons I don't want to use Chrome, and prefer to use Chromium. When Google slaps limitations on my ability to use W3C standardized browsers and force me to use their non-standard browser, I get the feeling they're only going to do worse in the future - al la Microsoft.
And so, last year I decided to ditch Google Docs and go back to LibreOffice. The most painful aspect of this is the loss of world-wide, easy access to my documents. Leaving the cloud is a hassle, but it's better than vendor lock-in.
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Lasting power (Score:2)
The only way Chrome will have IE6 levels of influence is if web developers will have to support its quirks and bugs for a decade, even after new versions of Chrome come out.
It is possible if Google leaves bugs in place in future versions and intentionally starts a process if embrace extend extinguish. It could happen but we are not at IE6 levels of insidiousness.
Finding web apps that aren't even trying (Score:4, Informative)
The google Empire is putting on the squeeze (Score:3)
Google's new strategy has definitely been walled-garden - for example look at the youtube vs amazon fire tv debacle.
They're starting to use the systems they already inhabit as leverage to wall people in.
Nonsense. This is something quite different. (Score:3)
There are many things that are way different then back in the IE days, the most important perhaps being that unlike IE the essential parts of Chrome are FOSS. There are quite a few feasible Chrome clones out there - commercial and enthusiast/FOSS and Chrome is way closer to web standards that IE ever was. Google would be very stupid to turn Chrome into something proprietary.
Google wants the Web to remain free. They just want everyone to use Google, that's all.
The danger with Google isn't Chrome but that they potentially have the power to hijack the web. For ordinary people who can't tell the difference they bascially have already, with their search engine. However, as soon as they attempt lock-in, people would notice and streat clear. The choice to rely on Google ranking for you business is nearly without alternatives for many people, but still no one forces you to do it,
I see some dangers lurking but Chrome turning proprietary and locking others out sure isn't one of them. At least not yet.
My 2 cents.
Not the same situation at all (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, there are similarities but it is actually completely different, both in philosophy and magnitude.
First, besides a few bleeding edge web apps (pun not intended), the vast majority of websites work on any recent browser. The situation is much better in that regard than it was before. In fact most headaches come more from compatibility between different versions within the same family rather than between the latest version of different families.
And unlike Microsoft in the IE6 days, Google actually wants other browsers to be compatible. Google doesn't make money off Chrome, they make money when you use their online services, they are perfectly happy to have Firefox users too, they even pay good money to Mozilla for it.
Microsoft was in the opposite situation: they make money by selling you the browser (as a component of Windows), they broke compatibility deliberately so that you needed to pay for Windows/IE in order to access a significant part of the web.
The reason Google makes Chrome is to push standards. When they want to add a feature that is advantageous to them (ex: lowers their bandwidth requirements) they don't have to beg standards governing bodies and other browsers developers. They just implement it in Chrome and encourage others to do the same.
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Sometimes it takes an asshole to spot an asshole.
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XUL and a non-Chrome UI already exists. It's called Palemoon. It has drawbacks of its own but if those are things you want, it's out there.
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The challenge was that they started following chrome's lead after the exodus of users. The exodus was going to happen regardless.
It is fair to complain that rather than catering to their loyal users, they tried to compete with chrome by being more chrome like, but either way their user share was going to decline.
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SIP, offline messages, and files (Score:2)
Hangouts is one of those obviously-silly-on-the-face-of-it services for people who don't realize that users can already communicate with one another using standard protocols and therefore nobody needs another fucking "chat website."
Sometimes these FCWs, such as Hangouts, Skype, Slack, and Discord, fill perceived functionality gaps in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and other standard chat protocols. For example, how can one set up a SIP call over IRC? Or view messages sent to you or to a group while you were offline or were using a different device? Or attach files when both sides are behind a firewall?