11 ms·

> does assumption on how things "should" be (in a highly subjective way) They claim they are making these decisions based on user data which I have no reason t

> does assumption on how things "should" be (in a highly subjective way) They claim they are making these decisions based on user data which I have no reason to doubt. > and breaks the web. Breaks crap websites that are broken already from performance and usability perspective. I personally think this is exactly what is needed to make the web better as a whole. Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense, and never thinking about the good of the ecosystem as a whole. Google is also "breaking the web" by not auto playing videos, not allowing alerts in one tab to block the entire browser, etc. Those all seem like good things to me.

twothamendment 9y ago
How about deciding to ignore requests to play a sound? I like it as a user but as a dev, now I have a big report that says the cash register isn't making a beep sounds when the user scans an item. Yes there is a setting to turn it off, but now there are quite a few people confused about why it quit working.
FussyZeus 9y ago
So aside of the fact that you agree with their decisions, how is this at all different from how Internet Explorer's dev team made arbitrary decisions on how things would work in their browser, and in so doing because of their market dominance, influenced how the web grew, looked and functioned for decades to come? And how much technical debt had to be tacked onto every project to address that need (and is to this day)? I'm all for moving the web forward and addressing stuff like this is a critical part of that, but this is not moving the web forward, this is moving Chrome forward, and in so doing breaking thousands if not millions of sites, and placing the burden of their repair on their developers with no notice and no better solution, just a different hack than the hack they were using.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  There are several other first-class browsers that you have a choice of if you don't like Chrome. The same was not true during IE's era of dominance. Also, do you agree, in general terms, that sometimes changes can be good whereas other times changes can be bad?
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Most of those are rebranded chromium. The only big ones that are independent are Safari (since Google forked Webkit to create Blink), Firefox, and IE/Edge. And the impression i have is that Safari is lagging, Mozilla is directionless and struggling to keep Firefox relevant, and MS is, well, MS. Ever since Opera folded and made their browser a Chromium clone, only Mozilla have been carrying the banner for standard correctness. And even they seem more and more bow to Google's decrees (whole virtually cloning the Chrome look and feel with each Firefox update).
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      Mozilla is directionless and struggling? Huh? They just came out with Firefox Quantum, which is a huge step forward, and I believe might have taken the web performance crown.
      - WillPostForFood 9y ago
        If you step back and look at Mozilla's performance, it looks like they have been struggling. https://www.w3counter.com/trends https://www.w3counter.com/trends Hopefully they are on the upswing recently because they have found more focus and direction.
    - gkya 9y ago
      Quantum is a great improvement to Firefox. I'm running 57.0b14 ATM (normally I'm quite conservative with anything except Emacs) and quite pleased. The performance improvements are quite noticable. Though I do wish they created a more user-extensible browser, a bit a la Emacs.
      - Izkata 9y ago
        > Though I do wish they created a more user-extensible browser, a bit a la Emacs. That's what Firefox used to be, and one of the main things that got it to where it is now. But 57 is also the one that drops that flexibility with removal of the XUL. Supposedly there'll be new API calls for WebExtension-converted add-ons, but it seems to be really slow going. Between this and the Electrolysis update that also broke a lot of add-ons, I've seen a few get abandoned by their devs, who are fed up with Mozilla breaking what works.
- staticassertion 9y ago
  It's not really comparable to IE. MS had a pretty explicit goal of destroying Netscape - to the extent that they were making deals with other companies to break compat with Netscape. Chrome is breaking 'autofill=false' on webforms because its really bad to have autofill=false most of the time. For example, this was breaking password managers, forcing users to have a worse experience around something as security critical as entering a password. If the goal is to have the user never remember their passwords to avoid phishing, this is a really important thing. I'm entirely, 100% in support of them ignoring 'autofill=false' because most of the time I see this as a security flaw on websites. This isn't anticompetitive - they aren't trying to break websites on Firefox, they aren't contacting websites to get them to do some Chrome specific thing. They're ignoring a really bad default that hurts users.
  - hoosieree 9y ago
    Whether or not you think Chrome "wants" to destroy the other browsers, we can observe that: Chrome is the most used web browser Chrome is deciding how the web should work unilaterally. These are the exact conditions that produced ActiveX and resulted in many websites with an IE6-only requirement. As much as developers dislike having to design around the various browser quirks, the situation will get much worse if any one browser becomes "important" enough that you can forget the others.
    - laumars 9y ago
      Chrome is at around 60% of desktop user agents, which is obviously significant but nothing on the scale of what IE was in the 90s. What's more, Chrome's market share plummets massively when you take other devices into account. So comparing Chrome to IE is a little premature when talking about browser monopolies. Next lets look at the actual technology we're complaining about. ActiveX wasn't just an Internet Explorer-only feature, it was Windows only as well. Furthermore it wasn't the only feature in IE that wasn't supported on other browsers (VBScript, JScript, WebForms†, different support for HTML and CSS, etc). Where as Chrome doesn't diverge from other browsers all that significantly in comparison. Chromes changes could be compared better to Internet Explorer with regards to how IE4 changed the way frames were used (inc the addition of iframes). This was really annoying as a developer but actually these changes were for the better - particularly the iframe - and eventually those features landed in other browsers. Including Netscape Communicator. The W3C are pretty glacial at updating their specs so it's often required browsers taking things into their own hands, eg the browser CSS prefixes. Developers would moan about having to add lots of extra junk to their code just to get new features to work but it was the price to pay for having access to new features that hadn't landed in the various web specifications. So as much as they would moan about vendor prefixes, they'd welcome browsers extending the specification. The above paragraph wasn't all that long ago and the difference between then and now was that Chrome, Firefox and Opera were all at it with IE still playing catch up with regards to compliance; but now the browser market has consolidated where Chrome (read: Blink) has absorbed Opera, IE has largely died off and Firefox is sadly slowly falling out of fashion. So people are paranoid Google might abuse their advantage. However I really cannot see that happen - or at least not with regards to Chrome. Not only is Chrome's market share small compared to IE in the 90s / early 00s but also the web is viewed from a multitude of different devices. As someone who has managed online shops, games and other popular web-based services I can testify that product owners do NOT want to lose business from portable devices. If just because some product owners are so technologically inept that their primary computing device outside of the office is an iPad and/or their business iPhone. † I think it was called. But basically it was their 90s tech for writing apps that looked like Win Forms.
ksk 9y ago
We all would like to see this "user data" and make up our own mind. Is the whole open source thing just a gimmick for Google? >Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense, and never thinking about the good of the ecosystem as a whole. >Google is also "breaking the web" by not auto playing videos, not allowing alerts in one tab to block the entire browser, etc. Those all seem like good things to me. Its interesting that you're calling for a browser to not implement standards. In any case, an advertising company would be the last entity who I would trust to do anything "good" with regards to the web.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > Its interesting that you're calling for a browser to not implement standards The "standards" are created by the browser makers. It is up to them to decide what the standards are by choosing what to implement. For instance, Apple can decide to not allow 3rd party cookies, which "breaks the web" and "doesn't follow standards" but it is also the right thing to do.
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    > The "standards" are created by the browser makers You're half right: standards are created by W3C & IETF, which includes browser makers. > It is up to them to decide what the standards are by choosing what to implement Kind of like IE and ActiveX, right? Right? ............Right?
  - ksk 9y ago
    If your position is "anyone can do anything" as long as it has some "perceived good" - in your opinion, then okay, that is your position and I have no argument.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    In practice, the causality is even more delayed than you describe. Browser vendors implement what they want, and then once two or more vendors have implemented a feature and some developers have adopted it, it gets considered for standardization. Standards which are written without a working implementation are widely ignored; there's a whole graveyard around the W3C (see eg. the Semantic Web) where somebody wrote a standard and nobody cared.
KeitIG 9y ago
Talking from the developer point of view here, not the user's: I'm expecting things to be working the same way they are documented in the manual. The changes some browsers have made to autoplay videos or alerts do not contradict what is in the manual.
- pas 9y ago
  With evergreen browsers, that basically requires a dev team to adjust the code and release/deploy a new version every X months. WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really. Let the market (and the users) decide. If a site takes forever to load, and scrolling is impossible because it takes ages to scroll, and burns a mark in your palm in that time, then maybe you'll reconsider visiting that site ever again.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    With evergreen browsers, that basically requires a dev team to adjust the code and release/deploy a new version every X months. WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really. It's not automatically OK to break functionality even for security/privacy reasons, IMHO. Browsers are used for many useful purposes that do not involve visiting sites run by large organisations with full-time development teams assigned to ongoing maintenance. Intranets. Embedded UIs in devices. Personal sites full of useful information but with no-one actively maintaining them. The number of breaking changes browser developers have been willing to make in recent years does not bode well for the future of the Web, a platform which became what it is today precisely because it was a known target for developers and for a few years the industry standards actually meant something. The Brave New Web is one dominated by ego-stroking contests between the major browser developers and huge, centralised sites with effectively unlimited resources run by just a handful of organisations. Notice that neither users nor original content creators appear in that previous description. The original author here is quite right to call the big players out for that. We saw Microsoft's infamous embrace-and-extend strategy and the way the Web was held back for years as a result. We should be just as wary when the likes of Google sing the same song.
fuck_google 9y ago
Humility often works better than arrogance.
gkya 9y ago
It's not onto Google or someone else to decide good or bad coding practices, and implement this sort of precautions breaking standards.
Daycrawler 9y ago
Most of those examples seem "good" because they prevent nasty behavior. This is conformance to the lowest usage, just like the FBI tries to argue against encryption because bad guys are using it too.
ivanhoe 9y ago
There are valid arguments for both sides, but instead of forcing this upon everyone, Chrome team could have added it as a config option. Set the defaults for autocomplete anyway you like, and then let the user change the behaviour only on some sites. Or if you don't wish to pollute the settings with this, extract this behaviour into an extension and let the people choose if it bothers them enough to go and install it.
- pricechild 9y ago
  "config option" can't be the right answer. It's simply not realistic the 1000th time it's offered as the obvious solution.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Either googles solution is better or its not. If it is then google should make it the default even if it provides an option. Then even if they provide the option 99.999% will use the default rendering the option basically worthless. If its not they should probably just work how everyone else works.
  - pathseeker 9y ago
    >Either googles solution is better or its not. No, it's better for users who read the auto-filled boxes to make sure they are sane (which is what I do). It's not good for users that don't understand what auto-fill is (i.e. they think the website is suggesting it to them).
    - hinkley 9y ago
      Or people staring at a form that is two screens long... Easy to miss things.
      - crottypeter 9y ago
        Or people unlucky enough to land on a site that has adopted "in-field labels". Once those autofill, it's anyone's guess whether you have put the right data in.
sterlingfs 9y ago
I think many will see this as a type of tyranny, and therefore will be worried about the future implications of yielding authority to a single monolith.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Google have been doing something similarly questionable for a long time by dictating how sites have to be presented if they want to rank highly in the search engine. They're just being more brazen about it now by actually breaking sites in Chrome.
Cacti 9y ago
It's not the browser developers jobs to police the web.
- slrz 9y ago
  But it is the job of browser developers to build programs that serve their users. If I, as a user, want to autocomplete a form field, the website operator doesn't get a say in whether I can do that. The settings that come with the markup are best understood as a recommendation, a slight hint that autocomplete might not be appropriate here. The final say is always with the user, though. Sadly, through over-usage on the part of website operators, this hint has become utterly useless.
  - learc83 9y ago
    But completely ignoring it isn't super helpful either. I run into more issues with chrome autofilling in forms inappropriately than I ever did with forms that I couldn't autofill. I think the solution is to follow the hint, but give users an override button next to or inside form fields that have it set to off.
BFatts 9y ago
"Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense, and never thinking about the good of the ecosystem as a whole." Are you serious? No one thinks this way? I've worked at several companies where the software I've written was EXPLICITLY written with others in mind. To claim "rarely, if ever" shows that you know very little about this industry. Or, you surround yourself with a bunch of selfish people who shouldn't be doing software development.
josteink 9y ago
> Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense But the megacorp Google is acting all altruistic and not at all abusing it monopoly powers? Give me a break.
notjoemama 9y ago
Woah woah woah. Let me recount/nutshell the crux of conversations I've had with my product manager(s) about things like this. Me: Hey, I'd like to add a work-item to our current sprint that reworks semantic attributes into our site. Them: What would that do? Me: It improves the underlying architecture making the markup more usable and extensible. Them: How does that benefit the users? Me: Over time it will reduce the TTM for features and allows us to adopt a common standard others use on the web. Them: So there's no UI and it won't affect their workflow? Me: Well, no. Them: Then why would you suggest it? We don't have the budget to add meaningless development tasks. I might be biased towards thinking there are plenty of developers and engineers out there thinking about this stuff but we don't always get the final say in what is done. Also, a lot of enterprise applications were and continue to be around before many of these standards. It's a struggle to improve what doesn't directly add to the bottom line.
- scarlac 9y ago
  This is true in a very practical sense: Product people will not care about engineering specifics. But that being said, I think you're missing the important take-away from that conclusion: You must decide that it's necessary. As an engineer, you are the most qualified individual to determine if something is technically necessary. Just like you decided that proper indentation, unit tests, refactors, etc. are important, so must we decide that other elements are.
- dpark 9y ago
  > It's a struggle to improve what doesn't directly add to the bottom line. That's exactly the point and you're essentially nitpicking (with anecdata) the fact that he pinned the problem on developers instead of product managers. Regardless of who is making the decision in companies, the end result is pretty much the same.
- yawaramin 9y ago
  > How does that benefit the users? It brings the site closer to recommended accessibility guidelines, making it easier for e.g. people who have vision loss to navigate. It also reduces our potential legal liability to such users for not meeting accessibility requirements.

twothamendment 9y ago

How about deciding to ignore requests to play a sound? I like it as a user but as a dev, now I have a big report that says the cash register isn't making a beep sounds when the user scans an item. Yes there is a setting to turn it off, but now there are quite a few people confused about why it quit working.

FussyZeus 9y ago

So aside of the fact that you agree with their decisions, how is this at all different from how Internet Explorer's dev team made arbitrary decisions on how things would work in their browser, and in so doing because of their market dominance, influenced how the web grew, looked and functioned for decades to come? And how much technical debt had to be tacked onto every project to address that need (and is to this day)? I'm all for moving the web forward and addressing stuff like this is a critical part of that, but this is not moving the web forward, this is moving Chrome forward, and in so doing breaking thousands if not millions of sites, and placing the burden of their repair on their developers with no notice and no better solution, just a different hack than the hack they were using.

CydeWeys 9y ago
There are several other first-class browsers that you have a choice of if you don't like Chrome. The same was not true during IE's era of dominance. Also, do you agree, in general terms, that sometimes changes can be good whereas other times changes can be bad?
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Most of those are rebranded chromium. The only big ones that are independent are Safari (since Google forked Webkit to create Blink), Firefox, and IE/Edge. And the impression i have is that Safari is lagging, Mozilla is directionless and struggling to keep Firefox relevant, and MS is, well, MS. Ever since Opera folded and made their browser a Chromium clone, only Mozilla have been carrying the banner for standard correctness. And even they seem more and more bow to Google's decrees (whole virtually cloning the Chrome look and feel with each Firefox update).
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    Mozilla is directionless and struggling? Huh? They just came out with Firefox Quantum, which is a huge step forward, and I believe might have taken the web performance crown.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      If you step back and look at Mozilla's performance, it looks like they have been struggling. https://www.w3counter.com/trends https://www.w3counter.com/trends Hopefully they are on the upswing recently because they have found more focus and direction.
  - gkya 9y ago
    Quantum is a great improvement to Firefox. I'm running 57.0b14 ATM (normally I'm quite conservative with anything except Emacs) and quite pleased. The performance improvements are quite noticable. Though I do wish they created a more user-extensible browser, a bit a la Emacs.
    - Izkata 9y ago
      > Though I do wish they created a more user-extensible browser, a bit a la Emacs. That's what Firefox used to be, and one of the main things that got it to where it is now. But 57 is also the one that drops that flexibility with removal of the XUL. Supposedly there'll be new API calls for WebExtension-converted add-ons, but it seems to be really slow going. Between this and the Electrolysis update that also broke a lot of add-ons, I've seen a few get abandoned by their devs, who are fed up with Mozilla breaking what works.
staticassertion 9y ago
It's not really comparable to IE. MS had a pretty explicit goal of destroying Netscape - to the extent that they were making deals with other companies to break compat with Netscape. Chrome is breaking 'autofill=false' on webforms because its really bad to have autofill=false most of the time. For example, this was breaking password managers, forcing users to have a worse experience around something as security critical as entering a password. If the goal is to have the user never remember their passwords to avoid phishing, this is a really important thing. I'm entirely, 100% in support of them ignoring 'autofill=false' because most of the time I see this as a security flaw on websites. This isn't anticompetitive - they aren't trying to break websites on Firefox, they aren't contacting websites to get them to do some Chrome specific thing. They're ignoring a really bad default that hurts users.
- hoosieree 9y ago
  Whether or not you think Chrome "wants" to destroy the other browsers, we can observe that: Chrome is the most used web browser Chrome is deciding how the web should work unilaterally. These are the exact conditions that produced ActiveX and resulted in many websites with an IE6-only requirement. As much as developers dislike having to design around the various browser quirks, the situation will get much worse if any one browser becomes "important" enough that you can forget the others.
  - laumars 9y ago
    Chrome is at around 60% of desktop user agents, which is obviously significant but nothing on the scale of what IE was in the 90s. What's more, Chrome's market share plummets massively when you take other devices into account. So comparing Chrome to IE is a little premature when talking about browser monopolies. Next lets look at the actual technology we're complaining about. ActiveX wasn't just an Internet Explorer-only feature, it was Windows only as well. Furthermore it wasn't the only feature in IE that wasn't supported on other browsers (VBScript, JScript, WebForms†, different support for HTML and CSS, etc). Where as Chrome doesn't diverge from other browsers all that significantly in comparison. Chromes changes could be compared better to Internet Explorer with regards to how IE4 changed the way frames were used (inc the addition of iframes). This was really annoying as a developer but actually these changes were for the better - particularly the iframe - and eventually those features landed in other browsers. Including Netscape Communicator. The W3C are pretty glacial at updating their specs so it's often required browsers taking things into their own hands, eg the browser CSS prefixes. Developers would moan about having to add lots of extra junk to their code just to get new features to work but it was the price to pay for having access to new features that hadn't landed in the various web specifications. So as much as they would moan about vendor prefixes, they'd welcome browsers extending the specification. The above paragraph wasn't all that long ago and the difference between then and now was that Chrome, Firefox and Opera were all at it with IE still playing catch up with regards to compliance; but now the browser market has consolidated where Chrome (read: Blink) has absorbed Opera, IE has largely died off and Firefox is sadly slowly falling out of fashion. So people are paranoid Google might abuse their advantage. However I really cannot see that happen - or at least not with regards to Chrome. Not only is Chrome's market share small compared to IE in the 90s / early 00s but also the web is viewed from a multitude of different devices. As someone who has managed online shops, games and other popular web-based services I can testify that product owners do NOT want to lose business from portable devices. If just because some product owners are so technologically inept that their primary computing device outside of the office is an iPad and/or their business iPhone. † I think it was called. But basically it was their 90s tech for writing apps that looked like Win Forms.

ksk 9y ago

We all would like to see this "user data" and make up our own mind. Is the whole open source thing just a gimmick for Google? >Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense, and never thinking about the good of the ecosystem as a whole. >Google is also "breaking the web" by not auto playing videos, not allowing alerts in one tab to block the entire browser, etc. Those all seem like good things to me. Its interesting that you're calling for a browser to not implement standards. In any case, an advertising company would be the last entity who I would trust to do anything "good" with regards to the web.

saas_co_de 9y ago
> Its interesting that you're calling for a browser to not implement standards The "standards" are created by the browser makers. It is up to them to decide what the standards are by choosing what to implement. For instance, Apple can decide to not allow 3rd party cookies, which "breaks the web" and "doesn't follow standards" but it is also the right thing to do.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  > The "standards" are created by the browser makers You're half right: standards are created by W3C & IETF, which includes browser makers. > It is up to them to decide what the standards are by choosing what to implement Kind of like IE and ActiveX, right? Right? ............Right?
- ksk 9y ago
  If your position is "anyone can do anything" as long as it has some "perceived good" - in your opinion, then okay, that is your position and I have no argument.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  In practice, the causality is even more delayed than you describe. Browser vendors implement what they want, and then once two or more vendors have implemented a feature and some developers have adopted it, it gets considered for standardization. Standards which are written without a working implementation are widely ignored; there's a whole graveyard around the W3C (see eg. the Semantic Web) where somebody wrote a standard and nobody cared.

KeitIG 9y ago

Talking from the developer point of view here, not the user's: I'm expecting things to be working the same way they are documented in the manual. The changes some browsers have made to autoplay videos or alerts do not contradict what is in the manual.

pas 9y ago
With evergreen browsers, that basically requires a dev team to adjust the code and release/deploy a new version every X months. WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really. Let the market (and the users) decide. If a site takes forever to load, and scrolling is impossible because it takes ages to scroll, and burns a mark in your palm in that time, then maybe you'll reconsider visiting that site ever again.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  With evergreen browsers, that basically requires a dev team to adjust the code and release/deploy a new version every X months. WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really. It's not automatically OK to break functionality even for security/privacy reasons, IMHO. Browsers are used for many useful purposes that do not involve visiting sites run by large organisations with full-time development teams assigned to ongoing maintenance. Intranets. Embedded UIs in devices. Personal sites full of useful information but with no-one actively maintaining them. The number of breaking changes browser developers have been willing to make in recent years does not bode well for the future of the Web, a platform which became what it is today precisely because it was a known target for developers and for a few years the industry standards actually meant something. The Brave New Web is one dominated by ego-stroking contests between the major browser developers and huge, centralised sites with effectively unlimited resources run by just a handful of organisations. Notice that neither users nor original content creators appear in that previous description. The original author here is quite right to call the big players out for that. We saw Microsoft's infamous embrace-and-extend strategy and the way the Web was held back for years as a result. We should be just as wary when the likes of Google sing the same song.

fuck_google 9y ago

Humility often works better than arrogance.

gkya 9y ago

It's not onto Google or someone else to decide good or bad coding practices, and implement this sort of precautions breaking standards.

Daycrawler 9y ago

Most of those examples seem "good" because they prevent nasty behavior. This is conformance to the lowest usage, just like the FBI tries to argue against encryption because bad guys are using it too.

ivanhoe 9y ago

There are valid arguments for both sides, but instead of forcing this upon everyone, Chrome team could have added it as a config option. Set the defaults for autocomplete anyway you like, and then let the user change the behaviour only on some sites. Or if you don't wish to pollute the settings with this, extract this behaviour into an extension and let the people choose if it bothers them enough to go and install it.

pricechild 9y ago
"config option" can't be the right answer. It's simply not realistic the 1000th time it's offered as the obvious solution.
michaelmrose 9y ago
Either googles solution is better or its not. If it is then google should make it the default even if it provides an option. Then even if they provide the option 99.999% will use the default rendering the option basically worthless. If its not they should probably just work how everyone else works.
- pathseeker 9y ago
  >Either googles solution is better or its not. No, it's better for users who read the auto-filled boxes to make sure they are sane (which is what I do). It's not good for users that don't understand what auto-fill is (i.e. they think the website is suggesting it to them).
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Or people staring at a form that is two screens long... Easy to miss things.
    - crottypeter 9y ago
      Or people unlucky enough to land on a site that has adopted "in-field labels". Once those autofill, it's anyone's guess whether you have put the right data in.

sterlingfs 9y ago

I think many will see this as a type of tyranny, and therefore will be worried about the future implications of yielding authority to a single monolith.

Silhouette 9y ago
Google have been doing something similarly questionable for a long time by dictating how sites have to be presented if they want to rank highly in the search engine. They're just being more brazen about it now by actually breaking sites in Chrome.

Cacti 9y ago

It's not the browser developers jobs to police the web.

slrz 9y ago
But it is the job of browser developers to build programs that serve their users. If I, as a user, want to autocomplete a form field, the website operator doesn't get a say in whether I can do that. The settings that come with the markup are best understood as a recommendation, a slight hint that autocomplete might not be appropriate here. The final say is always with the user, though. Sadly, through over-usage on the part of website operators, this hint has become utterly useless.
- learc83 9y ago
  But completely ignoring it isn't super helpful either. I run into more issues with chrome autofilling in forms inappropriately than I ever did with forms that I couldn't autofill. I think the solution is to follow the hint, but give users an override button next to or inside form fields that have it set to off.

BFatts 9y ago

"Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense, and never thinking about the good of the ecosystem as a whole." Are you serious? No one thinks this way? I've worked at several companies where the software I've written was EXPLICITLY written with others in mind. To claim "rarely, if ever" shows that you know very little about this industry. Or, you surround yourself with a bunch of selfish people who shouldn't be doing software development.

josteink 9y ago

> Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense But the megacorp Google is acting all altruistic and not at all abusing it monopoly powers? Give me a break.

notjoemama 9y ago

Woah woah woah. Let me recount/nutshell the crux of conversations I've had with my product manager(s) about things like this. Me: Hey, I'd like to add a work-item to our current sprint that reworks semantic attributes into our site. Them: What would that do? Me: It improves the underlying architecture making the markup more usable and extensible. Them: How does that benefit the users? Me: Over time it will reduce the TTM for features and allows us to adopt a common standard others use on the web. Them: So there's no UI and it won't affect their workflow? Me: Well, no. Them: Then why would you suggest it? We don't have the budget to add meaningless development tasks. I might be biased towards thinking there are plenty of developers and engineers out there thinking about this stuff but we don't always get the final say in what is done. Also, a lot of enterprise applications were and continue to be around before many of these standards. It's a struggle to improve what doesn't directly add to the bottom line.

scarlac 9y ago
This is true in a very practical sense: Product people will not care about engineering specifics. But that being said, I think you're missing the important take-away from that conclusion: You must decide that it's necessary. As an engineer, you are the most qualified individual to determine if something is technically necessary. Just like you decided that proper indentation, unit tests, refactors, etc. are important, so must we decide that other elements are.
dpark 9y ago
> It's a struggle to improve what doesn't directly add to the bottom line. That's exactly the point and you're essentially nitpicking (with anecdata) the fact that he pinned the problem on developers instead of product managers. Regardless of who is making the decision in companies, the end result is pretty much the same.
yawaramin 9y ago
> How does that benefit the users? It brings the site closer to recommended accessibility guidelines, making it easier for e.g. people who have vision loss to navigate. It also reduces our potential legal liability to such users for not meeting accessibility requirements.