6 ms·

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 thi

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.
- 5ilv3r 9y ago
  Strong-arming the spec is bad.
- gldalmaso 9y ago
  Are you advocating for a second coming of browser wars era because we now have more options? Have we not been there yet? Can we agree that that is a place of endless pain for developers, project managers and users as well?
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.

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.
5ilv3r 9y ago
Strong-arming the spec is bad.
gldalmaso 9y ago
Are you advocating for a second coming of browser wars era because we now have more options? Have we not been there yet? Can we agree that that is a place of endless pain for developers, project managers and users as well?

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.