6 ms·

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

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.
  - dmitriid 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. Yeah. Where other devices are mostly Android phones running Google's fork of Webkit. I.e., Chrome
    - laumars 9y ago
      I don't think it's as clear cut as that. You'll have iOS devices and a few Windows Phones too. Plus on Android it's pretty common (albeit mostly among power users) to install custom browsers like mobile ports of Firefox. Then you have other devices like games consoles. Things get pretty fragmented pretty quickly once you start investigating the "other devices" rabbit hole. However that all said, when it comes to product support, I've found product owners generally only care about Blink (Chrome / whatever) on Android and Safari on iOS. So there's usually little interest in all the other random browser + platform combinations seen in "other devices".
TFortunato 9y ago
Was it breaking password managers? Because from what I understand, that isn't the case, and the bug linked earlier is specifically titled "autocomplete=off is ignored on non-login INPUT elements" Also: "For most modern browsers (including Firefox 38+, Google Chrome 34+, IE 11+) setting the autocomplete attribute will not prevent a browser's password manager from asking the user if they want to store login fields (username and password), if the user permits the storage the browser will autofill the login the next time the user visits the page. See The autocomplete attribute and login fields." (From: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Form#Attributes https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Fo...)
FussyZeus 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. Netscape is irrelevant. The fact is Chrome is using it's market dominance to affect the implementation of standards and in doing so, is breaking numerous websites. That IE is famous for but because Chrome is made by Google, it gets a pass. > Chrome is breaking 'autofill=false' on webforms because its really bad to have autofill=false most of the time. That is not the Chrome web-teams decision to make. The point of standards is that the standards should be followed, regardless of your or anyone elses opinion. If you disagree with a standard, you work to change the standard, you don't just change your browser's implementation of the standard, break a ton of functionality all over the web, and then sit there saying "well that's how it should be." > 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. I agree with this in principle, but then they should be working to see that the standard is changed, and do so in such a way that the other browsers can follow suit and allow the standard to be improved. I don't disagree with the stance Google is taking; I don't like that one company is allowed to make such a sweeping change, and all the people who would get all over Microsoft's or Apple's asses about it if it was done in IE/Edge or Safari, are just all cool with it because again, Google is the golden child.
- laumars 9y ago
  > Netscape is irrelevant. Netscape is entirely relevant. The question was raised about how different Google / Chrome are compared to Microsoft / IE and the answer is Netscape. Microsoft tried to tie the internet into their own platform, Windows + IE, due to them pushing non-standard rendering and ActiveX. Whatever your opinion of Chrome's break from standards might be, Google simply are not trying to lock people into Chrome on Android / ChromeOS. Remember that Google's revenue comes from ads, not software sales (as was the case with Microsoft). Chrome, Android, etc are just platforms to help leverage ads but they still make money from people running Firefox on Windows, Linux and OS X. So while you might dislike the standards Google are breaking in Chrome, the intent is very different from Microsoft in the 90s with Internet Explorer as Google are not trying to control the web (or at least not with the examples given in this discussion. I'm less convinced their intentions are honorable with AMP).
josteink 9y ago
> It's not really comparable to IE. MS had a pretty explicit goal of destroying Netscape While Chrome has the goal to destroy everything else. Example 1: Google Chrome spam on youtube, gmail, every website on the internet. I can't count the amount of times my parents called and asked why Google asked them to "upgrade their browser" (hint: It wasn't a new Firefox-build). Example 2: Sending email SPAM to all Google-users where they are advised to install Chrome if they ever sign in to their Google-account on a new machine using anything except Chrome. Example 3: Installing Chrome unasked as drive-by installers when you install anything lots of freeware, because Google paid third-party developers to host Chrome as a spyware-like installation in their installer. Google is using spyware techniques to deploy their fucking browser. Google is literally working on killing all other browsers. And for the good of the web, this should be reason enough to instantly and permanently uninstall Chrome. Had Microsoft done a fraction of this for anything they did, you'd seen social media and the EU causing a shit-storm. How come Google gets a free pass?
- eropple 9y ago
  > Example 2: Sending email SPAM to all Google-users where they are advised to install Chrome if they ever sign in to their Google-account on a new machine using anything except Chrome. Cite? I've never seen this, and I use Firefox regularly. > Example 3: Installing Chrome unasked as drive-by installers when you install anything lots of freeware, because Google paid third-party developers to host Chrome as a spyware-like installation in their installer. Again, cite? Because, again, I've never seen this.
  - josteink 9y ago
    > Example 2 cite I don’t have articles to link to, but I’ve experienced this on numerous occasions. Me working with manual testing where we regularly set up clean environments from scratch probably has helped me notice the problem more than a regular webdev. Because this is absolutely a problem. > Example 3 cite I’d say Google it, but it really is a known and documented problem: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+chrome+bundled+installers&t=ffip&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+chrome+bundled+installers&t... Goggle is in no way playing fair.

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.
- dmitriid 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. Yeah. Where other devices are mostly Android phones running Google's fork of Webkit. I.e., Chrome
  - laumars 9y ago
    I don't think it's as clear cut as that. You'll have iOS devices and a few Windows Phones too. Plus on Android it's pretty common (albeit mostly among power users) to install custom browsers like mobile ports of Firefox. Then you have other devices like games consoles. Things get pretty fragmented pretty quickly once you start investigating the "other devices" rabbit hole. However that all said, when it comes to product support, I've found product owners generally only care about Blink (Chrome / whatever) on Android and Safari on iOS. So there's usually little interest in all the other random browser + platform combinations seen in "other devices".

TFortunato 9y ago

Was it breaking password managers? Because from what I understand, that isn't the case, and the bug linked earlier is specifically titled "autocomplete=off is ignored on non-login INPUT elements" Also: "For most modern browsers (including Firefox 38+, Google Chrome 34+, IE 11+) setting the autocomplete attribute will not prevent a browser's password manager from asking the user if they want to store login fields (username and password), if the user permits the storage the browser will autofill the login the next time the user visits the page. See The autocomplete attribute and login fields." (From: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Form#Attributes https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Fo...)

FussyZeus 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. Netscape is irrelevant. The fact is Chrome is using it's market dominance to affect the implementation of standards and in doing so, is breaking numerous websites. That IE is famous for but because Chrome is made by Google, it gets a pass. > Chrome is breaking 'autofill=false' on webforms because its really bad to have autofill=false most of the time. That is not the Chrome web-teams decision to make. The point of standards is that the standards should be followed, regardless of your or anyone elses opinion. If you disagree with a standard, you work to change the standard, you don't just change your browser's implementation of the standard, break a ton of functionality all over the web, and then sit there saying "well that's how it should be." > 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. I agree with this in principle, but then they should be working to see that the standard is changed, and do so in such a way that the other browsers can follow suit and allow the standard to be improved. I don't disagree with the stance Google is taking; I don't like that one company is allowed to make such a sweeping change, and all the people who would get all over Microsoft's or Apple's asses about it if it was done in IE/Edge or Safari, are just all cool with it because again, Google is the golden child.

laumars 9y ago
> Netscape is irrelevant. Netscape is entirely relevant. The question was raised about how different Google / Chrome are compared to Microsoft / IE and the answer is Netscape. Microsoft tried to tie the internet into their own platform, Windows + IE, due to them pushing non-standard rendering and ActiveX. Whatever your opinion of Chrome's break from standards might be, Google simply are not trying to lock people into Chrome on Android / ChromeOS. Remember that Google's revenue comes from ads, not software sales (as was the case with Microsoft). Chrome, Android, etc are just platforms to help leverage ads but they still make money from people running Firefox on Windows, Linux and OS X. So while you might dislike the standards Google are breaking in Chrome, the intent is very different from Microsoft in the 90s with Internet Explorer as Google are not trying to control the web (or at least not with the examples given in this discussion. I'm less convinced their intentions are honorable with AMP).

josteink 9y ago

> It's not really comparable to IE. MS had a pretty explicit goal of destroying Netscape While Chrome has the goal to destroy everything else. Example 1: Google Chrome spam on youtube, gmail, every website on the internet. I can't count the amount of times my parents called and asked why Google asked them to "upgrade their browser" (hint: It wasn't a new Firefox-build). Example 2: Sending email SPAM to all Google-users where they are advised to install Chrome if they ever sign in to their Google-account on a new machine using anything except Chrome. Example 3: Installing Chrome unasked as drive-by installers when you install anything lots of freeware, because Google paid third-party developers to host Chrome as a spyware-like installation in their installer. Google is using spyware techniques to deploy their fucking browser. Google is literally working on killing all other browsers. And for the good of the web, this should be reason enough to instantly and permanently uninstall Chrome. Had Microsoft done a fraction of this for anything they did, you'd seen social media and the EU causing a shit-storm. How come Google gets a free pass?

eropple 9y ago
> Example 2: Sending email SPAM to all Google-users where they are advised to install Chrome if they ever sign in to their Google-account on a new machine using anything except Chrome. Cite? I've never seen this, and I use Firefox regularly. > Example 3: Installing Chrome unasked as drive-by installers when you install anything lots of freeware, because Google paid third-party developers to host Chrome as a spyware-like installation in their installer. Again, cite? Because, again, I've never seen this.
- josteink 9y ago
  > Example 2 cite I don’t have articles to link to, but I’ve experienced this on numerous occasions. Me working with manual testing where we regularly set up clean environments from scratch probably has helped me notice the problem more than a regular webdev. Because this is absolutely a problem. > Example 3 cite I’d say Google it, but it really is a known and documented problem: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+chrome+bundled+installers&t=ffip&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+chrome+bundled+installers&t... Goggle is in no way playing fair.