4 ms·

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 s

by 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.
  - pas 9y ago
    Static sites without maintenance are not a problem, they remained readable all these years, and I guess they'll continue to be so. (ACID test and all.) And there are non evergreen browsers for those environments. I agree that unilateral moves are bad for the web, but the reality was always that. Vendors have their own agendas, and usually the overlap is large enough. Plus the change was always there too. Framesets work just as 'fine' today as they did back in '96, and the same goes for tables, divs, and falling snowflakes in the background DHTML snippets. The churn we see today is because the web became a lot more diverse, a lot of things were and are still live on the edge, some are in terms of performance and creative expression (just think about CSS Houdini, giving even lower level access gradually to the rendering pipeline), some in terms of security (because they depend on some implementation detail of browsers - such as CSRF protections, that took a decade to get sort of right with the Same Origin policy).
wereHamster 9y ago
What manual are you referring to? HTML5? That's a living standard, it evolves daily.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  A living standard, in the sense meant here, is a contradiction. The entire point of industry standards is to create a stable foundation that everyone can rely on so they can build on top in a compatible way.
- krainboltgreene 9y ago
  WHATWG is a living standard, HTML5 is not.
- edoceo 9y ago
  Dude, autocomplete=off should just work. Chrome does the WRONG THING. Spec says what to do, living spec says what to do - Chrome does whatever they want. It's BS. It breaks the web. Then chrome Devs say to use autocomplete=something-stupid to get the specification behaviour of 'off' WTF is that?! Donate to Firefox. Chrome is the new IE
  - labster 9y ago
    Or you know, just use Firefox. The only problem right now being that you need to install Dev Edition to get a decent experience (i.e. version 57).
    - wtetzner 9y ago
      Not for much longer, I think Firefox 57 is schedule for release on November 14th.
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    > Dude, autocomplete=off should just work. Chrome does the WRONG THING. Screw you. I've probably encountered 'autocomplete=off' thousands of times in my browsing history, and maybe 1% of the time was it being used for something that wasn't user-hostile. I don't care what the spec says, I care about what's good for users. If the spec writers aren't willing to embrace that, vendors will ignore it.

by KeitIG 9y ago

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.
- pas 9y ago
  Static sites without maintenance are not a problem, they remained readable all these years, and I guess they'll continue to be so. (ACID test and all.) And there are non evergreen browsers for those environments. I agree that unilateral moves are bad for the web, but the reality was always that. Vendors have their own agendas, and usually the overlap is large enough. Plus the change was always there too. Framesets work just as 'fine' today as they did back in '96, and the same goes for tables, divs, and falling snowflakes in the background DHTML snippets. The churn we see today is because the web became a lot more diverse, a lot of things were and are still live on the edge, some are in terms of performance and creative expression (just think about CSS Houdini, giving even lower level access gradually to the rendering pipeline), some in terms of security (because they depend on some implementation detail of browsers - such as CSRF protections, that took a decade to get sort of right with the Same Origin policy).

wereHamster 9y ago

What manual are you referring to? HTML5? That's a living standard, it evolves daily.

Silhouette 9y ago
A living standard, in the sense meant here, is a contradiction. The entire point of industry standards is to create a stable foundation that everyone can rely on so they can build on top in a compatible way.
krainboltgreene 9y ago
WHATWG is a living standard, HTML5 is not.
edoceo 9y ago
Dude, autocomplete=off should just work. Chrome does the WRONG THING. Spec says what to do, living spec says what to do - Chrome does whatever they want. It's BS. It breaks the web. Then chrome Devs say to use autocomplete=something-stupid to get the specification behaviour of 'off' WTF is that?! Donate to Firefox. Chrome is the new IE
- labster 9y ago
  Or you know, just use Firefox. The only problem right now being that you need to install Dev Edition to get a decent experience (i.e. version 57).
  - wtetzner 9y ago
    Not for much longer, I think Firefox 57 is schedule for release on November 14th.
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  > Dude, autocomplete=off should just work. Chrome does the WRONG THING. Screw you. I've probably encountered 'autocomplete=off' thousands of times in my browsing history, and maybe 1% of the time was it being used for something that wasn't user-hostile. I don't care what the spec says, I care about what's good for users. If the spec writers aren't willing to embrace that, vendors will ignore it.