25 ms·

Chrome is Not the Standard

807 points by chriskrycho 9y ago

sbr464 9y ago
I believe in free markets. If Chrome is winning, so be it. I for one am on the wagon.
- ergo14 9y ago
  When you will end up with monopoly it will become a problem. No one says chrome should be regulated, but for one I would like developers to test their applications in other browsers, at least Firefox and Edge.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  If sites only work in Chrome and Chrome becomes the only browser able to browse the Web, is it a free market anymore?
dijit 9y ago
I can't agree with the title more. I use a rather obscure browser full time (qutebrowser) and they use Qt native bindings. Due to compatibility issues Qt has _two_ backends for rendering HTML content. One is based on webkit (qt-webkit), the other (unintuitively called qt-webengine) is actually chrome underneath. Why chrome? because the web is now owned by chrome. Before qutebrowser I was a heavy firefox user, but I always had chrome installed for those sites which rendered bizarrely and were obviously only tested in chrome. Too much market share is toxic in this industry I feel.
- The-Compiler 9y ago
  Note that Qt officially only has one backend, QtWebEngine, which is QtWebKit's successor. However, it's more or less one guy (annulen) keeping QtWebKit alive as a hobby. So far that's worked surprisingly well, though.
  - dijit 9y ago
    That is incredibly notable, since qtwebengine is not supported -at-all- on my chosen platform (FreeBSD) OT: heard you were going to CCC, I'd appreciate it if you swung by the DarkScience Assembly if you get a chance. :D And great work on qutebrowser!
    - The-Compiler 9y ago
      Is it? https://www.freshports.org/www/qt5-webengine/ https://www.freshports.org/www/qt5-webengine/ I'll try, but as usual I'll probably have a lot of things I want to do :D I'm usually at the Swiss Chaos assembly FWIW, and there might be a qutebrowser meetup as self-organized session some day. Thanks! :)
      - dijit 9y ago
        Yeah i have that port installed. Getting the python bindings seems impossible. Also. That port is quite the hack. :(
        The-Compiler 9y ago
        Looks like there's some work-in-progress here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12964 https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12964 And yeah, QtWebEngine is quite a beast to package, I can imagine that it's even worse on BSD...
account0099099 9y ago
Of course everyone knows it is Emacs EWW.
appdrag 9y ago
"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well." I really don't agree at all with this, Safari is the new Internet explorer ... https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/ https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/
- Angostura 9y ago
  That's a fairly uninformative site. It makes a claim and does nothing to back it up.
  - appdrag 9y ago
    you are right, check those links instead then :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed-safari-is-the-new-internet-explorer/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed... http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-becoming-the-new-internet-explorer-2015-7 http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-be...
- elsurudo 9y ago
  Ehh, I use Safari as my main browser (it feels more "native" than Chrome & FF, has seemingly lower CPU usage than Chrome, and is WAY better for the battery), and I rarely suffer for it. Once in a while there is a site that does something fancy that requires Chrome, but it is rare.
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    Same experience here. Safari is my daily driver for casual browsing because it feels smoothest and integrates well with the OS, iPhone, etc. The only times I can remember it being a problem are when I see a bleeding edge tech demo posted somewhere like HN.
    - soperj 9y ago
      flexbox isn't a bleeding edge technology, and it's supposed to work properly on safari, but it really doesn't. Annoying as hell, and garbage on their organization to be honest.
kevmo 9y ago
I know they screwed up recently with the Mr. Robot malware, but I think it's really important for developers to get behind Firefox again. As the American government fails to provide any sort of check on its behemoth corporations (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and to protect consumer privacy, Firefox is basically the last contender for real consumer protection standing.
- TheCoreh 9y ago
  The Mr. Robot thing was not "malware". It was an easter egg, just like about:mozilla. You may say it was poor taste on Mozilla's part, since it was essentially a paid-for promotional tie-in with a TV show, and I would probably agree with you. But it did not damage anyone's computer, compromise any data or do anything that could put it on the "Malware" category. Something similar that noone has complained about are the Android version names which are promotional tie-ins: Kit Kat and Oreo. Mozilla's biggest screw up IMO was failing to disclose properly what was going on.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    > it was essentially a paid-for promotional tie-in From what I recall, it wasn't paid-for either. > we developed an unpaid collaboration to engage our users and viewers of the show in a new way Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/
    - bluetwo 9y ago
      If they didn't get paid, why on earth did they do it?
      - bugmen0t 9y ago
        Someone actually that it was fun and valuable. Shocking, I know.
        9y ago
dba7dba 9y ago
Yup agree. Something that was in back of my head but couldn't quite come up with a way to say/write about it.
makecheck 9y ago
I’m definitely seeing several sites lately that require me to use a particular browser, lest I see blank elements or “buttons” that infuriatingly do nothing when I click them except in certain browsers. It’s not consistent though. Usually switching to Safari is what works but sometimes I must use Firefox. On one government site it seemed the only working combo was to use an iPad, as no desktop browser worked on my Mac. My latest gripe has to be log-in screens though (Google is guilty): forms are as old as the web and I resent that I can’t even log in anymore because your Unnecessarily Fancy Form just doesn’t work on all browsers!?
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  > On one government site it seemed the only working combo was to use an iPad, as no desktop browser worked on my Mac. Did you try using IE? I find some state government sites still work best on IE10/IE11
  - newfoundglory 9y ago
    They had a Mac, so probably not.
- stephenr 9y ago
  Try changing macOS' safari's useragent to safari on ipad next time. Its also handy to get efficient video from sites stil serving flash to desktops.
dba7dba 9y ago
The scary thing is some may hold up Google/Facebook/Twitter as the standard of the internet (without even being conscious of it). Guess I'm not that young now, knowing what the internet was supposed to be in the beginning.
deleted 9y ago
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userbinator 9y ago
developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” Indeed, perhaps "holding the web back" is a good thing if it means websites will be more accessible overall, to even less common browsers like NetSurf, Dillo, and all the other text-based ones. IMHO the "feature war/race" between the major browser vendors has had an overall negative effect, as if all sites somehow need to turn into ridiculously bloated web apps instead of the simple and far more accessible hyperlinked collection of pages they once were. Keeping the browser choices diverse is a good thing, even if it means they will all display things slightly differently --- just find the lowest-common-denominator and emphasise the content, the stuff that people visiting sites really care about. There's been some other related discussion on this topic recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15943689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15943689
- komali2 9y ago
  I think there may even be a chicken and egg situation going on - for some reason, media websites such as CNN are pushing giant rich media content objects at us like videos, which obviously are meaningless to a text browser. Even webdev blogs are being posted with big GIFs every paragraph or two. I'm not sure why content creators are feeling the need to go multi-media - perhaps it's getting harder and harder to tell who your audience is, or segment your audience, or maybe the "smearing" of society is causing an audience for a given topic (ES6 development, say) to have so many different desires it's impossible to create content on the subject without annoying some portion of them (either by having plain HTML and CSS for your blog post with no helpful GIFs, or a bunch of GIFs that piss off people in text browsers or slow connections).
  - asplake 9y ago
    Even on my iPhone I can’t browse CNN while simultaneously listening to music or the radio (iPlayer). Even though the videos are silent until clicked, they still take over the audio. Gets me every time!
    - 9y ago
gremlinsinc 9y ago
Chrome just screwed the pooch, at least for me... blocking .dev domains ended my use. I'm not going to setup ssl on all my development environments for all the sites I have. I'll just dev in firefox, and move to firefox completely.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Any particular reason you think Firefox won't also implement Google's HSTS preloads for .dev? Google owns that TLD, so I don't see why any browser which supports HSTS preloads would choose to ignore that particular pin, especially given that a move towards universal deployment of HTTPS is generally regarded as a good thing by browser developers and security experts.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    > Google owns that TLD That’s the issue, and the part that should never have happened.
- Sephr 9y ago
  There are TLDs explicitly reserved for local use, and .dev isn't one of them.
- mark-r 9y ago
  According to this recent post Google is in charge of the master list that all the other browsers use. Expect the .dev domains to stop working on those other browsers shortly. https://medium.engineering/use-a-dev-domain-not-anymore-95219778e6fd https://medium.engineering/use-a-dev-domain-not-anymore-9521...
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    I'm the tech lead of Google Registry and the reason our TLDs ended up on that list, and I'd like to add a clarification here. Google isn't "in charge of" the HSTS preload list per se. The owner of each individual website is in charge of whether or not they are on the list. It is true that the Chrome team happens to manage the list, but the contents of the list wouldn't be any different were it to be managed by anyone else who operated it under the same principle. We, the Google Registry, the group that operates the TLDs that Google owns, have decided to start putting our private, closed, and not-yet-launched TLDs on the HSTS preload list. We can and would be doing this regardless of whether the list were managed by Chrome, Mozilaa, Microsoft, Apple, etc. More information on our motivations for doing so can be found here: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-secure-more-of-web.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-s...
WWLink 9y ago
Hurray for firefox quantum!
reacharavindh 9y ago
Is there a possibility of an alternative to Mozilla with the kind of backing that Mozilla enjoys now? GNU project? Apache web browser? Linux Foundation? Heck, I'm sure privacy conscious people will happily pay for a quality browser that they can trust. I don't have the technical prowess to build a browser. If I did, I would.
- jld 9y ago
  Mozilla has ~$500M revenue/year. I don't think you'll find a alternate non-Apple/Google/Microsoft player with similar backing.
  - alwillis 9y ago
    Former Mozilla CEO raises $35M in under 30 seconds for his browser startup Brave: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-seconds-brendan-eich/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-se...
- alwillis 9y ago
  You want Brave, which is based on Chromium. They raised $35 million in an ICO and plan to disrupt web advertising. Has a built-in wallet to pay content creators with cryptocurrency (-totally optional. Browser: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ Basic Attention Token: https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/
  - reacharavindh 9y ago
    Thanks for posting this. But, what does the ICO mean here? Are they some kind of shares of the company? Investors? What influence does that bring with? If no one chooses to use their Basic Attention Token, will the project survive?
    - alwillis 9y ago
      First, the ICO enabled them to raise money to hire a real team to develop the Brave browser and build out the ecosystem. They're on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS and Android already. They're seeding the ecosystem by giving BAT away to users so they can start paying content creators: "Brave grants 300,000 crypto tokens to browser users"--https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-grants-300000-crypto-tokens-to-browser-users/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-grants-300000-crypto-t.... BAT is an investment that the current situation with how advertising works on the web isn't sustainable--over 600 million users with ad blockers installed and climbing. We know we need a way to pay for content that doesn't suck, so lets build it into the browser and make it a mostly automatic and anonymous, based on the amount of time spent on web sites. In addition, the goal is for BAT to be used by advertisers to create a decentralized ad exchange where users who opt-in to watching privacy-respecting, quality-made ads get compensated in BAT (that's coming in the next 3-6 months.) Users who chose to watch and receive BAT can then pay other content creators with it, including on Youtube. Lastly, BAT is actively traded--the market cap is close to $349 million @ $0.39/BAT and over 16 million tokens in the past 24 hours: https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/basic-attention-token/usd?ref=wticker https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/basic-attention-to... The thread was about how only the big guys can afford to make a browser but here's a startup that is going after Google's core business using Chromium's code. Lots going on here; I can't do it all justice; this video should help--https://vimeo.com/209336437 https://vimeo.com/209336437. Plus the latest community update--https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7ljinb/bat_community_weekly_update_121417_to_122117_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7ljinb/bat_comm...
bitwize 9y ago
The only relevant Web standard in every era is "does it work in the browser most people are using". So Netscape in 1995, IE in 2000, Chrome today. That's just the reality, unless you'd rather lose money doing Web development.
- Gracana 9y ago
  That really depends on the values of the business in question. Some would look at that differently, and argue that developing to wider standards and testing on other platforms is an investment in quality and longevity.
- dmytroi 9y ago
  Fully agree with this. I know people who were developing 3G/4G base stations at Ericsson, and as they say: the only right way to check if implementation is correct - to test if your phone connects to it or not.
alvil 9y ago
Browser is not the Internet
subbz 9y ago
When Firefox is gone from browser charts it may be too late.
smoyer 9y ago
I like Chrome but lately I've spent almost all my time in Firefox Developer Edition. When I use Chrome it's to verify that it behaves the same way on more than one Javascript engine.
- bhhaskin 9y ago
  I decided to give Firefox Developer Edition a try a few weeks ago. Been pretty happy with it, with no plans to switch back.
- adregan 9y ago
  I switched to FF Developer Edition a little over a year ago, and I have caught several bugs that went unnoticed by my Chrome using colleagues.
  - fixermark 9y ago
    How were they unnoticed in Chrome?
    - scaryclam 9y ago
      Chrome seems to have a tenancy to paper over some bugs and not report them back to the user (even in the console). It's the main reason none of our devs use Chrome for primary development anymore (it's not worth the extra dev time when QA fails on all other browsers) and it's just used during QA.
alexchantavy 9y ago
Man, this is 2002 all over again with everyone treating IE6 as if it were the standard.
hungerstrike 9y ago
Chrome is the de facto standard at this time and all of the irrelevant, hyperbolic nitpicking and dubious conjecture isn't going to change that. But here's a thought: WebKit and Chromium (and Blink) are open source, so maybe don't worry about it? Furthermore, if all browsers don't work the same then that's a problem for developers. If we can't have that - I'd rather see just one browser engine in use by the majority like what we have now with WebKit. It makes my life easier. Don't we have more important things to worry about than competition between web browser apps?
- syshum 9y ago
  That would be great if Chromium/Chrome used WebKit, they dont. They stopped using Webkit years ago
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    Yeah, they use Blink which is a fork of WebKit and open source as well. So I guess it is great, isn't it?
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      You missed the point. Your position is that there should be only one browser engine. But you're trying to use two browser engines, which are very different, to support your argument.
      - hungerstrike 9y ago
        No, you missed the points. My major point was that we have the source code and nothing changes that. My second point was that I would rather all browser engines work the same and if they can’t then I’d rather just have one popular browser engine.
        pcwalton 9y ago
        > My second point was that I would rather all browser engines work the same and if they can’t then I’d rather just have one popular browser engine. Would you be willing to give up, for example, Rust's parallelism and security for that future? Why do you think this would work better than it did in the past, when Google and Apple tried to collaborate on the same engine and it ended in a fork?
deleted 9y ago
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shmerl 9y ago
Yeah. Yet, sites like Seamless glitch horribly in Firefox, and their tech support answers "try it in Chrome". Very annoying.
- Eupolemos 9y ago
  Actually, it is the opposite for me. Works fine in both, but in Chrome - if I open developer tools - I get 19 warnings and 1 error. None in FF.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    For example, their integration with Paypal is completely broken in Firefox.
    - Eupolemos 9y ago
      That's bad...
deleted 9y ago
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justin_vanw 9y ago
Standards don't matter, interoperability and openness are what matter. Standards are a means to that, but it's perfectly ok for one vendor to add features and do experiments, that is how progress is made, deviation/extension, adoption, analysis, and finally after all of that standardization. A standard without vendors pushing the limits is the hallmark of a dead technology.
feelin_googley 9y ago
The problem as I see it is that the public data that users want to access is packaged in such a way as to maximize its exposure through Googles channels, be it a search engine with a proprietary ranking algorithm, a browser with certain unique features/quirks[1], a new HTTP version that allows stuffing more tracking information into HTTP headers, etc. While a mere three examples does not do justice to their achievements, there are honestly so many examples to list at this point it would be a disturbing exercise to be comprehensive. It is not worth debating whether this impressive work is part of a plan by a corporation or a conspiracy among multiple corporations to steer/takeover "open" standards. (From past experience, it can be assumed that corporations will try.) The important point is the effect that this work is having, irrespective of intent. The author uses Microsoft or Apple as an analogy. Question: If something goes wrong at the corporation -- e.g., as we see today MS is not what it used to be, at least not in the browser market -- then what happens to the corporate-driven "standard"? Will Chrome always be the #1 browser? It should not matter. If people believe it does matter, then we know people are not aiming at complying with a open, immortal standard, they are aiming at being compatible with a present-day successful corporation, hoping to ride on their coattails. I submit to the reader that whatever "standards" the corporation creates may well die out if the success of the corporation ever begins to fade. Keep in mind also that these "features" that the corporation has introduced as "standards" may have been introduced primarily to benefit that corporations business (and business model). They are the largest/primary implementer. Maybe their software is the only software that ever used the feature. If the software "disappears" from use because the corporations business falters they stop developing it, then what good is the standard (e.g. if it is too difficult, not well-enough understood or for whatever reason that other software authors did not implement it)? I leave it to the reader to draw some examples of where this may have happened in the past from the internet and web archives. It could be exhausting if one were to try to be comprehensive. 1. This is only personal opinion but when it takes a minimum of two hours to compile a "browser" (as suggested by one corporation that sponsors one of these monstrosities), then clearly that is a problem. It should cause people to question. Instead it effectively stops people from compiling -- they give up and just accept the binary distribution. By comparison, IME (please do not assume I am referring to Linux) it only takes a fraction of an hour even on modest hardware to compile a complex kernel. Kernel development may not be for everyone, but there is no reason I can imagine why every users "web browser" needs to be a single program of that size and complexity. Personal opinion. Others may disagree. I respect everyones opinion but am entitled to have one that differs.
Spooky23 9y ago
You have at least three viable browsers available on popular platforms. This is a great thing. Developers who give a hoot about new features will be attracted to Chrome, it's just the nature of the game. If Firefox wants to attract those users, introduce more features.
city41 9y ago
I switched to Firefox, and I was blown away to find that Google Meet (the new Hangouts) does not work. You just get the message "Meet doesn't work on your browser". I'm also impressed at how many of my job's internal websites don't work. This doesn't bug me as much, but it's obvious the devs who created them didn't even do a sanity check in Firefox.
- narsil 9y ago
  Yeah the old Hangouts doesn't either.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    There's been some recent movement on this https://twitter.com/tsahil/status/943471207692763136 https://twitter.com/tsahil/status/943471207692763136
- Garbage 9y ago
  It started working from yesterday (at least on Firefox nightly). I found it accidentally. Can you please try again today and see if it works?
- Gaelan 9y ago
  What happens if you lie about your user agent?
- sundarurfriend 9y ago
  I don't know how much of Google's thinking is "this will move users to Chrome" and how much is "we can't be bothered to make it work there", but it has helped me in my attempts to move away from Google services. I was a big fan of Hangouts and once upon a time used it as pretty much my main mode of online communication (and made many friends aware that such an app exists on their phone). But now that I can no longer rely on it working, I have disabled that part of Gmail and haven't opened the mobile app in months either.
agjacobson 9y ago
I was under the impression that Chrome for IOS was a shell on Safari relying on calls to Safari code. Am I wrong?
- chriskrycho 9y ago
  Nope you're exactly right. That's why I compared iOS Safari and Android Chrome.
fixermark 9y ago
Consider QUIC. QUIC is a UDP-based transport-layer alternative to TCP/IP (which, to a rough approximation, has some advantages over TCP/IP for multiplexing multiple logical data channels between the same two physical machines). While it is being standardized by the IETF, it is not yet a standard. Google implements it server-side and it's enabled by default in Chrome. It is, as a result, already around 7% of Internet traffic.
- chriskrycho 9y ago
  Experiments are great in my opinion, and this is a fabulous example. We just shouldn't mistake "<Vendor> is trying something" for "Ergo it is now standard and everyone should support it." The beauty of the web is that everybody can try these kinds of experiments, and if they have high value, the others will adopt them. I'm not sour on Chrome for trying stuff, by a long shot. I'm sour on people thinking "Chrome tried something" means any other browser which hasn't yet gone along with it is doing something wrong.
  - fixermark 9y ago
    Agreed. ... but it's interesting that when Google "tries something" that crosses their server and web browser boundaries, that "something" can quickly become 7% of network traffic.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
On the web, momentum is the standard. I’ve been a web developer since the 90’s and I’ve seen technologies and standards come and go. One constant amongst them is the ones with the most momentum become the standard (whether de facto or de jure). Flash was a standard, say what you want about it but browsing the web without a flash plugin, for a time, would have been a diminished experience. Even if it wasn’t an IETF W3C standard DHTML from Microsoft was really incredible at the time. It should have been a standard. There was no momentum behind it so it died. RSS was a standard, now how many of us still use RSS readers? JavaScript, need I say more? PNG was a standard but took forever for browsers to implement because JPG’s were “fine”. You want something to be a standard? Build awesome things quickly and get people to adopt them. You want something to not be a standard? Build something better, but do so quickly. The Chrome team has great momentum, so sometimes when they sneeze the web catches a cold.
DubiousPusher 9y ago
I'm beginning to think that the best thing you can do as a user is to distribute your information footprint as much as possible. Personally, I'll keep on using Firefox specifically because Mozilla does not own any of the other technologies I use.
agentPrefect 9y ago
Everybody favours the underdog. Mr. Robot was stupid because - why do I want marketing in a product I use as an eveyday utility? Chrome is the standard because of the majority market share and also because they do a great job of delivering a good developer AND user experience.
NightlyDev 9y ago
"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well" Well, clearly this person doesn't have much experience with web development... The webengine in iOS is the biggest pile of crap I've ever worked with since IE6. "Oh? You want to click this? OK, let's wait for 300 ms just in case you want to double tap to scroll!" "We finally fixed it, no more delay on clicks! Yo Apple, the delay is still there if it runs as standalone, good job..!" "OK, you've added the page to the home screen, now, if you click another URL on the same domain you definitely want it opened in the browser, right? Good guess Apple, that's why I added it.." "Wait, are you saying that if you switch to another app and back again to the standalone site you don't want us to reload the URL that's added to the home screen? You would prefer us to let you continue where you left off, what!?!?" "Oh, so you think momentum scrolling is a good idea? Too bad, we don't support it on elements that overflow, but we do have it elsewhere, have fun! PS we do have an experimental flag to enable it, but then I sure hope you're not using animations with gpu acceleration, cause then we have som nice race condition bugs in store for you, so who knows if scroll will work or not.." Seriously, iOS is the worst of them. Sure Firefox and Chrome often has experimental features with bugs, but both of them are much more "solid" when it comes to features you'll actually use in production. Safari on iOS is the IE6 of today.
- amelius 9y ago
  This also shows that the architecture of the web is wrong, i.e. to have the browser vendor in control rather than the developers.
- EGreg 9y ago
  What really sucks is that Apple has TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars in cash, and yet can't be bothered to throw a billion at fixing iOS, iOS safari and MacOS bugs. Its quality really went downhill. I really loved the "it just works" stuff of Apple Past. And I loved the intuitive, skeumorphic interfaces. Now it's all crap and HIDDEN MODES - something Apple always spoke against in its UX manuals. It's sad day that Google and Microsoft have better design than Apple now, and Apple copied them. Steve Jobs would have never let this happen. He would have a whole department funded with several billion dollars just to make Apple products the most user friendly on the planet. And he would have Siri be a Star-Trek-like voice platform by now.
Sephr 9y ago
The author laments about performance without once considering security. There are good reasons why that concurrent JavaScript extension hasn't been adopted by Google: it enables very powerful timing attacks against many aspects of your computer.
- chriskrycho 9y ago
  This is literally the exact point I'm making in the article. This kind of pushback from other vendors (including Google against Apple) is part of what makes the web platform strong.
darepublic 9y ago
Chrome has the best dev tools bar none. Firefox: make better dev tools please. Safari: No comment.
4684499 9y ago
There was a competition, Chrome won, I don't like the result, but it's the fact. I won't tell people to save the web by suggesting using something less competitive, that would reduce the I-wanna-save-the-web group's productivity, making their choices/opinions less competitive, which probably leads them to extinction. Web devs are just a small amount of browser users, general users couldn't care less about the standard. I wish someone could bring up some viable solution to that. Roar within the community won't change the situation, it's not even a start, such roar has been around for years, and yet here we are, still roaring. Sad indeed, downvotes are welcome.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  Like it's over? You forget that one of the things that happens a lot before losing, is winning. Internet Explorer won too.
  - rimliu 9y ago
    The problem was not IE winning, the problem was it sleeping on the laurels after that. So when demands for what could be done on the web, for standards compliance increased IE become troublesome. If there is a winning browser but it is still constantly developed and improved that would be less of a problem (though still not desirable).
lern_too_spel 9y ago
The author misses the point entirely. People don't complain about Safari holding back the web simply because it didn't implement service workers, WebM, WebRTC, and payment request while Chrome did. People complain about Safari because both Firefox and Chrome implemented those things. Nobody is complaining about Safari not implementing APIs that only Chrome has implemented.
zbentley 9y ago
Unpopular opinion: valuing compatibility and standards compliance as engineering/design principles is orthogonal to making your website play with obscure (e.g. Dillo, old Opera) or pointless (e.g. old IE when you're making a website whose money is overwhelmingly likely to come from technically savvy, younger, first-world users) browsers.
XCSme 9y ago
Chrome sux, their rendering is the worst among all browsers. If you try to use CSS transitions, or scaling, or any other GPU-accelerated effects in most of the times Chrome will render artifacts and have weird rendering bugs that don't occur in Firefox or Edge. PS: I still use Chrome for both personal use and as a developer, but I'm starting to realize more and more that Chrome is starting to be clearly the worse modern browser. I only use Chrome now for the Google account integration.
drvortex 9y ago
Standards are irrelevant to pragmatism. De facto standards are what is important. By virture of sheer popularity, Chrome is the de facto standard. And if they have provided anything that becomes useful or popular, then by virtue of popularity of that feature in what is already the post popular browser, makes that feature part of the de facto standard. The post is just pedantic whining about how something isn't according to the written word in some document written some years ago by a bunch of people that the average user of the standard does not even know. I understand the value of standardization. Everything should be standardized. But what the standard should be is completely another question. I would say that all enhancements/popular features should be standard. At least that way, we'll have more people happier, rather than follow the least common denominator approach where there is a compromise that leaves no one happy.
- JohnBooty 9y ago
  The practical upshot of what you're saying is that the browser vendor with the biggest market share can do whatever the heck they want, and everybody else can either reverse-engineer it or eat dirt. I'd tell you why you're so spectacularly wrong, but since we've already lived through the nightmare you're currently endorsing... instead I'll simply refer you to the 1990s and early 2000s. You don't want that.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  Chrome isn't the de facto standard, it doesn't have complete dominance of the web yet so you also have to support, at the very least, Safari.
  - drvortex 9y ago
    No, it doesn't have complete dominance. But it has more share than all the other players combined. https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php That is a dominating position making it the de facto standard, even if not absolute.
- chriskrycho 9y ago
  Not only did I not whine about something in a written document, I never once mentioned WHATWG or anything other standards body. (That was intentional.) I explicitly call out the vendors and their mutual implementations. The "standard" I care about is the truly living standard of what every browser implements. The point here is that the _de facto_ standard is not Chrome, and if it were that'd be a bad thing. (We've been there before; it was a bad thing.)
beisner 9y ago
At what point does the dominant market leader become the standard, though? Chrome currently has roughly 60% market share in both desktop and mobile. No other browsers are forced to comply, but web developers will prioritize targeting the platform where their users are. We see this today where tons of things are broken on the long tail of older versions of IE, and developers largely ignore them. I'm not saying that I like one company controlling the web, but when you're a small company developing software for the web, Chrome IS the standard.
- chriskrycho 9y ago
  If web developers refuse to treat it that way, the web stays healthier overall. Consider this post an argument for why we shouldn't let any single browser have that kind of dominance. (I'd say the same it if were Firefox, Safari, or Edge in this spot.)
  - yeukhon 9y ago
    When you have dominance, and most of your users want to use Chrome, as developers you will tend to use Chrome to compare to other browsers. “I wish Firefox has this feature” kind of statement. This is natural. Whether it is urban architecture to medical practice, someone’s idea dominated the rest, and we use the dominant one as reference and as a tool for comparison. This is called competition.
debacle 9y ago
Firefox's webGL support is abhorrent. Microsoft is undoing some aspects of their browser/OS decoupling. Google is no longer Don't Be Evil. Honestly without that getting better, I think the browser wars are pretty much moot.
bhawks 9y ago
I wish the author discussed the fact that Apple doesn't allow any other browsers to target the iOS platform. Chrome / Firefox are forced to be thin wrappers against the webkit engine instead of bringing their own technology. No other platform has policies like this and it greatly impacts the web platform and changes the dynamic of web standards in a way no other browser developer could.
- thekingofh 9y ago
  If it makes you feel any better there's some of us that left iOS for this exact reason. I don't like Apple telling me what I can and can't do with my computer.
- carlob 9y ago
  Me too, but from the brief mention of Chrome being faster on Android than iOS in the article, I'm afraid the author actually believes that there is such a thing as Chrome for iOS.
- chriskrycho 9y ago
  This is an important point, but it's ancillary to what I'm getting at here. (And, contrary to sibling comment, I'm well aware that "Chrome on iOS" is just a wrapper around the Webkit view.) There's an important role of competition, and I sometimes do wish that Apple allowed alternative implementations. On the other hand, alternative implementations are also alternative vectors for security holes, and one of Apple's primary business differentiators at this point is "security and privacy"—so I'm also sympathetic to the reasons they don't allow other implementations on their system.
  - bhawks 9y ago
    Two points: 1. Today we have 4 browser implementors. Only one of them doesn't also own an operating system (FF). We lost opera year or two ago. I would argue that a significant factor in this shrinking landscape is the fact that Apple has locked away ~10% of the market forever (and this 10% is not a random sampling - it includes many high value customers). Sure implementing a browser is technically challenging - my argument is that Apple's policy has altered the environment in such a way that there is no longer any reward for overcoming that challenge unless you have an operating system or some other large interest that requires you to make a browser. This will have effects on the web as a platform for years to come. 2. Security is a core principle for all browser implementors - due to the nature of a browser you won't get far without it. Privacy is a can of worms - all implementors will pay lip service to it. Whether or not they deliver on it is another topic entirely. A blanket ban on browser development in the name of security is heavy handed. Browser implementors love security and would gladly follow any procedures and policies the platform chooses to enforce. Apple's kill switches give them more than enough leverage to protect users from bad security actors. Now privacy, given that WKWebviews apis allow developers today to evaluate arbitrary JavaScript and monitor the users navigation Apple has already trusted developers to respect user privacy. A browser implementor wouldn't have much more ability to damage user expectation of privacy as a normal app developer already does. Looking at the facts I cannot help but come to the conclusion that Apple's policies and actions are hurting the web in a way the no other browser implementor could.
kuon 9y ago
I've always hated IE, and I've never been an MS fan, but I tried Edge and I was surprised how fast it was. I just use it to test website and app I work on, so I don't have a good idea on how good it is as a browser (bookmark, privacy, plugins...).
EGreg 9y ago
Google should start an independent Chrome Foundation because honestly I would far rather see COLLABORATION than COMPETITION.
headmelted 9y ago
This isn't new, though. I think people forgive Google for more because they like them. IE did exactly the same thing before Chrome and was roundly (and rightly) admonished for it. In fairness, Chrome's proposals do seem to be designed with the open web in mind - at least insofar as being items that other projects could reasonably be expected to implement in their engines if they chose to do so. There's nothing so egregious as IE's DirectX-filters-embedded-in-CSS nonsense - or shudder ActiveX - but it's still not great for the open web as a whole.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dao- 9y ago
  NaCl was as bad as ActiveX but less successful, thank God.
  - headmelted 9y ago
    Was it though? I wasn't a fan of NaCl, and WebAssembly (for example) is a much better fit for an open web, but it was at least platform agnostic (if support was provided by the vendor) and ran in a reasonably strict sandbox. ActiveX was neither of these things. All that said, having any one browser be the standard is as terrible for the open web now as it was in IE's heyday. Just because Chrome is less awful doesn't solve the single-vendor problem.
    - dao- 9y ago
      "If support was provided by the vendor" is a big if... Google was well aware of this inherent flaw but pushed NaCl regardless while at the same time promising for years that PNaCl would eventually solve all problems. PNaCl never really materialized, I think, and it feels like Google was throwing a smokescreen there to boost support and mindshare for NaCl.
mdevere 9y ago
i am certain the ppl who write these articles have also read the other 427 articles saying the same thing
zxy_xyz 9y ago
I use chromium because firefox and chrome remain memory hogs that are slower. Other than that, I'd go firefox.
intellix 9y ago
"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well" - Also came with a torch and pitchfork to say that this is the most wrong statement ever. Flex is still barely supported. Transforms that are mixed together still cause the pages to flicker and screw up. Safari is a joke. The development experience is a joke. I wish it would just disappear.
spankalee 9y ago
It's interesting that the author chose PWA's as their example. The "Progressive" in Progressive Web Application means that web sites progressively become more app-like as they use certain APIs like Service Workers, but it also means that PWAs progressively become more app-like on browsers that support those APIs. A site can go all-in on the PWA-related APIs and cause absolutely no degradation in experience on browsers like Safari. Safari doesn't support Service Workers, ignores parts of the manifest, doesn't allow PWA installation? It's fine, your app is just a normal website on Safari.
- chriskrycho 9y ago
  Yep, and this is one reason I like the PWA design a lot. It's very web-y in the best ways. Which is part of why the "Safari is holding back the web b/c no PWA!" response perplexes me. Even independent of the fact that they were in fact getting there – just not as fast as people wanted! – progressive enhancement is still a thing.
  - spankalee 9y ago
    Safari has definitely been holding back PWAs though, because they're the gatekeeper of feature on iOS. I've personally had meetings with teams would would love to adopt PWAs over their existing native apps, but can't due to Safari. I'm excited that it looks like that will change very soon!
tannhaeuser 9y ago
The thing is that Google owns WHATWG (who write and edit HTML specs) so the difference between Web "standards" and "what Chrome does" is moot. Other browser vendors have no choice other than to follow suit. I'm putting "standards" in scare quotes since what WHATWG publishes - the "living standard" thing - doesn't qualify as standard in my book. It's a tragedy to see so much well-intentioned work being weaponized. Actually I appreciate the hard work of Domenic et al, and also the work being done on CSS specs. But we're way past the point where Web specs serve a purpose other than to keep people busy and brittle and monopolize the Web beyond recognition.
- bsimpson 9y ago
  "The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software in 2004." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
  - hungryfoolish 9y ago
    Yes, but it's been pretty much taken over by Google now. All but one of the WHATWG spec editors are from Google. No editor is there which is from a non-browser vendor. IMO it makes a strong case for the still existence of the w3c html spec.
inpdx 9y ago
Dev tools are huge in getting devs onboard. Chrome has a huge lead in that regard.
jrochkind1 9y ago
> Many times, when this latter tack happens, developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” But there is a fundamental problem in this way of looking at things: Chrome isn’t the standard. The fact that Chrome proposes something, and even the fact that a bunch of developers like it, does not a standard make. WHATWG taking over the "standard" certainly muddies the waters. It's theoretically not just what a single browser vendor proposes or implements... but it is whatever the browser-dominated WHATWG says it is... on any given day... and effectively is whatever the most powerful browser vendors implement or propose (ie, Chrome).
- rimliu 9y ago
  What WHATWG says does not matter either. The only thing that matters is what is implemented in browsers.
  - jrochkind1 9y ago
    That's a pretty different argument than the OP's about standards. Chrome is obviously a browser.
yuhong 9y ago
I remember the recent Groupon debacle on this, where the CTO was formerly of Mozilla.
dillweed 9y ago
Prefer Firefox
dvhh 9y ago
Glad the author is cheering for a browser that is only available on the platform sold by only one vendor. And is dissing developers that are complaining that features that could make their job easier are not available on the author favorite platform. I would honestly be more thankful for a lynx friendlier internet.
partycoder 9y ago
Opera, Firefox, Safari, etc are OK. But in the case of Microsoft, they made 2 horrible mistakes: - Piss off the user (slow, frustrating performance, popups, leaving people vulnerable to malware) - Piss off the developer (incompatible behavior) I think Microsoft saw web applications as a competitor for desktop development (e.g: Visual Studio), and they felt the urge to cripple it. Your average user had IE with 100 toolbars installed and horrible performance, you could not do anything. As a result, IE and all successors are dead to me. Never going to use it again. https://i.stack.imgur.com/82hWm.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/82hWm.jpg ^ That's why we hate you Microsoft. Each time I delete the Edge icon, I restore it only to delete it again, and again, and again, each time bringing more satisfaction. That satisfaction is only surpassed by the one I get when I delete a Windows partition.
mr_toad 9y ago
Designing progressive web apps with fallbacks for unsupported features is PWA101. It’s in the name.
evolighting 9y ago
What really annoyed me recently is WEBP; Yes, I know the format is GREAT AND GOOGLE, but none of my pic view tools on PC be able to print them on screen, nor my None chrome browser. That feel IE anyway.
- jhasse 9y ago
  Well, that's the problem for every new (image) format.
ksec 9y ago
Safari is the new IE. Chrome is the new IE. And then all these comment claiming IE6 was actually very good? May be I am old. Old, at least by Silicon Valley standard. After all Webkit is the new IE was coined by someone who hasn't started programming in the IE 6 era and thought IE era meant IE7 onwards. Do any of you remember what those days were? IE? Active X? Different code for different Browser? DHTML? That was before even the word Ajax was coined. Before we had Jquery? The problem we had with IE6, for me at least wasn't really about its monopoly. It was about so many low hanging fruit that they could have improve, but decided not to, and it was at the start of the first Internet boom, we could have had a future much brighter, but Microsoft was using all sort of propriety tech and not working with standards, leading to Netscape and Mozilla having to engineering its "Quirk" mode. Developing for IE was simple enough, Developing for Netscape and IE was hell. That was long time ago. I guess Microsoft thought IE was good enough. Good for simple Documents with tables and little animation sprinkled on top. Given their very low quality of standards at the time, may be they really thought the Web was good enough. Fast forward to today, I guess Apple thought the web, as basic web pages is good enough. At least we cant do better without breaking lots of compatibility. But then there are those who saw Internet as an App Platform, much like Java, write once run anywhere. And they see Apple as something that is stopping them to achieve that goal, much like how IE was stopping the Internet from becoming better. It really is two different Goal, Web Pages or Web Apps. Some people thinks web pages is even done yet, CSS Grid is hardly the answer we were all looking for. Some think forget about Web pages, it is good for what it is, Web Apps. It is all we need. For me? I just wanted simple and beautiful Web Pages, Stripe and Apple's Website is two example I like. So i do ignore people who think it is their right for Webassembly, WhateverDB, ServerWorker, PWA or what ever that NEEDS to be included in every Browser. May be the younger ones thinks I am just old fart stopping them from reaching their goal. Just like I was thinking IE was stopping the Web becomes the Web. I guess, is just a matter of prospective, old vs the New, the age old question.
homakov 9y ago
Oh, I wish Chrome was the standard. Safari is such a crap browser with dev team unable to comprehend basic security models.

807 points by chriskrycho 9y ago

sbr464 9y ago

I believe in free markets. If Chrome is winning, so be it. I for one am on the wagon.

ergo14 9y ago
When you will end up with monopoly it will become a problem. No one says chrome should be regulated, but for one I would like developers to test their applications in other browsers, at least Firefox and Edge.
pcwalton 9y ago
If sites only work in Chrome and Chrome becomes the only browser able to browse the Web, is it a free market anymore?

dijit 9y ago

I can't agree with the title more. I use a rather obscure browser full time (qutebrowser) and they use Qt native bindings. Due to compatibility issues Qt has _two_ backends for rendering HTML content. One is based on webkit (qt-webkit), the other (unintuitively called qt-webengine) is actually chrome underneath. Why chrome? because the web is now owned by chrome. Before qutebrowser I was a heavy firefox user, but I always had chrome installed for those sites which rendered bizarrely and were obviously only tested in chrome. Too much market share is toxic in this industry I feel.

The-Compiler 9y ago
Note that Qt officially only has one backend, QtWebEngine, which is QtWebKit's successor. However, it's more or less one guy (annulen) keeping QtWebKit alive as a hobby. So far that's worked surprisingly well, though.
- dijit 9y ago
  That is incredibly notable, since qtwebengine is not supported -at-all- on my chosen platform (FreeBSD) OT: heard you were going to CCC, I'd appreciate it if you swung by the DarkScience Assembly if you get a chance. :D And great work on qutebrowser!
  - The-Compiler 9y ago
    Is it? https://www.freshports.org/www/qt5-webengine/ https://www.freshports.org/www/qt5-webengine/ I'll try, but as usual I'll probably have a lot of things I want to do :D I'm usually at the Swiss Chaos assembly FWIW, and there might be a qutebrowser meetup as self-organized session some day. Thanks! :)
    - dijit 9y ago
      Yeah i have that port installed. Getting the python bindings seems impossible. Also. That port is quite the hack. :(
      - The-Compiler 9y ago
        Looks like there's some work-in-progress here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12964 https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12964 And yeah, QtWebEngine is quite a beast to package, I can imagine that it's even worse on BSD...

account0099099 9y ago

Of course everyone knows it is Emacs EWW.

appdrag 9y ago

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well." I really don't agree at all with this, Safari is the new Internet explorer ... https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/ https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/

Angostura 9y ago
That's a fairly uninformative site. It makes a claim and does nothing to back it up.
- appdrag 9y ago
  you are right, check those links instead then :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed-safari-is-the-new-internet-explorer/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed... http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-becoming-the-new-internet-explorer-2015-7 http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-be...
elsurudo 9y ago
Ehh, I use Safari as my main browser (it feels more "native" than Chrome & FF, has seemingly lower CPU usage than Chrome, and is WAY better for the battery), and I rarely suffer for it. Once in a while there is a site that does something fancy that requires Chrome, but it is rare.
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  Same experience here. Safari is my daily driver for casual browsing because it feels smoothest and integrates well with the OS, iPhone, etc. The only times I can remember it being a problem are when I see a bleeding edge tech demo posted somewhere like HN.
  - soperj 9y ago
    flexbox isn't a bleeding edge technology, and it's supposed to work properly on safari, but it really doesn't. Annoying as hell, and garbage on their organization to be honest.

kevmo 9y ago

I know they screwed up recently with the Mr. Robot malware, but I think it's really important for developers to get behind Firefox again. As the American government fails to provide any sort of check on its behemoth corporations (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and to protect consumer privacy, Firefox is basically the last contender for real consumer protection standing.

TheCoreh 9y ago
The Mr. Robot thing was not "malware". It was an easter egg, just like about:mozilla. You may say it was poor taste on Mozilla's part, since it was essentially a paid-for promotional tie-in with a TV show, and I would probably agree with you. But it did not damage anyone's computer, compromise any data or do anything that could put it on the "Malware" category. Something similar that noone has complained about are the Android version names which are promotional tie-ins: Kit Kat and Oreo. Mozilla's biggest screw up IMO was failing to disclose properly what was going on.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > it was essentially a paid-for promotional tie-in From what I recall, it wasn't paid-for either. > we developed an unpaid collaboration to engage our users and viewers of the show in a new way Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/
  - bluetwo 9y ago
    If they didn't get paid, why on earth did they do it?
    - bugmen0t 9y ago
      Someone actually that it was fun and valuable. Shocking, I know.
      - 9y ago

dba7dba 9y ago

Yup agree. Something that was in back of my head but couldn't quite come up with a way to say/write about it.

makecheck 9y ago

I’m definitely seeing several sites lately that require me to use a particular browser, lest I see blank elements or “buttons” that infuriatingly do nothing when I click them except in certain browsers. It’s not consistent though. Usually switching to Safari is what works but sometimes I must use Firefox. On one government site it seemed the only working combo was to use an iPad, as no desktop browser worked on my Mac. My latest gripe has to be log-in screens though (Google is guilty): forms are as old as the web and I resent that I can’t even log in anymore because your Unnecessarily Fancy Form just doesn’t work on all browsers!?

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
> On one government site it seemed the only working combo was to use an iPad, as no desktop browser worked on my Mac. Did you try using IE? I find some state government sites still work best on IE10/IE11
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  They had a Mac, so probably not.
stephenr 9y ago
Try changing macOS' safari's useragent to safari on ipad next time. Its also handy to get efficient video from sites stil serving flash to desktops.

dba7dba 9y ago

The scary thing is some may hold up Google/Facebook/Twitter as the standard of the internet (without even being conscious of it). Guess I'm not that young now, knowing what the internet was supposed to be in the beginning.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

userbinator 9y ago

developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” Indeed, perhaps "holding the web back" is a good thing if it means websites will be more accessible overall, to even less common browsers like NetSurf, Dillo, and all the other text-based ones. IMHO the "feature war/race" between the major browser vendors has had an overall negative effect, as if all sites somehow need to turn into ridiculously bloated web apps instead of the simple and far more accessible hyperlinked collection of pages they once were. Keeping the browser choices diverse is a good thing, even if it means they will all display things slightly differently --- just find the lowest-common-denominator and emphasise the content, the stuff that people visiting sites really care about. There's been some other related discussion on this topic recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15943689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15943689

komali2 9y ago
I think there may even be a chicken and egg situation going on - for some reason, media websites such as CNN are pushing giant rich media content objects at us like videos, which obviously are meaningless to a text browser. Even webdev blogs are being posted with big GIFs every paragraph or two. I'm not sure why content creators are feeling the need to go multi-media - perhaps it's getting harder and harder to tell who your audience is, or segment your audience, or maybe the "smearing" of society is causing an audience for a given topic (ES6 development, say) to have so many different desires it's impossible to create content on the subject without annoying some portion of them (either by having plain HTML and CSS for your blog post with no helpful GIFs, or a bunch of GIFs that piss off people in text browsers or slow connections).
- asplake 9y ago
  Even on my iPhone I can’t browse CNN while simultaneously listening to music or the radio (iPlayer). Even though the videos are silent until clicked, they still take over the audio. Gets me every time!
  - 9y ago

gremlinsinc 9y ago

Chrome just screwed the pooch, at least for me... blocking .dev domains ended my use. I'm not going to setup ssl on all my development environments for all the sites I have. I'll just dev in firefox, and move to firefox completely.

Ajedi32 9y ago
Any particular reason you think Firefox won't also implement Google's HSTS preloads for .dev? Google owns that TLD, so I don't see why any browser which supports HSTS preloads would choose to ignore that particular pin, especially given that a move towards universal deployment of HTTPS is generally regarded as a good thing by browser developers and security experts.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > Google owns that TLD That’s the issue, and the part that should never have happened.
Sephr 9y ago
There are TLDs explicitly reserved for local use, and .dev isn't one of them.
mark-r 9y ago
According to this recent post Google is in charge of the master list that all the other browsers use. Expect the .dev domains to stop working on those other browsers shortly. https://medium.engineering/use-a-dev-domain-not-anymore-95219778e6fd https://medium.engineering/use-a-dev-domain-not-anymore-9521...
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  I'm the tech lead of Google Registry and the reason our TLDs ended up on that list, and I'd like to add a clarification here. Google isn't "in charge of" the HSTS preload list per se. The owner of each individual website is in charge of whether or not they are on the list. It is true that the Chrome team happens to manage the list, but the contents of the list wouldn't be any different were it to be managed by anyone else who operated it under the same principle. We, the Google Registry, the group that operates the TLDs that Google owns, have decided to start putting our private, closed, and not-yet-launched TLDs on the HSTS preload list. We can and would be doing this regardless of whether the list were managed by Chrome, Mozilaa, Microsoft, Apple, etc. More information on our motivations for doing so can be found here: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-secure-more-of-web.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-s...

WWLink 9y ago

Hurray for firefox quantum!

reacharavindh 9y ago

Is there a possibility of an alternative to Mozilla with the kind of backing that Mozilla enjoys now? GNU project? Apache web browser? Linux Foundation? Heck, I'm sure privacy conscious people will happily pay for a quality browser that they can trust. I don't have the technical prowess to build a browser. If I did, I would.

jld 9y ago
Mozilla has ~$500M revenue/year. I don't think you'll find a alternate non-Apple/Google/Microsoft player with similar backing.
- alwillis 9y ago
  Former Mozilla CEO raises $35M in under 30 seconds for his browser startup Brave: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-seconds-brendan-eich/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-se...
alwillis 9y ago
You want Brave, which is based on Chromium. They raised $35 million in an ICO and plan to disrupt web advertising. Has a built-in wallet to pay content creators with cryptocurrency (-totally optional. Browser: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ Basic Attention Token: https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/
- reacharavindh 9y ago
  Thanks for posting this. But, what does the ICO mean here? Are they some kind of shares of the company? Investors? What influence does that bring with? If no one chooses to use their Basic Attention Token, will the project survive?
  - alwillis 9y ago
    First, the ICO enabled them to raise money to hire a real team to develop the Brave browser and build out the ecosystem. They're on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS and Android already. They're seeding the ecosystem by giving BAT away to users so they can start paying content creators: "Brave grants 300,000 crypto tokens to browser users"--https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-grants-300000-crypto-tokens-to-browser-users/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-grants-300000-crypto-t.... BAT is an investment that the current situation with how advertising works on the web isn't sustainable--over 600 million users with ad blockers installed and climbing. We know we need a way to pay for content that doesn't suck, so lets build it into the browser and make it a mostly automatic and anonymous, based on the amount of time spent on web sites. In addition, the goal is for BAT to be used by advertisers to create a decentralized ad exchange where users who opt-in to watching privacy-respecting, quality-made ads get compensated in BAT (that's coming in the next 3-6 months.) Users who chose to watch and receive BAT can then pay other content creators with it, including on Youtube. Lastly, BAT is actively traded--the market cap is close to $349 million @ $0.39/BAT and over 16 million tokens in the past 24 hours: https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/basic-attention-token/usd?ref=wticker https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/basic-attention-to... The thread was about how only the big guys can afford to make a browser but here's a startup that is going after Google's core business using Chromium's code. Lots going on here; I can't do it all justice; this video should help--https://vimeo.com/209336437 https://vimeo.com/209336437. Plus the latest community update--https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7ljinb/bat_community_weekly_update_121417_to_122117_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7ljinb/bat_comm...

bitwize 9y ago

The only relevant Web standard in every era is "does it work in the browser most people are using". So Netscape in 1995, IE in 2000, Chrome today. That's just the reality, unless you'd rather lose money doing Web development.

Gracana 9y ago
That really depends on the values of the business in question. Some would look at that differently, and argue that developing to wider standards and testing on other platforms is an investment in quality and longevity.
dmytroi 9y ago
Fully agree with this. I know people who were developing 3G/4G base stations at Ericsson, and as they say: the only right way to check if implementation is correct - to test if your phone connects to it or not.

alvil 9y ago

Browser is not the Internet

subbz 9y ago

When Firefox is gone from browser charts it may be too late.

smoyer 9y ago

I like Chrome but lately I've spent almost all my time in Firefox Developer Edition. When I use Chrome it's to verify that it behaves the same way on more than one Javascript engine.

bhhaskin 9y ago
I decided to give Firefox Developer Edition a try a few weeks ago. Been pretty happy with it, with no plans to switch back.
adregan 9y ago
I switched to FF Developer Edition a little over a year ago, and I have caught several bugs that went unnoticed by my Chrome using colleagues.
- fixermark 9y ago
  How were they unnoticed in Chrome?
  - scaryclam 9y ago
    Chrome seems to have a tenancy to paper over some bugs and not report them back to the user (even in the console). It's the main reason none of our devs use Chrome for primary development anymore (it's not worth the extra dev time when QA fails on all other browsers) and it's just used during QA.

alexchantavy 9y ago

Man, this is 2002 all over again with everyone treating IE6 as if it were the standard.

hungerstrike 9y ago

Chrome is the de facto standard at this time and all of the irrelevant, hyperbolic nitpicking and dubious conjecture isn't going to change that. But here's a thought: WebKit and Chromium (and Blink) are open source, so maybe don't worry about it? Furthermore, if all browsers don't work the same then that's a problem for developers. If we can't have that - I'd rather see just one browser engine in use by the majority like what we have now with WebKit. It makes my life easier. Don't we have more important things to worry about than competition between web browser apps?

syshum 9y ago
That would be great if Chromium/Chrome used WebKit, they dont. They stopped using Webkit years ago
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Yeah, they use Blink which is a fork of WebKit and open source as well. So I guess it is great, isn't it?
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    You missed the point. Your position is that there should be only one browser engine. But you're trying to use two browser engines, which are very different, to support your argument.
    - hungerstrike 9y ago
      No, you missed the points. My major point was that we have the source code and nothing changes that. My second point was that I would rather all browser engines work the same and if they can’t then I’d rather just have one popular browser engine.
      - pcwalton 9y ago
        > My second point was that I would rather all browser engines work the same and if they can’t then I’d rather just have one popular browser engine. Would you be willing to give up, for example, Rust's parallelism and security for that future? Why do you think this would work better than it did in the past, when Google and Apple tried to collaborate on the same engine and it ended in a fork?

deleted 9y ago

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shmerl 9y ago

Yeah. Yet, sites like Seamless glitch horribly in Firefox, and their tech support answers "try it in Chrome". Very annoying.

Eupolemos 9y ago
Actually, it is the opposite for me. Works fine in both, but in Chrome - if I open developer tools - I get 19 warnings and 1 error. None in FF.
- shmerl 9y ago
  For example, their integration with Paypal is completely broken in Firefox.
  - Eupolemos 9y ago
    That's bad...

deleted 9y ago

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justin_vanw 9y ago

Standards don't matter, interoperability and openness are what matter. Standards are a means to that, but it's perfectly ok for one vendor to add features and do experiments, that is how progress is made, deviation/extension, adoption, analysis, and finally after all of that standardization. A standard without vendors pushing the limits is the hallmark of a dead technology.

feelin_googley 9y ago

The problem as I see it is that the public data that users want to access is packaged in such a way as to maximize its exposure through Googles channels, be it a search engine with a proprietary ranking algorithm, a browser with certain unique features/quirks[1], a new HTTP version that allows stuffing more tracking information into HTTP headers, etc. While a mere three examples does not do justice to their achievements, there are honestly so many examples to list at this point it would be a disturbing exercise to be comprehensive. It is not worth debating whether this impressive work is part of a plan by a corporation or a conspiracy among multiple corporations to steer/takeover "open" standards. (From past experience, it can be assumed that corporations will try.) The important point is the effect that this work is having, irrespective of intent. The author uses Microsoft or Apple as an analogy. Question: If something goes wrong at the corporation -- e.g., as we see today MS is not what it used to be, at least not in the browser market -- then what happens to the corporate-driven "standard"? Will Chrome always be the #1 browser? It should not matter. If people believe it does matter, then we know people are not aiming at complying with a open, immortal standard, they are aiming at being compatible with a present-day successful corporation, hoping to ride on their coattails. I submit to the reader that whatever "standards" the corporation creates may well die out if the success of the corporation ever begins to fade. Keep in mind also that these "features" that the corporation has introduced as "standards" may have been introduced primarily to benefit that corporations business (and business model). They are the largest/primary implementer. Maybe their software is the only software that ever used the feature. If the software "disappears" from use because the corporations business falters they stop developing it, then what good is the standard (e.g. if it is too difficult, not well-enough understood or for whatever reason that other software authors did not implement it)? I leave it to the reader to draw some examples of where this may have happened in the past from the internet and web archives. It could be exhausting if one were to try to be comprehensive. 1. This is only personal opinion but when it takes a minimum of two hours to compile a "browser" (as suggested by one corporation that sponsors one of these monstrosities), then clearly that is a problem. It should cause people to question. Instead it effectively stops people from compiling -- they give up and just accept the binary distribution. By comparison, IME (please do not assume I am referring to Linux) it only takes a fraction of an hour even on modest hardware to compile a complex kernel. Kernel development may not be for everyone, but there is no reason I can imagine why every users "web browser" needs to be a single program of that size and complexity. Personal opinion. Others may disagree. I respect everyones opinion but am entitled to have one that differs.

Spooky23 9y ago

You have at least three viable browsers available on popular platforms. This is a great thing. Developers who give a hoot about new features will be attracted to Chrome, it's just the nature of the game. If Firefox wants to attract those users, introduce more features.

city41 9y ago

I switched to Firefox, and I was blown away to find that Google Meet (the new Hangouts) does not work. You just get the message "Meet doesn't work on your browser". I'm also impressed at how many of my job's internal websites don't work. This doesn't bug me as much, but it's obvious the devs who created them didn't even do a sanity check in Firefox.

narsil 9y ago
Yeah the old Hangouts doesn't either.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  There's been some recent movement on this https://twitter.com/tsahil/status/943471207692763136 https://twitter.com/tsahil/status/943471207692763136
Garbage 9y ago
It started working from yesterday (at least on Firefox nightly). I found it accidentally. Can you please try again today and see if it works?
Gaelan 9y ago
What happens if you lie about your user agent?
sundarurfriend 9y ago
I don't know how much of Google's thinking is "this will move users to Chrome" and how much is "we can't be bothered to make it work there", but it has helped me in my attempts to move away from Google services. I was a big fan of Hangouts and once upon a time used it as pretty much my main mode of online communication (and made many friends aware that such an app exists on their phone). But now that I can no longer rely on it working, I have disabled that part of Gmail and haven't opened the mobile app in months either.

agjacobson 9y ago

I was under the impression that Chrome for IOS was a shell on Safari relying on calls to Safari code. Am I wrong?

chriskrycho 9y ago
Nope you're exactly right. That's why I compared iOS Safari and Android Chrome.

fixermark 9y ago

Consider QUIC. QUIC is a UDP-based transport-layer alternative to TCP/IP (which, to a rough approximation, has some advantages over TCP/IP for multiplexing multiple logical data channels between the same two physical machines). While it is being standardized by the IETF, it is not yet a standard. Google implements it server-side and it's enabled by default in Chrome. It is, as a result, already around 7% of Internet traffic.

chriskrycho 9y ago
Experiments are great in my opinion, and this is a fabulous example. We just shouldn't mistake "<Vendor> is trying something" for "Ergo it is now standard and everyone should support it." The beauty of the web is that everybody can try these kinds of experiments, and if they have high value, the others will adopt them. I'm not sour on Chrome for trying stuff, by a long shot. I'm sour on people thinking "Chrome tried something" means any other browser which hasn't yet gone along with it is doing something wrong.
- fixermark 9y ago
  Agreed. ... but it's interesting that when Google "tries something" that crosses their server and web browser boundaries, that "something" can quickly become 7% of network traffic.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

On the web, momentum is the standard. I’ve been a web developer since the 90’s and I’ve seen technologies and standards come and go. One constant amongst them is the ones with the most momentum become the standard (whether de facto or de jure). Flash was a standard, say what you want about it but browsing the web without a flash plugin, for a time, would have been a diminished experience. Even if it wasn’t an IETF W3C standard DHTML from Microsoft was really incredible at the time. It should have been a standard. There was no momentum behind it so it died. RSS was a standard, now how many of us still use RSS readers? JavaScript, need I say more? PNG was a standard but took forever for browsers to implement because JPG’s were “fine”. You want something to be a standard? Build awesome things quickly and get people to adopt them. You want something to not be a standard? Build something better, but do so quickly. The Chrome team has great momentum, so sometimes when they sneeze the web catches a cold.

DubiousPusher 9y ago

I'm beginning to think that the best thing you can do as a user is to distribute your information footprint as much as possible. Personally, I'll keep on using Firefox specifically because Mozilla does not own any of the other technologies I use.

agentPrefect 9y ago

Everybody favours the underdog. Mr. Robot was stupid because - why do I want marketing in a product I use as an eveyday utility? Chrome is the standard because of the majority market share and also because they do a great job of delivering a good developer AND user experience.

NightlyDev 9y ago

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well" Well, clearly this person doesn't have much experience with web development... The webengine in iOS is the biggest pile of crap I've ever worked with since IE6. "Oh? You want to click this? OK, let's wait for 300 ms just in case you want to double tap to scroll!" "We finally fixed it, no more delay on clicks! Yo Apple, the delay is still there if it runs as standalone, good job..!" "OK, you've added the page to the home screen, now, if you click another URL on the same domain you definitely want it opened in the browser, right? Good guess Apple, that's why I added it.." "Wait, are you saying that if you switch to another app and back again to the standalone site you don't want us to reload the URL that's added to the home screen? You would prefer us to let you continue where you left off, what!?!?" "Oh, so you think momentum scrolling is a good idea? Too bad, we don't support it on elements that overflow, but we do have it elsewhere, have fun! PS we do have an experimental flag to enable it, but then I sure hope you're not using animations with gpu acceleration, cause then we have som nice race condition bugs in store for you, so who knows if scroll will work or not.." Seriously, iOS is the worst of them. Sure Firefox and Chrome often has experimental features with bugs, but both of them are much more "solid" when it comes to features you'll actually use in production. Safari on iOS is the IE6 of today.

amelius 9y ago
This also shows that the architecture of the web is wrong, i.e. to have the browser vendor in control rather than the developers.
EGreg 9y ago
What really sucks is that Apple has TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars in cash, and yet can't be bothered to throw a billion at fixing iOS, iOS safari and MacOS bugs. Its quality really went downhill. I really loved the "it just works" stuff of Apple Past. And I loved the intuitive, skeumorphic interfaces. Now it's all crap and HIDDEN MODES - something Apple always spoke against in its UX manuals. It's sad day that Google and Microsoft have better design than Apple now, and Apple copied them. Steve Jobs would have never let this happen. He would have a whole department funded with several billion dollars just to make Apple products the most user friendly on the planet. And he would have Siri be a Star-Trek-like voice platform by now.

Sephr 9y ago

The author laments about performance without once considering security. There are good reasons why that concurrent JavaScript extension hasn't been adopted by Google: it enables very powerful timing attacks against many aspects of your computer.

chriskrycho 9y ago
This is literally the exact point I'm making in the article. This kind of pushback from other vendors (including Google against Apple) is part of what makes the web platform strong.

darepublic 9y ago

Chrome has the best dev tools bar none. Firefox: make better dev tools please. Safari: No comment.

4684499 9y ago

There was a competition, Chrome won, I don't like the result, but it's the fact. I won't tell people to save the web by suggesting using something less competitive, that would reduce the I-wanna-save-the-web group's productivity, making their choices/opinions less competitive, which probably leads them to extinction. Web devs are just a small amount of browser users, general users couldn't care less about the standard. I wish someone could bring up some viable solution to that. Roar within the community won't change the situation, it's not even a start, such roar has been around for years, and yet here we are, still roaring. Sad indeed, downvotes are welcome.

rdiddly 9y ago
Like it's over? You forget that one of the things that happens a lot before losing, is winning. Internet Explorer won too.
- rimliu 9y ago
  The problem was not IE winning, the problem was it sleeping on the laurels after that. So when demands for what could be done on the web, for standards compliance increased IE become troublesome. If there is a winning browser but it is still constantly developed and improved that would be less of a problem (though still not desirable).

lern_too_spel 9y ago

The author misses the point entirely. People don't complain about Safari holding back the web simply because it didn't implement service workers, WebM, WebRTC, and payment request while Chrome did. People complain about Safari because both Firefox and Chrome implemented those things. Nobody is complaining about Safari not implementing APIs that only Chrome has implemented.

zbentley 9y ago

Unpopular opinion: valuing compatibility and standards compliance as engineering/design principles is orthogonal to making your website play with obscure (e.g. Dillo, old Opera) or pointless (e.g. old IE when you're making a website whose money is overwhelmingly likely to come from technically savvy, younger, first-world users) browsers.

XCSme 9y ago

Chrome sux, their rendering is the worst among all browsers. If you try to use CSS transitions, or scaling, or any other GPU-accelerated effects in most of the times Chrome will render artifacts and have weird rendering bugs that don't occur in Firefox or Edge. PS: I still use Chrome for both personal use and as a developer, but I'm starting to realize more and more that Chrome is starting to be clearly the worse modern browser. I only use Chrome now for the Google account integration.

drvortex 9y ago

Standards are irrelevant to pragmatism. De facto standards are what is important. By virture of sheer popularity, Chrome is the de facto standard. And if they have provided anything that becomes useful or popular, then by virtue of popularity of that feature in what is already the post popular browser, makes that feature part of the de facto standard. The post is just pedantic whining about how something isn't according to the written word in some document written some years ago by a bunch of people that the average user of the standard does not even know. I understand the value of standardization. Everything should be standardized. But what the standard should be is completely another question. I would say that all enhancements/popular features should be standard. At least that way, we'll have more people happier, rather than follow the least common denominator approach where there is a compromise that leaves no one happy.

JohnBooty 9y ago
The practical upshot of what you're saying is that the browser vendor with the biggest market share can do whatever the heck they want, and everybody else can either reverse-engineer it or eat dirt. I'd tell you why you're so spectacularly wrong, but since we've already lived through the nightmare you're currently endorsing... instead I'll simply refer you to the 1990s and early 2000s. You don't want that.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
Chrome isn't the de facto standard, it doesn't have complete dominance of the web yet so you also have to support, at the very least, Safari.
- drvortex 9y ago
  No, it doesn't have complete dominance. But it has more share than all the other players combined. https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php That is a dominating position making it the de facto standard, even if not absolute.
chriskrycho 9y ago
Not only did I not whine about something in a written document, I never once mentioned WHATWG or anything other standards body. (That was intentional.) I explicitly call out the vendors and their mutual implementations. The "standard" I care about is the truly living standard of what every browser implements. The point here is that the _de facto_ standard is not Chrome, and if it were that'd be a bad thing. (We've been there before; it was a bad thing.)

beisner 9y ago

At what point does the dominant market leader become the standard, though? Chrome currently has roughly 60% market share in both desktop and mobile. No other browsers are forced to comply, but web developers will prioritize targeting the platform where their users are. We see this today where tons of things are broken on the long tail of older versions of IE, and developers largely ignore them. I'm not saying that I like one company controlling the web, but when you're a small company developing software for the web, Chrome IS the standard.

chriskrycho 9y ago
If web developers refuse to treat it that way, the web stays healthier overall. Consider this post an argument for why we shouldn't let any single browser have that kind of dominance. (I'd say the same it if were Firefox, Safari, or Edge in this spot.)
- yeukhon 9y ago
  When you have dominance, and most of your users want to use Chrome, as developers you will tend to use Chrome to compare to other browsers. “I wish Firefox has this feature” kind of statement. This is natural. Whether it is urban architecture to medical practice, someone’s idea dominated the rest, and we use the dominant one as reference and as a tool for comparison. This is called competition.

debacle 9y ago

Firefox's webGL support is abhorrent. Microsoft is undoing some aspects of their browser/OS decoupling. Google is no longer Don't Be Evil. Honestly without that getting better, I think the browser wars are pretty much moot.

bhawks 9y ago

I wish the author discussed the fact that Apple doesn't allow any other browsers to target the iOS platform. Chrome / Firefox are forced to be thin wrappers against the webkit engine instead of bringing their own technology. No other platform has policies like this and it greatly impacts the web platform and changes the dynamic of web standards in a way no other browser developer could.

thekingofh 9y ago
If it makes you feel any better there's some of us that left iOS for this exact reason. I don't like Apple telling me what I can and can't do with my computer.
carlob 9y ago
Me too, but from the brief mention of Chrome being faster on Android than iOS in the article, I'm afraid the author actually believes that there is such a thing as Chrome for iOS.
chriskrycho 9y ago
This is an important point, but it's ancillary to what I'm getting at here. (And, contrary to sibling comment, I'm well aware that "Chrome on iOS" is just a wrapper around the Webkit view.) There's an important role of competition, and I sometimes do wish that Apple allowed alternative implementations. On the other hand, alternative implementations are also alternative vectors for security holes, and one of Apple's primary business differentiators at this point is "security and privacy"—so I'm also sympathetic to the reasons they don't allow other implementations on their system.
- bhawks 9y ago
  Two points: 1. Today we have 4 browser implementors. Only one of them doesn't also own an operating system (FF). We lost opera year or two ago. I would argue that a significant factor in this shrinking landscape is the fact that Apple has locked away ~10% of the market forever (and this 10% is not a random sampling - it includes many high value customers). Sure implementing a browser is technically challenging - my argument is that Apple's policy has altered the environment in such a way that there is no longer any reward for overcoming that challenge unless you have an operating system or some other large interest that requires you to make a browser. This will have effects on the web as a platform for years to come. 2. Security is a core principle for all browser implementors - due to the nature of a browser you won't get far without it. Privacy is a can of worms - all implementors will pay lip service to it. Whether or not they deliver on it is another topic entirely. A blanket ban on browser development in the name of security is heavy handed. Browser implementors love security and would gladly follow any procedures and policies the platform chooses to enforce. Apple's kill switches give them more than enough leverage to protect users from bad security actors. Now privacy, given that WKWebviews apis allow developers today to evaluate arbitrary JavaScript and monitor the users navigation Apple has already trusted developers to respect user privacy. A browser implementor wouldn't have much more ability to damage user expectation of privacy as a normal app developer already does. Looking at the facts I cannot help but come to the conclusion that Apple's policies and actions are hurting the web in a way the no other browser implementor could.

kuon 9y ago

I've always hated IE, and I've never been an MS fan, but I tried Edge and I was surprised how fast it was. I just use it to test website and app I work on, so I don't have a good idea on how good it is as a browser (bookmark, privacy, plugins...).

EGreg 9y ago

Google should start an independent Chrome Foundation because honestly I would far rather see COLLABORATION than COMPETITION.

headmelted 9y ago

This isn't new, though. I think people forgive Google for more because they like them. IE did exactly the same thing before Chrome and was roundly (and rightly) admonished for it. In fairness, Chrome's proposals do seem to be designed with the open web in mind - at least insofar as being items that other projects could reasonably be expected to implement in their engines if they chose to do so. There's nothing so egregious as IE's DirectX-filters-embedded-in-CSS nonsense - or shudder ActiveX - but it's still not great for the open web as a whole.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dao- 9y ago
NaCl was as bad as ActiveX but less successful, thank God.
- headmelted 9y ago
  Was it though? I wasn't a fan of NaCl, and WebAssembly (for example) is a much better fit for an open web, but it was at least platform agnostic (if support was provided by the vendor) and ran in a reasonably strict sandbox. ActiveX was neither of these things. All that said, having any one browser be the standard is as terrible for the open web now as it was in IE's heyday. Just because Chrome is less awful doesn't solve the single-vendor problem.
  - dao- 9y ago
    "If support was provided by the vendor" is a big if... Google was well aware of this inherent flaw but pushed NaCl regardless while at the same time promising for years that PNaCl would eventually solve all problems. PNaCl never really materialized, I think, and it feels like Google was throwing a smokescreen there to boost support and mindshare for NaCl.

mdevere 9y ago

i am certain the ppl who write these articles have also read the other 427 articles saying the same thing

zxy_xyz 9y ago

I use chromium because firefox and chrome remain memory hogs that are slower. Other than that, I'd go firefox.

intellix 9y ago

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well" - Also came with a torch and pitchfork to say that this is the most wrong statement ever. Flex is still barely supported. Transforms that are mixed together still cause the pages to flicker and screw up. Safari is a joke. The development experience is a joke. I wish it would just disappear.

spankalee 9y ago

It's interesting that the author chose PWA's as their example. The "Progressive" in Progressive Web Application means that web sites progressively become more app-like as they use certain APIs like Service Workers, but it also means that PWAs progressively become more app-like on browsers that support those APIs. A site can go all-in on the PWA-related APIs and cause absolutely no degradation in experience on browsers like Safari. Safari doesn't support Service Workers, ignores parts of the manifest, doesn't allow PWA installation? It's fine, your app is just a normal website on Safari.

chriskrycho 9y ago
Yep, and this is one reason I like the PWA design a lot. It's very web-y in the best ways. Which is part of why the "Safari is holding back the web b/c no PWA!" response perplexes me. Even independent of the fact that they were in fact getting there – just not as fast as people wanted! – progressive enhancement is still a thing.
- spankalee 9y ago
  Safari has definitely been holding back PWAs though, because they're the gatekeeper of feature on iOS. I've personally had meetings with teams would would love to adopt PWAs over their existing native apps, but can't due to Safari. I'm excited that it looks like that will change very soon!

tannhaeuser 9y ago

The thing is that Google owns WHATWG (who write and edit HTML specs) so the difference between Web "standards" and "what Chrome does" is moot. Other browser vendors have no choice other than to follow suit. I'm putting "standards" in scare quotes since what WHATWG publishes - the "living standard" thing - doesn't qualify as standard in my book. It's a tragedy to see so much well-intentioned work being weaponized. Actually I appreciate the hard work of Domenic et al, and also the work being done on CSS specs. But we're way past the point where Web specs serve a purpose other than to keep people busy and brittle and monopolize the Web beyond recognition.

bsimpson 9y ago
"The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software in 2004." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
- hungryfoolish 9y ago
  Yes, but it's been pretty much taken over by Google now. All but one of the WHATWG spec editors are from Google. No editor is there which is from a non-browser vendor. IMO it makes a strong case for the still existence of the w3c html spec.

inpdx 9y ago

Dev tools are huge in getting devs onboard. Chrome has a huge lead in that regard.

jrochkind1 9y ago

> Many times, when this latter tack happens, developers grouse about the other browser makers who are “holding the web back.” But there is a fundamental problem in this way of looking at things: Chrome isn’t the standard. The fact that Chrome proposes something, and even the fact that a bunch of developers like it, does not a standard make. WHATWG taking over the "standard" certainly muddies the waters. It's theoretically not just what a single browser vendor proposes or implements... but it is whatever the browser-dominated WHATWG says it is... on any given day... and effectively is whatever the most powerful browser vendors implement or propose (ie, Chrome).

rimliu 9y ago
What WHATWG says does not matter either. The only thing that matters is what is implemented in browsers.
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  That's a pretty different argument than the OP's about standards. Chrome is obviously a browser.

yuhong 9y ago

I remember the recent Groupon debacle on this, where the CTO was formerly of Mozilla.

dillweed 9y ago

Prefer Firefox

dvhh 9y ago

Glad the author is cheering for a browser that is only available on the platform sold by only one vendor. And is dissing developers that are complaining that features that could make their job easier are not available on the author favorite platform. I would honestly be more thankful for a lynx friendlier internet.

partycoder 9y ago

Opera, Firefox, Safari, etc are OK. But in the case of Microsoft, they made 2 horrible mistakes: - Piss off the user (slow, frustrating performance, popups, leaving people vulnerable to malware) - Piss off the developer (incompatible behavior) I think Microsoft saw web applications as a competitor for desktop development (e.g: Visual Studio), and they felt the urge to cripple it. Your average user had IE with 100 toolbars installed and horrible performance, you could not do anything. As a result, IE and all successors are dead to me. Never going to use it again. https://i.stack.imgur.com/82hWm.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/82hWm.jpg ^ That's why we hate you Microsoft. Each time I delete the Edge icon, I restore it only to delete it again, and again, and again, each time bringing more satisfaction. That satisfaction is only surpassed by the one I get when I delete a Windows partition.

mr_toad 9y ago

Designing progressive web apps with fallbacks for unsupported features is PWA101. It’s in the name.

evolighting 9y ago

What really annoyed me recently is WEBP; Yes, I know the format is GREAT AND GOOGLE, but none of my pic view tools on PC be able to print them on screen, nor my None chrome browser. That feel IE anyway.

jhasse 9y ago
Well, that's the problem for every new (image) format.

ksec 9y ago

Safari is the new IE. Chrome is the new IE. And then all these comment claiming IE6 was actually very good? May be I am old. Old, at least by Silicon Valley standard. After all Webkit is the new IE was coined by someone who hasn't started programming in the IE 6 era and thought IE era meant IE7 onwards. Do any of you remember what those days were? IE? Active X? Different code for different Browser? DHTML? That was before even the word Ajax was coined. Before we had Jquery? The problem we had with IE6, for me at least wasn't really about its monopoly. It was about so many low hanging fruit that they could have improve, but decided not to, and it was at the start of the first Internet boom, we could have had a future much brighter, but Microsoft was using all sort of propriety tech and not working with standards, leading to Netscape and Mozilla having to engineering its "Quirk" mode. Developing for IE was simple enough, Developing for Netscape and IE was hell. That was long time ago. I guess Microsoft thought IE was good enough. Good for simple Documents with tables and little animation sprinkled on top. Given their very low quality of standards at the time, may be they really thought the Web was good enough. Fast forward to today, I guess Apple thought the web, as basic web pages is good enough. At least we cant do better without breaking lots of compatibility. But then there are those who saw Internet as an App Platform, much like Java, write once run anywhere. And they see Apple as something that is stopping them to achieve that goal, much like how IE was stopping the Internet from becoming better. It really is two different Goal, Web Pages or Web Apps. Some people thinks web pages is even done yet, CSS Grid is hardly the answer we were all looking for. Some think forget about Web pages, it is good for what it is, Web Apps. It is all we need. For me? I just wanted simple and beautiful Web Pages, Stripe and Apple's Website is two example I like. So i do ignore people who think it is their right for Webassembly, WhateverDB, ServerWorker, PWA or what ever that NEEDS to be included in every Browser. May be the younger ones thinks I am just old fart stopping them from reaching their goal. Just like I was thinking IE was stopping the Web becomes the Web. I guess, is just a matter of prospective, old vs the New, the age old question.

homakov 9y ago

Oh, I wish Chrome was the standard. Safari is such a crap browser with dev team unable to comprehend basic security models.