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> It's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions. I'm curious why y

by geofft 8y ago

> It's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions. I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? It's okay for a user to override their user-agent string, and fine for browsers to mention other browsers for compatibility, but uncool for a browser to not identify itself at all and steal another browser's user-agent string. The OpenGL API includes vendor strings for a reason. Chrome isn't doing `strings` on the library or anything.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text. >I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible. >It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs This is also a very dumb anti-practice.
- XMPPwocky 8y ago
  > So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible. If a Windows graphics acceleration component spied on its users, Chromium should absolutely blacklist that component, and use software rendering instead.
- nl 8y ago
  Personally I believe a non-crashing browser is a good user experience.
- geofft 8y ago
  They don't blacklist Windows because it spies on users, but they absolutely blacklist anything from AV to malware because it causes instability. https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes-caused-by-third.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes-ca... This seems like exactly the same thing. They're responsible for delivering a browser that renders webpages successfully. They're doing what needs to be done to make this happen.
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  > So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? That's such silly rhetoric, no wonder you're in the situation you're in. > This is also a very dumb anti-practice. So is crashing users machines and then blaming Chrome for doing what's best for its users.
emilsedgh 8y ago
> It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? No. Its more like blocking the access to your website to some browsers. At best they should give a warning that youre using an unsupported browser/driver so beware if unexpected issues.
- geofft 8y ago
  It's nothing like blocking access to the website. It just falls back to unaccelerated rendering. It makes it more likely to work.
drb91 8y ago
> I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users Are you talking about chrome, the least user friendly of all browsers? This is just corporate talk for “we don’t care about making our software work with nouveau”.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- geofft 8y ago
  I think Chrome is empirically quite user friendly - it's not installed by default anywhere and people choose to use it. It is true that Chrome isn't particularly power-user friendly for certain use cases, but that's different. Also, if you look at the bug report, it's quite clear they spent a lot of time trying to make nouveau work.
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    There's more to being user friendly than having a dumbed down UI and being technically correct. Helping corporations spy on users is definitely not user friendly, and Chrome is by far the worst offender there. Saying, "nobody cares," because they're ignorant that it's going on is no excuse, either.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      User-friendliness is usually understood as being about usability and interface design. Spyware-riddled software may be shitty, and that should be called out, but it's orthogonal to user-friendliness. Edit: You seem to disagree. Google "user-friendly" and realize that I'm not defending Chrome.
      - drb91 8y ago
        Just because corporate language doesn’t include any way of expressing representing consumer and user interests outside of what can be represented in a transaction doesn’t mean it isn’t worth expressing.
zamalek 8y ago
I get the predicament that caused Chromium to blacklist Nouveau. Nothing against the incredible work done in Nouveau, it's just reality: given a thousand eyes, apparently not all bugs are shallow (see also: Heartbleed and Shellshock). That being said: >I'm curious why you hold this position. Agreed. There are countless AAA titles (games) that do vendor checks on the GPU. Game developers are a bunch of people who have been working with GPUs for more than a decade, possibly approaching two decades. For some reason, GPUs are the one thing that the OS HAL isn't able to sort out. Windows (and Mac?) drivers are always proprietary, so different hardware vendors are all Windows developers have to worry about. I can't imagine the headache of dealing with differing hardware vendors (and families), on top of differing driver vendors. Reality fucking sucks and I guess this is just Chromium acknowledging it. I doubt there's a grand conspiracy here.

by geofft 8y ago

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text. >I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible. >It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs This is also a very dumb anti-practice.

XMPPwocky 8y ago
> So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible. If a Windows graphics acceleration component spied on its users, Chromium should absolutely blacklist that component, and use software rendering instead.
nl 8y ago
Personally I believe a non-crashing browser is a good user experience.
geofft 8y ago
They don't blacklist Windows because it spies on users, but they absolutely blacklist anything from AV to malware because it causes instability. https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes-caused-by-third.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes-ca... This seems like exactly the same thing. They're responsible for delivering a browser that renders webpages successfully. They're doing what needs to be done to make this happen.
tomnipotent 8y ago
> So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? That's such silly rhetoric, no wonder you're in the situation you're in. > This is also a very dumb anti-practice. So is crashing users machines and then blaming Chrome for doing what's best for its users.

emilsedgh 8y ago

> It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? No. Its more like blocking the access to your website to some browsers. At best they should give a warning that youre using an unsupported browser/driver so beware if unexpected issues.

geofft 8y ago
It's nothing like blocking access to the website. It just falls back to unaccelerated rendering. It makes it more likely to work.

drb91 8y ago

> I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users Are you talking about chrome, the least user friendly of all browsers? This is just corporate talk for “we don’t care about making our software work with nouveau”.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
geofft 8y ago
I think Chrome is empirically quite user friendly - it's not installed by default anywhere and people choose to use it. It is true that Chrome isn't particularly power-user friendly for certain use cases, but that's different. Also, if you look at the bug report, it's quite clear they spent a lot of time trying to make nouveau work.
- jlarocco 8y ago
  There's more to being user friendly than having a dumbed down UI and being technically correct. Helping corporations spy on users is definitely not user friendly, and Chrome is by far the worst offender there. Saying, "nobody cares," because they're ignorant that it's going on is no excuse, either.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    User-friendliness is usually understood as being about usability and interface design. Spyware-riddled software may be shitty, and that should be called out, but it's orthogonal to user-friendliness. Edit: You seem to disagree. Google "user-friendly" and realize that I'm not defending Chrome.
    - drb91 8y ago
      Just because corporate language doesn’t include any way of expressing representing consumer and user interests outside of what can be represented in a transaction doesn’t mean it isn’t worth expressing.

zamalek 8y ago

I get the predicament that caused Chromium to blacklist Nouveau. Nothing against the incredible work done in Nouveau, it's just reality: given a thousand eyes, apparently not all bugs are shallow (see also: Heartbleed and Shellshock). That being said: >I'm curious why you hold this position. Agreed. There are countless AAA titles (games) that do vendor checks on the GPU. Game developers are a bunch of people who have been working with GPUs for more than a decade, possibly approaching two decades. For some reason, GPUs are the one thing that the OS HAL isn't able to sort out. Windows (and Mac?) drivers are always proprietary, so different hardware vendors are all Windows developers have to worry about. I can't imagine the headache of dealing with differing hardware vendors (and families), on top of differing driver vendors. Reality fucking sucks and I guess this is just Chromium acknowledging it. I doubt there's a grand conspiracy here.