4 ms·

This kinda erases history. IE was riddled with security flaws and stagnant beyond belief when Firefox usurped it. There was a compelling reason to use an IE alt

• bhtru 7y ago
  With this course of action it may be compelling enough to give consumer users a reason to ditch Chrome.
  • ethbro 7y ago
    No significant number of users have ever ditched anything useful over invisible tracking.
    • brokenmachine 7y ago
      We're talking about very visible ads, not invisible tracking.
• kortilla 7y ago
  Well it will once it disallows ad blocking
• ljm 7y ago
  Do these changes make Google less stagnant, as they disempower the discerning user who wants at least some control over their browsing experience? Google's new security flaw is that they are going to moderate ad-blocking, become responsible for it, and then depend on their inhuman machine to ignore all of your complaints. No different to how you can't find a human connect when you get screwed out of Gmail or Google Wallet because of their mathematics. As a total thought experiment on where I'm coming from with this: in Star Trek TNG, Data (the Android) spends seven years with us exploring the human equation. Strip out the narrative imbalance and do you think the current automation of help and support is anywhere near aligned to the ideals of that 30 year old TV show that didn't know better? Or is the algorithm an overfitting to Google's commercial needs? It's tangential to this thread but for some reason it felt worth writing out.
• ori_b 7y ago
  The web standards were also much simpler then. It was difficult but tractable for a small team of volunteers to implement and keep up with them. That ship has sailed.
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    Standards often shift be a substantial reconsolidation, in which numerous side features are discarded. HTML itself emerged from such a consolidation (from SGML) and went through this process a few times. There are numerous other examples of technical recapitulation.
    • ori_b 7y ago
      HTML and the menagerie of related standards has never, as far as I'm aware, become simpler. And the old versions have never been removed from a browser.
      • dredmorbius 7y ago
        XHTML was a step too far. It was rejected in favour of HTML4 & 5, ultimately.
        • ori_b 7y ago
          xhtml seems to me quite a bit simpler to implement than HTML5.
          • dredmorbius 7y ago
            XHTML is hard-structured, and among its negatives, requires being fully downloaded to be parsed and validated. HTML, including H5, has soft-fail modes. At least that's the justification I generally see. See the Criticism section of the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML#Criticism
            • 7y ago
• wwweston 7y ago
  Mozilla can (and does) offer putting the privacy concerns and an open web first. Google has worked very hard over the years to make itself into an organization with deeply baked-in incentives to do the opposite. It'd take a decade of sustained effort working counter to powerful incentives to fix that. This is distinct from making a capable well-performing browser, which Google has done. So has Mozilla.
  • Klonoar 7y ago
    Yeah, sure, privacy is good. It's not a product-making sale point for the vast majority of people.
    • propertymagnate 7y ago
      Ad blocking is at least a concrete point that can be clearly explained, and will continue to drive traffic to mozilla. It's not a completely ethereal concept like privacy, democratic freedom, etc.
• tomjen3 7y ago
  Chrome might not have that many security holes, but if you browse without adblock you will quickly see just how festered the web is with horrible, horrible ads. Chrome without adblock is essentially ie6, with tabs.
• deadbunny 7y ago
  If ad blockers can't block ads in Chrome but can in FF that'll get a large chunk of people to switch without a second thought.