4 ms·

Google essentially has the same role Microsoft did at the height of the browser wars...majority market share and lazy developers. So new shiny things tend to be

Google essentially has the same role Microsoft did at the height of the browser wars...majority market share and lazy developers. So new shiny things tend to be Chrome-only. Webcomponents exist as a loose set of standards that are marginally cross-browser, but Google has the biggest/most popular framework using web components.

lima 7y ago
The big difference is that Google is building well-specified new web standards which are quickly adopted by other browser vendors, rather than adding a heap of poor proprietary browser extensions that become de-facto standards. They even deprecated Chrome Apps in favor of the PWA standard. Google has nothing to gain from hurting the open web ecosystem.
- throwaway77384 7y ago
  "Google has nothing to gain from hurting the open web ecosystem." I really want to believe this. But how does AMP fit into this? I feel it is quite counter to the idea of an open web. Please do not take this as an attack or criticism, I would like to, in fact, learn some better arguments in favour of why Google would support, rather than suppress an open web ecosystem.
  - eropple 7y ago
    From the perspective of a service connecting eyeballs with the thing they're looking for (and some ads along the way), AMP is a relatively anodyne amplification on top of caching strategies. "Hey, build good, easily parsed and managed pages and we'll make everything Way Way Faster" is the argument. To be clear, I'm not saying that it is necessarily representative of reality, but that's the idea.
    - throwaway77384 7y ago
      Interesting. It would appear I have been downvoted by someone for asking a question, which is a strange thing to do. Anyway, I thank you for your comment. I now feel I understand the matter / intent behind AMP a little better.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    AMP is a federated web alternative to closed apps and ecosystems like Apple News and FB Instant Articles. It's a specification built using existing web standards that allows anybody to build FB IA or Apple News without integrating directly with publishers.
  - themacguffinman 7y ago
    Depends on what you mean by "an open web". If you consider "an open web" to be a publicly accessible network of documents and applications, it's practically absurd to suggest that Google - a company that makes almost all of its money from services that need to crawl everything it can find on the public internet - might want to hurt this. The more websites and applications that join the open web ecosystem and open themselves to public crawling and searching, the better it is for Google. Walled gardens like Apple News and Facebook Instant actually run counter to this open web. They can't be publicly indexed or crawled or searched, yet they have the valuable advantage of being really fast. I see AMP as an aggressive optimization designed to bring web performance up to par with native platforms like Apple News and Facebook Instant. When a publisher chooses AMP instead of exclusively using those closed platforms, it's a win for the open web when their content uses web standards (AMP is merely a strict subset of web standards) accessible by anyone, not just Apple or Facebook users. I think nowadays "the open web ecosystem" has come to mean something different in discussions like this, closer in meaning to "the distributed web" or "a less corporate web". Google obviously doesn't care for that.
- admax88q 7y ago
  That's true, however the new standards are often poorly designed and require Google level resources to keep up with the pace of change. They've basically ensured that another Netscape/Chrome cannot happen, they've pushed the complexity of the web so quickly that only the biggest most well funded companies can afford to keep up.
  - true_religion 7y ago
    Browsers are now about as complicated as operating systems were in the 1980s. It’s not impossible to create a new one, but it’s certainly not low hanging fruit anymore.
- int_19h 7y ago
  They're building some, but also killing others, like the aforementioned <style scoped>.
IAmEveryone 7y ago
This is such a common misconception... Internet Explorer was terrible because they would drop some binary blob (ActiveX, Flash Player) into the interpreter. And those binaries were neither standardised, nor cross-platform, nor OSS. None of that is true for Chrome. Google's additions tend be useful, which is why "too fast" and "bloated" is the only (generic and subjective) criticism people can come up with. With Safari on Mac and especially iOS, Google also doesn't quite own the same position that MS did. Nor do they have any incentives to harm other browsers: their competitors are Facebook and iOS native apps, i. e. the walled gardens that can't be crawled and searched.
- int_19h 7y ago
  There were far more issues with IE than just ActiveX and Flash (especially since Flash was also available for all other browsers). It was the difference in how it handled HTML/CSS/JS, compared to other browsers, that was the biggest pain point by far.
- timw4mail 7y ago
  ActiveX was never as big an issue as weird CSS rendering and JScript weirdness. Even VBScript was a minimal issue. In some ways, it's for the best that Microsoft basically stopped development in the days of IE6, as it didn't lead to the exponential feature bloat that has been the case the last few years.

lima 7y ago

The big difference is that Google is building well-specified new web standards which are quickly adopted by other browser vendors, rather than adding a heap of poor proprietary browser extensions that become de-facto standards. They even deprecated Chrome Apps in favor of the PWA standard. Google has nothing to gain from hurting the open web ecosystem.

throwaway77384 7y ago
"Google has nothing to gain from hurting the open web ecosystem." I really want to believe this. But how does AMP fit into this? I feel it is quite counter to the idea of an open web. Please do not take this as an attack or criticism, I would like to, in fact, learn some better arguments in favour of why Google would support, rather than suppress an open web ecosystem.
- eropple 7y ago
  From the perspective of a service connecting eyeballs with the thing they're looking for (and some ads along the way), AMP is a relatively anodyne amplification on top of caching strategies. "Hey, build good, easily parsed and managed pages and we'll make everything Way Way Faster" is the argument. To be clear, I'm not saying that it is necessarily representative of reality, but that's the idea.
  - throwaway77384 7y ago
    Interesting. It would appear I have been downvoted by someone for asking a question, which is a strange thing to do. Anyway, I thank you for your comment. I now feel I understand the matter / intent behind AMP a little better.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  AMP is a federated web alternative to closed apps and ecosystems like Apple News and FB Instant Articles. It's a specification built using existing web standards that allows anybody to build FB IA or Apple News without integrating directly with publishers.
- themacguffinman 7y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "an open web". If you consider "an open web" to be a publicly accessible network of documents and applications, it's practically absurd to suggest that Google - a company that makes almost all of its money from services that need to crawl everything it can find on the public internet - might want to hurt this. The more websites and applications that join the open web ecosystem and open themselves to public crawling and searching, the better it is for Google. Walled gardens like Apple News and Facebook Instant actually run counter to this open web. They can't be publicly indexed or crawled or searched, yet they have the valuable advantage of being really fast. I see AMP as an aggressive optimization designed to bring web performance up to par with native platforms like Apple News and Facebook Instant. When a publisher chooses AMP instead of exclusively using those closed platforms, it's a win for the open web when their content uses web standards (AMP is merely a strict subset of web standards) accessible by anyone, not just Apple or Facebook users. I think nowadays "the open web ecosystem" has come to mean something different in discussions like this, closer in meaning to "the distributed web" or "a less corporate web". Google obviously doesn't care for that.
admax88q 7y ago
That's true, however the new standards are often poorly designed and require Google level resources to keep up with the pace of change. They've basically ensured that another Netscape/Chrome cannot happen, they've pushed the complexity of the web so quickly that only the biggest most well funded companies can afford to keep up.
- true_religion 7y ago
  Browsers are now about as complicated as operating systems were in the 1980s. It’s not impossible to create a new one, but it’s certainly not low hanging fruit anymore.
int_19h 7y ago
They're building some, but also killing others, like the aforementioned <style scoped>.

IAmEveryone 7y ago

This is such a common misconception... Internet Explorer was terrible because they would drop some binary blob (ActiveX, Flash Player) into the interpreter. And those binaries were neither standardised, nor cross-platform, nor OSS. None of that is true for Chrome. Google's additions tend be useful, which is why "too fast" and "bloated" is the only (generic and subjective) criticism people can come up with. With Safari on Mac and especially iOS, Google also doesn't quite own the same position that MS did. Nor do they have any incentives to harm other browsers: their competitors are Facebook and iOS native apps, i. e. the walled gardens that can't be crawled and searched.

int_19h 7y ago
There were far more issues with IE than just ActiveX and Flash (especially since Flash was also available for all other browsers). It was the difference in how it handled HTML/CSS/JS, compared to other browsers, that was the biggest pain point by far.
timw4mail 7y ago
ActiveX was never as big an issue as weird CSS rendering and JScript weirdness. Even VBScript was a minimal issue. In some ways, it's for the best that Microsoft basically stopped development in the days of IE6, as it didn't lead to the exponential feature bloat that has been the case the last few years.