4 ms·

The challenge with standards is feature creep. Example: amd64 One day Intel goes and implements instructions which support video decoding. And then Microsoft t

by Taek 6y ago

The challenge with standards is feature creep. Example: amd64 One day Intel goes and implements instructions which support video decoding. And then Microsoft takes advantage of them, and now users have a better experience. Now open source compilers have to implement them and AMD has to implement them and the cost of competing with the giants goes up. Same thing with browser DRM. Either Firefox implements it, or Netflix tells all of their users that chrome is a requirement. I don't know how to stop this type of creep.

dvt 6y ago
> I don't know how to stop this type of creep. For one, it would've helped if Firefox didn't drop the ball in the late-00s, when Chrome became the de facto best browser around. Google + Chrome did more bad for the web than Microsoft + IE ever dreamt of doing. Having the very same companies that make browsers vested in certain web features is a big no-no, but that cat's already out of the bag. I'm not really sure if we can put it back in.
- projektfu 6y ago
  IIRC, Netflix used Silverlight until DRM in the browser was good enough for their purposes. If it weren’t for web standards, Flash and Silverlight would probably still be in use, and any browser that deprecated plug ins would get the “this site doesn’t work here” message.
  - dvt 6y ago
    Honestly, and I know this isn't a popular opinion, but I'm okay-ish with DRM (Netflix has to prove, legally speaking, they're at least trying to protect IP). What I'm not OK with is the current Google AMP-page/hiding-URL shenanigans, Chrome limiting/banning ad-blocking plugins, etc. These are all very clearly Google-centric "features."
    - kelnos 6y ago
      DRM is just security theater that makes us all culturally poorer. Give me the name of a movie on Netflix or any of the other mainstream streaming services, and I'll find you a high-quality copy of it, often with subtitles in many different languages, for the cost of a usenet subscription (you don't even need to worry about a DMCA notice from your ISP for torrenting). DRM is not stopping anything. The studios and streaming services have made it just convenient enough to pay, with nice UI/UX on top. The reason people pay is the convenience! The DRM isn't required for that. If they dropped all DRM tomorrow, they would lose far fewer subscriber dollars than they spend on DRM implementations, license servers, key management, etc. They're just greedy, want control, and want to keep it illegal to break out of that control. Meanwhile, any media "purchases" you make are gone in a blink if the company you bought them from goes out of business or just decides they don't feel like offering the service anymore. The funny thing is that most of the buy-to-"own" (where you don't actually own it) prices are similar to the cost of a DVD or blu-ray disc. Ditto for Kindle books and their paperback counterparts. All the promises of digital distribution giving consumers lower prices were predictable lies.
      - mekkkkkk 6y ago
        I despise DRM as much as the next guy, but its existence makes perfect sense. The moment someone explains to a C level at a studio how easily the content could "leak" from a site without it, it's out of the question to not have it. As the parent poster implied, yes it's security theatre to a large extent, but it does block the very easiest forms of content sharing (i.e. just sharing the video manifest or simply saving segments). Regarding purchases and licensing, those are still stuck in the same business model and pricing as in the analogue days, this is true. But saying overall consumer prices are the same is ridiculous, since all-you-can-eat content subscriptions is a massive transition with no comparable offerings in the analogue past. If you want to culturally enrich people, there has never been a better time to consume huge amounts of quality stuff for barely any money.
        arpa 6y ago
        Thanks to napster and co., who forced the fat cats to look for a solution mind you.
- cure 6y ago
  > Google + Chrome did more bad for the web than Microsoft + IE ever dreamt of doing. I'm not sure that's really true. Do you remember the bad old IE days? Half the web was simply broken on non-Microsoft operating systems, because Microsoft refused to follow standards. They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement. And despite all that effort, we often never managed to do it - cough _ActiveX_ cough. The situation back then was much, much worse than today in terms of open standards and cross-browser (let alone cross-OS) compatibility. And that was pretty much Microsoft's fault. Google and Chrome have lots of problems. But they build on top of Chromium, which is completely open source. It does not have 100% of the features of Chrome, but from a practical perspective that seems to be mostly a non-issue, at least for me.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Microsoft broke the web in more spectacular ways than Google. Even IE6 itself didn’t always work properly. But Google has done more lasting damage I think. The effects are more subtle, things work. ...The way Google wants. We may never know what was crushed or lost by submitting to Google’s will. So the harm will be less visible.
  - ahupp 6y ago
    "They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement." One example is XHR, which is probably the single defining feature of the modern web. Good standards simply codify whatever "proprietary" features we've found are useful.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Remember most people shit on Chrome and Webkit as the new IE think of IE era as IE 7. It is like a kid just a saw a few rounds of cross fire than ran and tell the world how is was like World War 2.
- masswerk 6y ago
  Talking oft the late 00s, it was actually about Webkit. Nowadays Chrome collects all the merits for the foundation it was once built on.
  - jashmatthews 6y ago
    It's crazy how much dev mindshare Google captured with Chrome and V8 to the point where WebKit and JavaScriptCore are almost forgotten despite Safari making huge progress in JS performance before Chrome was even released.
dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
I think feature creep is the #2 issue after adoption, and I think the solution is to adhere to a strong set of priorities, namely: simplicity. Take your example. In 2020 there are already many ways that video can be decoded simply, efficiently and with excellent quality. We don't need to accept marginal user experience improvement at the cost of simplicity. So we don't accept changes to the standards at the expense of cost implementation complexity. It's about having a different mantra. Instead of an emphasis on backwards compatibility and bleeding edge user experience, there's an emphasis on a democracy by simplicity.
- tmd83 6y ago
  Right after a comment I realized #3 or perhaps #1 Most popular sites won't adopt the simpler web even if they can afford to do 2 version of their site, even if users like it. Because the lighter web most certainly will be worse for ads and tracking.
  - ghayes 6y ago
    FWIW, check out CNN's light page [0]. It's an amazing experience for a text-only page that loads blazingly fast. [0] http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en
    - vikiomega9 6y ago
      Brilliant. There should be some way to incentivize lite pages, even if only for news websites.
      - tux1968 6y ago
        Using them instead of the main page is a good start.
    - DarthGhandi 6y ago
      Wow, that's such a pleasant experience for a news site.
    - 6y ago
aleksjess 6y ago
That's sadly the thing - you can't. Not until you have community-owned companies providing services being directly competing against tech giants. Which might not happen, ever. Sadly.

by Taek 6y ago

dvt 6y ago

> I don't know how to stop this type of creep. For one, it would've helped if Firefox didn't drop the ball in the late-00s, when Chrome became the de facto best browser around. Google + Chrome did more bad for the web than Microsoft + IE ever dreamt of doing. Having the very same companies that make browsers vested in certain web features is a big no-no, but that cat's already out of the bag. I'm not really sure if we can put it back in.

projektfu 6y ago
IIRC, Netflix used Silverlight until DRM in the browser was good enough for their purposes. If it weren’t for web standards, Flash and Silverlight would probably still be in use, and any browser that deprecated plug ins would get the “this site doesn’t work here” message.
- dvt 6y ago
  Honestly, and I know this isn't a popular opinion, but I'm okay-ish with DRM (Netflix has to prove, legally speaking, they're at least trying to protect IP). What I'm not OK with is the current Google AMP-page/hiding-URL shenanigans, Chrome limiting/banning ad-blocking plugins, etc. These are all very clearly Google-centric "features."
  - kelnos 6y ago
    DRM is just security theater that makes us all culturally poorer. Give me the name of a movie on Netflix or any of the other mainstream streaming services, and I'll find you a high-quality copy of it, often with subtitles in many different languages, for the cost of a usenet subscription (you don't even need to worry about a DMCA notice from your ISP for torrenting). DRM is not stopping anything. The studios and streaming services have made it just convenient enough to pay, with nice UI/UX on top. The reason people pay is the convenience! The DRM isn't required for that. If they dropped all DRM tomorrow, they would lose far fewer subscriber dollars than they spend on DRM implementations, license servers, key management, etc. They're just greedy, want control, and want to keep it illegal to break out of that control. Meanwhile, any media "purchases" you make are gone in a blink if the company you bought them from goes out of business or just decides they don't feel like offering the service anymore. The funny thing is that most of the buy-to-"own" (where you don't actually own it) prices are similar to the cost of a DVD or blu-ray disc. Ditto for Kindle books and their paperback counterparts. All the promises of digital distribution giving consumers lower prices were predictable lies.
    - mekkkkkk 6y ago
      I despise DRM as much as the next guy, but its existence makes perfect sense. The moment someone explains to a C level at a studio how easily the content could "leak" from a site without it, it's out of the question to not have it. As the parent poster implied, yes it's security theatre to a large extent, but it does block the very easiest forms of content sharing (i.e. just sharing the video manifest or simply saving segments). Regarding purchases and licensing, those are still stuck in the same business model and pricing as in the analogue days, this is true. But saying overall consumer prices are the same is ridiculous, since all-you-can-eat content subscriptions is a massive transition with no comparable offerings in the analogue past. If you want to culturally enrich people, there has never been a better time to consume huge amounts of quality stuff for barely any money.
      - arpa 6y ago
        Thanks to napster and co., who forced the fat cats to look for a solution mind you.
cure 6y ago
> Google + Chrome did more bad for the web than Microsoft + IE ever dreamt of doing. I'm not sure that's really true. Do you remember the bad old IE days? Half the web was simply broken on non-Microsoft operating systems, because Microsoft refused to follow standards. They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement. And despite all that effort, we often never managed to do it - cough _ActiveX_ cough. The situation back then was much, much worse than today in terms of open standards and cross-browser (let alone cross-OS) compatibility. And that was pretty much Microsoft's fault. Google and Chrome have lots of problems. But they build on top of Chromium, which is completely open source. It does not have 100% of the features of Chrome, but from a practical perspective that seems to be mostly a non-issue, at least for me.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Microsoft broke the web in more spectacular ways than Google. Even IE6 itself didn’t always work properly. But Google has done more lasting damage I think. The effects are more subtle, things work. ...The way Google wants. We may never know what was crushed or lost by submitting to Google’s will. So the harm will be less visible.
- ahupp 6y ago
  "They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement." One example is XHR, which is probably the single defining feature of the modern web. Good standards simply codify whatever "proprietary" features we've found are useful.
- ksec 6y ago
  Remember most people shit on Chrome and Webkit as the new IE think of IE era as IE 7. It is like a kid just a saw a few rounds of cross fire than ran and tell the world how is was like World War 2.
masswerk 6y ago
Talking oft the late 00s, it was actually about Webkit. Nowadays Chrome collects all the merits for the foundation it was once built on.
- jashmatthews 6y ago
  It's crazy how much dev mindshare Google captured with Chrome and V8 to the point where WebKit and JavaScriptCore are almost forgotten despite Safari making huge progress in JS performance before Chrome was even released.

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago

I think feature creep is the #2 issue after adoption, and I think the solution is to adhere to a strong set of priorities, namely: simplicity. Take your example. In 2020 there are already many ways that video can be decoded simply, efficiently and with excellent quality. We don't need to accept marginal user experience improvement at the cost of simplicity. So we don't accept changes to the standards at the expense of cost implementation complexity. It's about having a different mantra. Instead of an emphasis on backwards compatibility and bleeding edge user experience, there's an emphasis on a democracy by simplicity.

tmd83 6y ago
Right after a comment I realized #3 or perhaps #1 Most popular sites won't adopt the simpler web even if they can afford to do 2 version of their site, even if users like it. Because the lighter web most certainly will be worse for ads and tracking.
- ghayes 6y ago
  FWIW, check out CNN's light page [0]. It's an amazing experience for a text-only page that loads blazingly fast. [0] http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en
  - vikiomega9 6y ago
    Brilliant. There should be some way to incentivize lite pages, even if only for news websites.
    - tux1968 6y ago
      Using them instead of the main page is a good start.
  - DarthGhandi 6y ago
    Wow, that's such a pleasant experience for a news site.
  - 6y ago

aleksjess 6y ago

That's sadly the thing - you can't. Not until you have community-owned companies providing services being directly competing against tech giants. Which might not happen, ever. Sadly.