3 ms·

Quick note: it's an unfortunate fact of life that some engineers make a career of exaggerating things.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
This is not that, though. I heard this story from people involved at the time, and it's not exaggerated in any way, shape or form.
- hoten 6y ago
  But isn't it? I can believe people inside Facebook really thought it was a critical problem, but I don't see how it could have become any more than an inconvenience. - There's a websql polyfill. I don't have experience with it, but it looks like a drop in replacement. This is such a strong counterpoint, the rest almost doesn't matter. - Features tend to be disabled in Chrome with some advanced warning. Not overnight. - websql is still enabled in chrome today - if the api were disabled, ad customers could be directed to flip the feature switch in Chrome. If money is on the line, seems like an easy enough task.
  - yyyk 6y ago
    - Safari supported websql until safari 13 (september 2019), long after this issue stopped being relevant. How many people in an organization need to use PE? Probably only a few in marketing. Surely these few people could have just bought a macbook. A few macbooks must be a very small expense compared to facebook advertising. - Or IT could have arranged a VM with an old version of Chrome.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      So this was an application used by extremely non-technical customers (i.e. marketers) spending money on behalf of many, many brands. Relying on their IT to do this just wouldn't have worked and was definitely not scalable. For context, if Power Editor disappeared along with its revenue, Facebook would have needed to report this to the market.
      - yyyk 6y ago
        The idea that businesses would forego Facebook because some non-techies find the most powerful ad manager to be difficult to run completely mistakes where the focal point is. Brands need FB more than the other way around. If Chrome were to remove WebSQL, bosses would have told people to 'run this or else', and you'd have found that every process was scalable with enough human labour. There were multiple workarounds present. Probably they'd have bought a mac, at worst they'd just have used a 3rd party app until FB fixed this, which wouldn't have taken long with FB's resources. Hardly fatal for anyone.

This is not that, though. I heard this story from people involved at the time, and it's not exaggerated in any way, shape or form.

hoten 6y ago
But isn't it? I can believe people inside Facebook really thought it was a critical problem, but I don't see how it could have become any more than an inconvenience. - There's a websql polyfill. I don't have experience with it, but it looks like a drop in replacement. This is such a strong counterpoint, the rest almost doesn't matter. - Features tend to be disabled in Chrome with some advanced warning. Not overnight. - websql is still enabled in chrome today - if the api were disabled, ad customers could be directed to flip the feature switch in Chrome. If money is on the line, seems like an easy enough task.
- yyyk 6y ago
  - Safari supported websql until safari 13 (september 2019), long after this issue stopped being relevant. How many people in an organization need to use PE? Probably only a few in marketing. Surely these few people could have just bought a macbook. A few macbooks must be a very small expense compared to facebook advertising. - Or IT could have arranged a VM with an old version of Chrome.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    So this was an application used by extremely non-technical customers (i.e. marketers) spending money on behalf of many, many brands. Relying on their IT to do this just wouldn't have worked and was definitely not scalable. For context, if Power Editor disappeared along with its revenue, Facebook would have needed to report this to the market.
    - yyyk 6y ago
      The idea that businesses would forego Facebook because some non-techies find the most powerful ad manager to be difficult to run completely mistakes where the focal point is. Brands need FB more than the other way around. If Chrome were to remove WebSQL, bosses would have told people to 'run this or else', and you'd have found that every process was scalable with enough human labour. There were multiple workarounds present. Probably they'd have bought a mac, at worst they'd just have used a 3rd party app until FB fixed this, which wouldn't have taken long with FB's resources. Hardly fatal for anyone.