6 ms·

They write "Now that web apps are capable of reading and writing files", and link to their article about the File System Access API, which is a Chromium only AP

They write "Now that web apps are capable of reading and writing files", and link to their article about the File System Access API, which is a Chromium only API. They're trying to make it look like Chrome only apps are regular web apps, and if they doesn't work in other browsers that's on them and you should just switch to Chrome instead. They want Chrome to be thought of as the default web experience. https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api

dfabulich 5y ago
There are basically four votes that matter, corresponding to the four major browsers: Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), Microsoft (Edge) and Mozilla (Firefox). Google claims that "browsers" support an API if it's supported in Chrome and in Microsoft Edge, a Chromium-based browser. I think that's a fair claim, because MS does sometimes block Chromium features that they don't like. https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest-browser-to-disable-googles-floc https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest... Microsoft could have blocked File System Access, for some of the same reasons that Mozilla did, but they didn't; they elected to enable the feature. Since Microsoft + Google together have 70% share of desktop web, and since Microsoft agrees with Google that the File System Access API is a good thing for the web, I think it's not wrong to say that "browsers" support this feature. Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox, and we all agree that Mozilla's vote should count (at least as long as they can hang on to 3% market share).
- OJFord 5y ago
  > Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox That honestly surprised me, but you're right [0] - though only 0.01% (StatCounter) or 1.65% (NetMarketShare) in it, depending who you listen to. I'm not sure about the latter, but I'd have thought 0.01% is down in the noise of misreported user agent, which FF users are probably the most likely to be doing. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Largely because they are falsely and anti-competitively claiming that Firefox is unsafe with warning text and/or pop ups if you try to install it on windows
- Sleepytime 5y ago
  Mozilla is also funded nearly half a billion dollars a year by Google, so that makes three that are controlled directly or indirectly by G.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    In practice I don't think google exerts much control over Mozilla.
    - staunch 5y ago
      Sure, Mozilla just decided "independently" that building in ad-blocking would not be a competitive advantage vs Chrome.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        They did independently decide that they'd maintain the extension APIs that allow ublocj origin to work even though Chrome is probably dropping them
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        staunch 5y ago
        And yet they don't make uBlock Origin a pre-installed plugin for 500 million mysterious reasons.
        beebeepka 5y ago
        As a long time noscript user, I would be pissed if Mozilla were to install an ad blocker on any of my devices.
    - Sleepytime 5y ago
      In practice when Mozilla is the only real competition to Chrome and wouldn't exist without Google's funding, it's a conflict of interest regardless. All it does is make the situation more 'death by a thousand papercuts' than any single standard/extension.
- ysavir 5y ago
  How reliable is the 3% rating? Looking at the sources used on the wikipedia page[0], it seems pretty skeptical. For one, the services for collecting the data seem to be depending on tracking APIs from partnered sites. Does Firefox typically allow those through? Is it reasonable to question whether that's a reliable methodology when one of the values of the browsers is preventing such tracking in the first place? And it shows NetMarketShare data being as current as of May 2021, despite NetMarketShare not providing data beyond Oct 2020[1]. And the last dataset of NetMarketShare has Firefox at 7%. Publicly, at least. Looking around the site it seems people may have access to the internal API, but questions about data integrity remain (now in conjunction on whether unverifiable data from an API should be used on Wikipedia). Is there something more I and others should know about these data collectors? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su... [1]https://netmarketshare.com/ https://netmarketshare.com/ "...we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form. October, 2020 is the last month of data."
  - dfabulich 5y ago
    I got the 3% number from https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share As you noticed, https://netmarketshare.com/ https://netmarketshare.com/ is not a great site for browser share data. For one thing, as you point out, they stopped providing new data points in Oct 2020. But also, for some reason, NMS automatically filters the view by "desktop/laptop." If you click the yellow "Delete" button on the right-hand side, it'll show you all browsing data as of Oct 2020. https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222019-11%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222020-10%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%7D... As of Oct 2020, NMS says that Firefox's overall percentage was 3.32%, and that Edge overtook it over the course of the previous year. GlobalStats StatsCounter says that as of May 2021, Firefox has 3.36% share, down from 4.38% the prior year. Focusing on desktop browsing, Firefox had 8.91% share last year, and has 7.36% share today. If Firefox loses another 1.5 points of desktop market share this year (and I see no reason why they wouldn't), they'll dip below 5% desktop share; and well below 3% share when you add in mobile.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > Microsoft could have blocked File System Access, for some of the same reasons that Mozilla did, but they didn't; they elected to enable the feature. Microsoft thought ActiveX was a good idea.
spystath 5y ago
This might be me being pessimistic but there are no web standards any more. It's Chrome standards. You can fall in line or drift into obsolescence. We never really got rid of the IE dominance on the web, we merely exchanged one boss for another. I get it it's not _quite_ the same since we don't have the ActiveX nonsense any more but it certainly feels like we're living in Google's vision of the web. Monocultures are harmful but that's we get to live with.
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  We are living in Google's vision of the web, but isn't that the cost of disruption? The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. Many browsers are built on Chromium now and there is a standard for extensions on the horizon. No one is stopping another company from disrupting Chrome and making their own vision of the web by building a better browser. It's not going to be easy, but neither was it for Google. Many new web technologies like PWAs originated with Chrome and are slowly diffused to the other browsers. Apple, on their own, would never have pushed for PWAs and even now, their support for them are lackluster.
  - Karellen 5y ago
    > The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - Konqueror/KHTML - and were required to release changes under a compatible license. We should be thankful that Konqueror/KHTML was released under a Free Software license, rather than a permissive open source license that would have allowed Google to deny us the rights that they had been granted by their upstream.
    - zepto 5y ago
      I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - WebKit…
      - 5y ago
1234fef 5y ago
It is actually sad that other browsers are not going ahead supporting this API. The authors of this spec are really trying hard that other browsers also move forward with this API, but the maintainers of the other browsers confusingly think this is a threat to the web ecosystem. [1] Mozilla https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 [2] Brave https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407

dfabulich 5y ago

There are basically four votes that matter, corresponding to the four major browsers: Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), Microsoft (Edge) and Mozilla (Firefox). Google claims that "browsers" support an API if it's supported in Chrome and in Microsoft Edge, a Chromium-based browser. I think that's a fair claim, because MS does sometimes block Chromium features that they don't like. https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest-browser-to-disable-googles-floc https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest... Microsoft could have blocked File System Access, for some of the same reasons that Mozilla did, but they didn't; they elected to enable the feature. Since Microsoft + Google together have 70% share of desktop web, and since Microsoft agrees with Google that the File System Access API is a good thing for the web, I think it's not wrong to say that "browsers" support this feature. Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox, and we all agree that Mozilla's vote should count (at least as long as they can hang on to 3% market share).

OJFord 5y ago
> Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox That honestly surprised me, but you're right [0] - though only 0.01% (StatCounter) or 1.65% (NetMarketShare) in it, depending who you listen to. I'm not sure about the latter, but I'd have thought 0.01% is down in the noise of misreported user agent, which FF users are probably the most likely to be doing. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Largely because they are falsely and anti-competitively claiming that Firefox is unsafe with warning text and/or pop ups if you try to install it on windows
Sleepytime 5y ago
Mozilla is also funded nearly half a billion dollars a year by Google, so that makes three that are controlled directly or indirectly by G.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  In practice I don't think google exerts much control over Mozilla.
  - staunch 5y ago
    Sure, Mozilla just decided "independently" that building in ad-blocking would not be a competitive advantage vs Chrome.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      They did independently decide that they'd maintain the extension APIs that allow ublocj origin to work even though Chrome is probably dropping them
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - staunch 5y ago
        And yet they don't make uBlock Origin a pre-installed plugin for 500 million mysterious reasons.
        beebeepka 5y ago
        As a long time noscript user, I would be pissed if Mozilla were to install an ad blocker on any of my devices.
  - Sleepytime 5y ago
    In practice when Mozilla is the only real competition to Chrome and wouldn't exist without Google's funding, it's a conflict of interest regardless. All it does is make the situation more 'death by a thousand papercuts' than any single standard/extension.
ysavir 5y ago
How reliable is the 3% rating? Looking at the sources used on the wikipedia page[0], it seems pretty skeptical. For one, the services for collecting the data seem to be depending on tracking APIs from partnered sites. Does Firefox typically allow those through? Is it reasonable to question whether that's a reliable methodology when one of the values of the browsers is preventing such tracking in the first place? And it shows NetMarketShare data being as current as of May 2021, despite NetMarketShare not providing data beyond Oct 2020[1]. And the last dataset of NetMarketShare has Firefox at 7%. Publicly, at least. Looking around the site it seems people may have access to the internal API, but questions about data integrity remain (now in conjunction on whether unverifiable data from an API should be used on Wikipedia). Is there something more I and others should know about these data collectors? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su... [1]https://netmarketshare.com/ https://netmarketshare.com/ "...we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form. October, 2020 is the last month of data."
- dfabulich 5y ago
  I got the 3% number from https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share As you noticed, https://netmarketshare.com/ https://netmarketshare.com/ is not a great site for browser share data. For one thing, as you point out, they stopped providing new data points in Oct 2020. But also, for some reason, NMS automatically filters the view by "desktop/laptop." If you click the yellow "Delete" button on the right-hand side, it'll show you all browsing data as of Oct 2020. https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222019-11%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222020-10%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%7D... As of Oct 2020, NMS says that Firefox's overall percentage was 3.32%, and that Edge overtook it over the course of the previous year. GlobalStats StatsCounter says that as of May 2021, Firefox has 3.36% share, down from 4.38% the prior year. Focusing on desktop browsing, Firefox had 8.91% share last year, and has 7.36% share today. If Firefox loses another 1.5 points of desktop market share this year (and I see no reason why they wouldn't), they'll dip below 5% desktop share; and well below 3% share when you add in mobile.
mr_toad 5y ago
> Microsoft could have blocked File System Access, for some of the same reasons that Mozilla did, but they didn't; they elected to enable the feature. Microsoft thought ActiveX was a good idea.

spystath 5y ago

This might be me being pessimistic but there are no web standards any more. It's Chrome standards. You can fall in line or drift into obsolescence. We never really got rid of the IE dominance on the web, we merely exchanged one boss for another. I get it it's not _quite_ the same since we don't have the ActiveX nonsense any more but it certainly feels like we're living in Google's vision of the web. Monocultures are harmful but that's we get to live with.

theturtletalks 5y ago
We are living in Google's vision of the web, but isn't that the cost of disruption? The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. Many browsers are built on Chromium now and there is a standard for extensions on the horizon. No one is stopping another company from disrupting Chrome and making their own vision of the web by building a better browser. It's not going to be easy, but neither was it for Google. Many new web technologies like PWAs originated with Chrome and are slowly diffused to the other browsers. Apple, on their own, would never have pushed for PWAs and even now, their support for them are lackluster.
- Karellen 5y ago
  > The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - Konqueror/KHTML - and were required to release changes under a compatible license. We should be thankful that Konqueror/KHTML was released under a Free Software license, rather than a permissive open source license that would have allowed Google to deny us the rights that they had been granted by their upstream.
  - zepto 5y ago
    I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - WebKit…
    - 5y ago

1234fef 5y ago

It is actually sad that other browsers are not going ahead supporting this API. The authors of this spec are really trying hard that other browsers also move forward with this API, but the maintainers of the other browsers confusingly think this is a threat to the web ecosystem. [1] Mozilla https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 [2] Brave https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407