4 ms·

Maybe developers could stop designing websites that only work on Chrome too? I'm tired of seeing "your browser is unsupported" and denied access while using a

by petee 5y ago

Maybe developers could stop designing websites that only work on Chrome too? I'm tired of seeing "your browser is unsupported" and denied access while using a chromium based alternative. Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I'm tired of seeing "your browser is unsupported" and denied access while using a chromium based alternative. It's like Internet Explorer all over again! Why would anyone do this?
mschuster91 5y ago
> Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles Like it or not, at least Google blazes ahead and brings new features to the browser sphere. It's not like innovation can be expected from Firefox any more, not with them cutting costs on the development team.
- petee 5y ago
  A vast majority of websites do not need bells and whistles, especially when it breaks simple things like links, scrolling, or the back button. The end effect is a broken, incompatible web.
- pixl97 5y ago
  Hmm, I remember hearing this same argument about IE decades ago. Look how that worked out.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    When was Micro$oft ever accused of being too innovative - or rather, innovative at all?! From what I remember, web developers (including me) were so utterly pissed about IE6 being in a state of a years-long feature freeze that Firefox and later Chrome actually had their chance to rise.
- merrywhether 5y ago
  Keep telling yourself this. AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around? So many of their features are purely to give Google more ad revenue and power over the internet. I’d be willing to bet that the main reason they fund so much non-ad innovation is to overwhelm any potential new-comers to the browser space and stifle competition (even Microsoft gave up). But too many developers buy into the idea that being able to use the newest Array.findLast() API is somehow crucial to the success of their web product and thus help perpetuate the Chrome monoculture.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    If someone says AMP is bad because there's some better project for accelerating mobile pages, I'm all ears. If they say it's bad because web pages are fast enough, I'd tend to favor "bias for action", but I could imagine being convinced by something like Dan Luu's parting shot (https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/) that a big new standard hurts other people trying to solve the underlying issue. If someone says it's bad because corporate interests shouldn't push innovation... well, I'd like to understand why they're okay with the explicitly bought and paid for OpenJS board seats, or the permanent corporate tetrarchy for HTML. A lot of developers seem to have unrealistic expectations about how software governance works.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > If someone says AMP is bad because there's some better project for accelerating mobile pages, I'm all ears. http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around? At least for AMP, I indeed am glad because it finally forced the big media houses to provide pages that didn't suck ten freakin' megabytes off my 50€/2GB data plan (yeah, that were German mobile data prices until not too long ago!) for a single page load with under 10KB of actual content. I'm not particularly liking the situation, but the fact is that the only entity able to actually force change is Google. ETA: Sorry, I forgot Apple who managed to get the Web rid of the proprietary, expensive (for authors) and insecure scourge that was Adobe Flash, but that was about the only progress that came from Apple. I'm not counting PWAs because Apple utterly failed to make web apps actually competitive with App Store apps for profit reasons!
- criddell 5y ago
  What are the biggest features from the past decade?
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    To name those I use in my daily work: WebRTC, img srcset, the video element, WebASM, media queries, CSS animations. I haven't had the chance to play with the new authentication stuff (Yubikey) yet. Yes, some of that, e.g. srcset, animations and media queries, was possible using Javascript... but god, it was awful to use, even more awful to debug (especially "stuttering" issues or unresponsive pages due to some animation locking the render thread) and, worst of all, a couple tabs with JS animations open and you could watch your battery go empty faster than the gas needle of a BMW X7 on a German Autobahn! The only thing that is still, for now over than thirty years, needing massive effort is HTTPS client certificates. ETA: And... best of all, Chrome and FF forced people to regularly update, meaning the days of supporting a browser that hadn't seen an update in a decade (IE6) are gone. Mobile devices aside, you only need to take about half a year worth of browser versions to test, and cross-browser compatibility issues have all but vanished for standard stuff (with the notable exception of Apple).
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > To name those I use in my daily work: WebRTC, img srcset, the video element, WebASM, media queries, CSS animations. Sounds like you're in the business of making that crappy web bloat the rest of us despise. Which makes your whining about "download ten megabyte for ten kilobytes of content" doubly ironic.
    - ttepasse 5y ago
      > To name those I use in my daily work: WebRTC, img srcset, the video element, WebASM, media queries, CSS animations. The majority of these things are not from Google/Chrome and not from this past decade. <img srcset> was first introduced by Safari and proposed by Apple to the WhatWG in 2012; I believe for their iPhone 4 with the 2× Retina display. But Webkit was already thinking in 2006 about High DPI. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012May/0138.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2... https://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ https://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ The <video> element was first proposed by Opera to the WhatWG and standardised there. I believe the first big adopter was Safari on iPhone, because of no Flash, of course. https://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-February/009702.html https://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-Fe... Media Queries were first proposed and specced by Håkon Wium Lie of Opera in 2001. (Good) Browsers for the first years implemented just a subset of that feature (the media types). In 2007 Apple released the first iPhone and adopted the media queries syntax, especially the viewport width and height which made the former mostly unknown specification more popular. https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-mediaqueries-20010404/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-mediaqueries-20010404/Ove... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/OptimizingforSafarioniPhone/OptimizingforSafarioniPhone.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap... CSS animations (and transitions and transforms) were proposed by Apple in late 2007 after implementation in Safari: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.... I thought I remember that Apple first used these technologies for Mac OS X‘ web-based Dashboard widgets but in retrospect that must have been <canvas>. WebRTC and WebASM seem to be more Chrome things, yes, and from the past decade. (I don't have a big point; just some annoying memories of following web standards in that decade more closely than now.)
aembleton 5y ago
What websites do that? I'm sure they exist, but I've not come across them on Firefox for a few years now. Certainly not tiring of them.
- petee 5y ago
  Im not necessarily talking about Firefox (which i don't use.) Of course on the spot I'm not able to think of a big list, but my bank, the payroll company my employer uses, and Hulu. Opera is basically Chrome, and supports the same features, but alot of websites will complain to high heaven, or somehow find a way to break a feature due to whatever it thinks the useragent means.
kstrauser 5y ago
I’ll name names: I can’t use Safari to log into a website that uses Auth0 because its authorization flow depends on cookies working the way Chrome wants them to. I’m using Safari’s default cookie settings and not going out of my way to disable or block them. Their notes give instructions on how to “fix” Safari by disabling ITP, which I’m not gonna do. We need to use the business website that Auth0 logs us into, but I’m not touching Auth0 until they fix their stuff to work with more privacy-respecting browsers. I can appreciate how difficult that may be from a technical point of view, but as an end user, no thanks.

by petee 5y ago

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> I'm tired of seeing "your browser is unsupported" and denied access while using a chromium based alternative. It's like Internet Explorer all over again! Why would anyone do this?

mschuster91 5y ago

> Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles Like it or not, at least Google blazes ahead and brings new features to the browser sphere. It's not like innovation can be expected from Firefox any more, not with them cutting costs on the development team.

petee 5y ago
A vast majority of websites do not need bells and whistles, especially when it breaks simple things like links, scrolling, or the back button. The end effect is a broken, incompatible web.
pixl97 5y ago
Hmm, I remember hearing this same argument about IE decades ago. Look how that worked out.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  When was Micro$oft ever accused of being too innovative - or rather, innovative at all?! From what I remember, web developers (including me) were so utterly pissed about IE6 being in a state of a years-long feature freeze that Firefox and later Chrome actually had their chance to rise.
merrywhether 5y ago
Keep telling yourself this. AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around? So many of their features are purely to give Google more ad revenue and power over the internet. I’d be willing to bet that the main reason they fund so much non-ad innovation is to overwhelm any potential new-comers to the browser space and stifle competition (even Microsoft gave up). But too many developers buy into the idea that being able to use the newest Array.findLast() API is somehow crucial to the success of their web product and thus help perpetuate the Chrome monoculture.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  If someone says AMP is bad because there's some better project for accelerating mobile pages, I'm all ears. If they say it's bad because web pages are fast enough, I'd tend to favor "bias for action", but I could imagine being convinced by something like Dan Luu's parting shot (https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/) that a big new standard hurts other people trying to solve the underlying issue. If someone says it's bad because corporate interests shouldn't push innovation... well, I'd like to understand why they're okay with the explicitly bought and paid for OpenJS board seats, or the permanent corporate tetrarchy for HTML. A lot of developers seem to have unrealistic expectations about how software governance works.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > If someone says AMP is bad because there's some better project for accelerating mobile pages, I'm all ears. http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around? At least for AMP, I indeed am glad because it finally forced the big media houses to provide pages that didn't suck ten freakin' megabytes off my 50€/2GB data plan (yeah, that were German mobile data prices until not too long ago!) for a single page load with under 10KB of actual content. I'm not particularly liking the situation, but the fact is that the only entity able to actually force change is Google. ETA: Sorry, I forgot Apple who managed to get the Web rid of the proprietary, expensive (for authors) and insecure scourge that was Adobe Flash, but that was about the only progress that came from Apple. I'm not counting PWAs because Apple utterly failed to make web apps actually competitive with App Store apps for profit reasons!
criddell 5y ago
What are the biggest features from the past decade?
- mschuster91 5y ago
  To name those I use in my daily work: WebRTC, img srcset, the video element, WebASM, media queries, CSS animations. I haven't had the chance to play with the new authentication stuff (Yubikey) yet. Yes, some of that, e.g. srcset, animations and media queries, was possible using Javascript... but god, it was awful to use, even more awful to debug (especially "stuttering" issues or unresponsive pages due to some animation locking the render thread) and, worst of all, a couple tabs with JS animations open and you could watch your battery go empty faster than the gas needle of a BMW X7 on a German Autobahn! The only thing that is still, for now over than thirty years, needing massive effort is HTTPS client certificates. ETA: And... best of all, Chrome and FF forced people to regularly update, meaning the days of supporting a browser that hadn't seen an update in a decade (IE6) are gone. Mobile devices aside, you only need to take about half a year worth of browser versions to test, and cross-browser compatibility issues have all but vanished for standard stuff (with the notable exception of Apple).
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > To name those I use in my daily work: WebRTC, img srcset, the video element, WebASM, media queries, CSS animations. Sounds like you're in the business of making that crappy web bloat the rest of us despise. Which makes your whining about "download ten megabyte for ten kilobytes of content" doubly ironic.
  - ttepasse 5y ago
    > To name those I use in my daily work: WebRTC, img srcset, the video element, WebASM, media queries, CSS animations. The majority of these things are not from Google/Chrome and not from this past decade. <img srcset> was first introduced by Safari and proposed by Apple to the WhatWG in 2012; I believe for their iPhone 4 with the 2× Retina display. But Webkit was already thinking in 2006 about High DPI. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012May/0138.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2... https://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ https://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ The <video> element was first proposed by Opera to the WhatWG and standardised there. I believe the first big adopter was Safari on iPhone, because of no Flash, of course. https://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-February/009702.html https://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-Fe... Media Queries were first proposed and specced by Håkon Wium Lie of Opera in 2001. (Good) Browsers for the first years implemented just a subset of that feature (the media types). In 2007 Apple released the first iPhone and adopted the media queries syntax, especially the viewport width and height which made the former mostly unknown specification more popular. https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-mediaqueries-20010404/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-mediaqueries-20010404/Ove... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/OptimizingforSafarioniPhone/OptimizingforSafarioniPhone.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap... CSS animations (and transitions and transforms) were proposed by Apple in late 2007 after implementation in Safari: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.... I thought I remember that Apple first used these technologies for Mac OS X‘ web-based Dashboard widgets but in retrospect that must have been <canvas>. WebRTC and WebASM seem to be more Chrome things, yes, and from the past decade. (I don't have a big point; just some annoying memories of following web standards in that decade more closely than now.)

aembleton 5y ago

What websites do that? I'm sure they exist, but I've not come across them on Firefox for a few years now. Certainly not tiring of them.

petee 5y ago
Im not necessarily talking about Firefox (which i don't use.) Of course on the spot I'm not able to think of a big list, but my bank, the payroll company my employer uses, and Hulu. Opera is basically Chrome, and supports the same features, but alot of websites will complain to high heaven, or somehow find a way to break a feature due to whatever it thinks the useragent means.

kstrauser 5y ago

I’ll name names: I can’t use Safari to log into a website that uses Auth0 because its authorization flow depends on cookies working the way Chrome wants them to. I’m using Safari’s default cookie settings and not going out of my way to disable or block them. Their notes give instructions on how to “fix” Safari by disabling ITP, which I’m not gonna do. We need to use the business website that Auth0 logs us into, but I’m not touching Auth0 until they fix their stuff to work with more privacy-respecting browsers. I can appreciate how difficult that may be from a technical point of view, but as an end user, no thanks.