12 ms·

How’s it fake grassroots? It literally got started by a bunch of no name developers

Kerrick 4y ago
For one thing, TFA is written by someone whose livelihood is earned at a competing software mega corporation & browser vendor. Their job title is, "Microsoft Partner PM on Edge."
dmitriid 4y ago
No. It wasn't. This is a several-year-long obvious and brash campaign by numerous very loud "developer advocates" and high-visibility developers from Chrome. Of whom Alex Russel (the author of the piece we're discussing) was one of the most visible (he worked at Google for 9 years? More?). Chrome is by far the largest driver behind "Safari bad, Safari no support standards" of these "grassroots no-name initiatives". On top of that, Google owns web.dev. And when Chrome releases another half-baked non-standard it's advertised there as "this great new standard now available" that gullible devs buy line, hook and sinker and flock to HN to demand that "the new IE wisen up and implement those things now".
- nailer 4y ago
  > Chrome is by far the largest driver behind "Safari bad, Safari no support standards" of these "grassroots no-name initiatives". No Safari is the largest driver of the "Safari no support standards". It's Apple's choices, not Google or Microsofts or Mozilla's, that make Safari not support standards. Edit-reply due to rate limit: my own experience was WebCrypto, which was very much a standard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_... and ignored by Safari for years. There are many, many others. If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Hint, ChromeOS API pushed as "standards", aren't.
  - stoobs 4y ago
    "standards"
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    The "standards" aren't standards, they're new Chrome features. Most of the time their only utility is to enable more accurate browser fingerprinting. Google feels they can release any half-baked "feature" and declare it a standard thanks to their monopoly.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one. Easy. The most obvious/glaring one is WebHID. Enjoy the timeline: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459 It's not just HID, of course. All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Chrome is shipping them enabled by default, and there's no end to clueless developers moaning about this and calling Safari (mostly) and Firefox (from time to time) too slow in "moving the web forward". Needless to say that all those non-standards are pushed forward by Chrome. The less obvious one is Constructable Stylesheets. The spec had an obvious flaw that could lead to easily reproducible deadlocks. And that is on top with other issues with design, API naming etc. A team within Google (lit-html) wanted this feature, so Chrome shipped it against clear objections from both Safari and Firefox. And then refused to move the feature back under a flag because "0.8% of page views in Chrome" were suddenly using this feature. And proceded to gaslight other browsers' developers https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45 https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45. See e.g. a response to that https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issuecomment-578008737 https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu... Of course there's now a "looking ahead" that wants to do exactly what Safari and Mozilla wanted to do in the first place: https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead In general, Chrome pushes 40 to over 100 new Web APIs with each release (that is, every two months). How many of them are actual standards that had actual input from other browser developers? In how many Chrome actually listened and implemented suggestions? https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
    - nailer 4y ago
      Thanks for the substantive reply, upvoted. > All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Well yes. Re https://wicg.github.io/webhid/ https://wicg.github.io/webhid/, there's a risk in allowing apps to talk to hardware. We still let non-web apps do this. We deny by default, and have permissions screens etc where people can allow/reject the access. Disagreements are a separate issue from Safari's record of shipping broken versions of uncontroversial web standards though. Eg, Mozilla disagrees with hardware support but nobody accuses them of ignoring web standards.

For one thing, TFA is written by someone whose livelihood is earned at a competing software mega corporation & browser vendor. Their job title is, "Microsoft Partner PM on Edge."

dmitriid 4y ago

No. It wasn't. This is a several-year-long obvious and brash campaign by numerous very loud "developer advocates" and high-visibility developers from Chrome. Of whom Alex Russel (the author of the piece we're discussing) was one of the most visible (he worked at Google for 9 years? More?). Chrome is by far the largest driver behind "Safari bad, Safari no support standards" of these "grassroots no-name initiatives". On top of that, Google owns web.dev. And when Chrome releases another half-baked non-standard it's advertised there as "this great new standard now available" that gullible devs buy line, hook and sinker and flock to HN to demand that "the new IE wisen up and implement those things now".

nailer 4y ago
> Chrome is by far the largest driver behind "Safari bad, Safari no support standards" of these "grassroots no-name initiatives". No Safari is the largest driver of the "Safari no support standards". It's Apple's choices, not Google or Microsofts or Mozilla's, that make Safari not support standards. Edit-reply due to rate limit: my own experience was WebCrypto, which was very much a standard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_... and ignored by Safari for years. There are many, many others. If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Hint, ChromeOS API pushed as "standards", aren't.
- stoobs 4y ago
  "standards"
- giantrobot 4y ago
  The "standards" aren't standards, they're new Chrome features. Most of the time their only utility is to enable more accurate browser fingerprinting. Google feels they can release any half-baked "feature" and declare it a standard thanks to their monopoly.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one. Easy. The most obvious/glaring one is WebHID. Enjoy the timeline: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459 It's not just HID, of course. All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Chrome is shipping them enabled by default, and there's no end to clueless developers moaning about this and calling Safari (mostly) and Firefox (from time to time) too slow in "moving the web forward". Needless to say that all those non-standards are pushed forward by Chrome. The less obvious one is Constructable Stylesheets. The spec had an obvious flaw that could lead to easily reproducible deadlocks. And that is on top with other issues with design, API naming etc. A team within Google (lit-html) wanted this feature, so Chrome shipped it against clear objections from both Safari and Firefox. And then refused to move the feature back under a flag because "0.8% of page views in Chrome" were suddenly using this feature. And proceded to gaslight other browsers' developers https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45 https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45. See e.g. a response to that https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issuecomment-578008737 https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu... Of course there's now a "looking ahead" that wants to do exactly what Safari and Mozilla wanted to do in the first place: https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead In general, Chrome pushes 40 to over 100 new Web APIs with each release (that is, every two months). How many of them are actual standards that had actual input from other browser developers? In how many Chrome actually listened and implemented suggestions? https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
  - nailer 4y ago
    Thanks for the substantive reply, upvoted. > All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Well yes. Re https://wicg.github.io/webhid/ https://wicg.github.io/webhid/, there's a risk in allowing apps to talk to hardware. We still let non-web apps do this. We deny by default, and have permissions screens etc where people can allow/reject the access. Disagreements are a separate issue from Safari's record of shipping broken versions of uncontroversial web standards though. Eg, Mozilla disagrees with hardware support but nobody accuses them of ignoring web standards.