3 ms·

PPK (whom you cite) is an extreme conservative for the web, as are many many forces about. I don't think it's possible to have this conversation. People have a

PPK (whom you cite) is an extreme conservative for the web, as are many many forces about. I don't think it's possible to have this conversation. People have a deep belief about what they want from the web, and a ton of people want it small & tiny & less than it is. People are desperate to believe Google has some huge weird agenda. The agenda seems pretty obvious: build a great hypermedium. Build the best protocol for information the world has. Because Google already is everywhere, already has the best search engine, already has a great first party relationship with users, as they start every journey into the web. Google' agenda isn't to block out or hurt other people, it's to be better & do better than all the native apps, to make the connected online experience simply better. And they're winning. They're doing it: they're making the connected hypermedia world the best option for computing, by having great capabilities, by making it easy for webdevs to do amazing things quickly, by having a good low-level capabilities that endless frameworks can arrange as they see fit, pursuant to the ideals of the Extensible Web Manifesto. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto They're not being mean or unfair at all. Chrome has the most fair, reasonable, upstream-first, pro-social way of developing software the world has ever seen. https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/ https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/ is higher responsibility, more responsive & shared-early, with more safeguards than almost everyone else on the planet, and they do it in public. Their works are specified, they seek review early, they get architecture & security group reviews. It's unprecedented in extreme how far Google goes to make sure web development is open. But people just cannot possibly imagine there's not some secret cause. Everything is met with hostility, weird personal attacks, & debasement. You basically never hear anyone who is critical but also reasonable or sympathetic or understanding: this is the tell. Almost all the negative feedback against Google & Chrome is to the wall outrage, is 100% on one side, lacking in nuance or balance. There's no recognition of good, no appreciation of the attempt at process. This is a cruel & savage thing the internet has ganged up to do, to be so lopsidedly angry and mean, with so little willingness to recognize optimism, growth, hope, trying, and effort, which have already been such an amazing boon to us.

userbinator 3y ago
They're not being mean or unfair at all. Chrome has the most fair, reasonable, upstream-first, pro-social way of developing software the world has ever seen.[...]higher responsibility, more responsive & shared-early, with more safeguards than almost everyone else on the planet That may be the most buzzword-filled sentence (and comment) I've ever seen in a reply, and it means absolutely nothing. Google's weapon of monopoly is change. They have the manpower to churn the "standard" more than anyone else and modify their browser accordingly, while at the same time spreading propaganda about using features only their browser (now) has, regardless of whether they're actually necessary. This is a cruel & savage thing the internet has ganged up to do, to be so lopsidedly angry and mean, with so little willingness to recognize optimism, growth, hope, trying, and effort, which have already been such an amazing boon to us. Oh for fucks' sake... you're talking about an advertising-based megacorp that essentially controls the entire Internet. This isn't "don't be evil" anymore. They've long outgrown that.
- rektide 3y ago
  The only people who have forced change, so far, are Apple, and then Mozilla, who both banned 3rd party cookies/implemented Intelligent Tracking Protection, without a spec or guidance ahead of time, & then had to walk back & create a bunch of allow lists half the protections to not break the internet. > That may be the most buzzword-filled sentence (and comment) I've ever seen in a reply, and it means absolutely nothing. This is flaming. It's just being aggressive. In case I'm not being clear & you really don't get it (which I doubt), let's go over my assertions. "Chrome has the most fair" - Chrome is by far the most proactive of browsers at getting signals from other vendors. As above with Intelligent Tracking Protection, Apple and Moz just do shit & break shit. Everyone has to tip-tow through talking to Apple about specs because they'll just tank anything that doesn't go their way. "reasonable" - The first step in launching features is to tell people, write an explainer at a public endpoint, start prototyping, launch origin trials, widen review/seek signals from other vendors. They go so far to be considerate about what's happening. The origin trials allow for end-user experimentation, with a buy in that makes it obvious to users there's not commitment to the feature actually shipping; a trial is a trial is a trial. "upstream-first" - The guidelines I shared for launching features is to literally start incubating with a public spec. Get a mentor, & start writing specs. Prioritize the public & the spec over the work in the browser. "pro-social" - As above, incredible commitment to involving other parties to try to build great specifications. No surprises. Everything announced far ahead of time, tested. Spec review & TAG & security review. Everything is extremely public. "way of developing software the world has ever seen" - There's nothing like this. No one does 1/3rd as much a Google does when trying to advance the web. It's incredible. "higher responsibility" - Spoken to by the above. "more responsive" - blink-dev and the spec repos are both incredibly high responsiveness, with enormous amount of back & forth & give & take with external parties of all kinds to see what makes sense to build. "& shared-early," - So much warm up for anything they do. Incubating with use case/scenarios/explainer. Creating a Chrome Status entry. Announcing to blink-dev. All before any actual work happens. Incredible visibility. "with more safeguards than almost everyone else on the planet" - I can't think of a single other company with anywhere near this level of maturity about iterating forwards. > Google's weapon of monopoly is change. They have the manpower to churn the "standard" more than anyone else and modify their browser accordingly, If this were a problem, wouldn't we see the old web be broken? Do we see that problem? The only instances I'm aware of the web breaking in the past decade or so is Apple shipping Intelligent Tracking Protection, which they had to largely roll back & create allowlists around to allow the web to keep working. Google is now spearheading the effort to make actual specifications to for how we can do similar, but with, you know, actual specs, & just just waving the magic wand & changing things unannounced overnight. > while at the same time spreading propaganda about using features only their browser (now) has, The amount of tech that other browsers have adopted from Google is also notably high too. Since Google's open source, heck yes it's great that so many others can re-use & leverage the WebRTC stack Google was core to developing. Heck yes it's great that Google went off & built incredible software WebGL implementations in ANGLE, which again everyone else also uses now. There just doesn't seem to be a real problem here. We don't have the IE vs Netscape web, where huge amounts of sites just don't work & use fundamentally different technologies. Things seem to mostly work. Most of these techs being built seem to make sense & be helpful & good. They're things we should have. What is the propoganda Google is spinning here? Where do they haze the competition? If anything I see it as exactly the opposite. Google isn't negatively campaigning. But we see Apple then a week latter Mozilla make a big stink about how proud they are not to be implementing Web MIDI, or Web USB, which can be such direct & competent ways for users to make user of their devices. https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16-web-apis-in-safari-due-to-privacy-concerns/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16... > Oh for fucks' sake...that essentially controls the entire Internet. This is the weirdest strangest version of control I've ever seen. I think most people who read blink-dev see an entirely different world. This doesn't seem based in reason, in judgement over the actions of Chrome teams. It seems based in bias, in personal Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. I do think there's real problems with Google as a company, and there are real problems. But this company's success is directly coupled to the web. If you look at blink-dev for real, it's incredibly easy to see the truth of what Google does for the web. They try to take care of it. They try to help. The hypermedium we have has indeed made them big and strong, but the only way for them to stay big & strong is to keep the web from going bad, to keep it a good medium. Which they have done an excellent job of. Which they have poured enormous good genuine unshady effort into doing, for years.
vasco 3y ago
I'm going to say AMP, and hope that's enough to prove their main goal isn't to advance the "great hypermedium", but serve more ads and pay less fees to anyone else. Google has Chrome because Firefox Safari and IE could cut them out and make other search engines the default, that's about it, the rest are side reasons.
- rektide 3y ago
  AMP is definitely a bad taste. The bad feelings here are legitemate for sure. Still, I recognize at least some of the desires here. The web did have a huge problem with sites loading slow, and it on average could be better; AMP did prune things down & make a number of picks that would make things a lot faster. It was a careful subset. People detested that AMP sites got privilege in search rankings, and that was definitely a huge issue & uncool as heck. Right off the bat, Google did say they wanted to try to open up the capabilities to other sites. They wanted to make generic web technology where sites could safely embed content in a "search carousel", without AMP. But AMP stuck around for years as the only way to do that. The third AMP issue is what they kept wanting to make Google the first party host of a lot of this stuff, again crying that it was the only way they felt sure users would have fast experiences. And again, they said they hoped to have web specs to let them not have to do this in the future, coupled with the above search carousel/packaged site ideas. Which again was just incredibly slow to mature. I think AMP really polarized people stronger than it should have. It wasn't great. And worse, it was one of the rare times we've seen Google really try to play at picking favorites; they said they were going to open things up so others could also have similar benefits without being AMP, but it was incredibly slow to mature (in part because the standards development for WebPackage has gone soo slow). But they really did tackle real issues & did try to make things better; they really did have a very fast loading, lower jank page system that sites could quickly build with & get consistent good results from. Still, there were so many political land mines they created with this attempt; I want to recognize there are real interests here, but absolutely, in the end, this was an incredibly damaging bad experience. Still, I think there's an Occam's Razer view here. Either Google is an incredibly crafty top-down well-planned mastermind, who has incredibly complex schemes to "take over" the web. Or it's just a variety of different attempts to try to make things better, different organizational fiefs within a huge entity, and sometimes people are a little short-sighted about what a lightning rod their work might become. Yes: I think AMP is a pretty exceedingly bold & indeed misguided attempt, a huge lightning road for understandable frustration. But it's 7 years old now, and we haven't seen this kind of balderdashery since. Google isn't pushing AMP like they were, they're fine with it being a sparsely adopted toolkit, most of the teams have moved on, and we don't see a lot of similar picking favorites plays since. Some of WebPackage has shipped & we can do a lot of cool things now that AMP dreamed up, with no Google involved.

userbinator 3y ago

They're not being mean or unfair at all. Chrome has the most fair, reasonable, upstream-first, pro-social way of developing software the world has ever seen.[...]higher responsibility, more responsive & shared-early, with more safeguards than almost everyone else on the planet That may be the most buzzword-filled sentence (and comment) I've ever seen in a reply, and it means absolutely nothing. Google's weapon of monopoly is change. They have the manpower to churn the "standard" more than anyone else and modify their browser accordingly, while at the same time spreading propaganda about using features only their browser (now) has, regardless of whether they're actually necessary. This is a cruel & savage thing the internet has ganged up to do, to be so lopsidedly angry and mean, with so little willingness to recognize optimism, growth, hope, trying, and effort, which have already been such an amazing boon to us. Oh for fucks' sake... you're talking about an advertising-based megacorp that essentially controls the entire Internet. This isn't "don't be evil" anymore. They've long outgrown that.

rektide 3y ago
The only people who have forced change, so far, are Apple, and then Mozilla, who both banned 3rd party cookies/implemented Intelligent Tracking Protection, without a spec or guidance ahead of time, & then had to walk back & create a bunch of allow lists half the protections to not break the internet. > That may be the most buzzword-filled sentence (and comment) I've ever seen in a reply, and it means absolutely nothing. This is flaming. It's just being aggressive. In case I'm not being clear & you really don't get it (which I doubt), let's go over my assertions. "Chrome has the most fair" - Chrome is by far the most proactive of browsers at getting signals from other vendors. As above with Intelligent Tracking Protection, Apple and Moz just do shit & break shit. Everyone has to tip-tow through talking to Apple about specs because they'll just tank anything that doesn't go their way. "reasonable" - The first step in launching features is to tell people, write an explainer at a public endpoint, start prototyping, launch origin trials, widen review/seek signals from other vendors. They go so far to be considerate about what's happening. The origin trials allow for end-user experimentation, with a buy in that makes it obvious to users there's not commitment to the feature actually shipping; a trial is a trial is a trial. "upstream-first" - The guidelines I shared for launching features is to literally start incubating with a public spec. Get a mentor, & start writing specs. Prioritize the public & the spec over the work in the browser. "pro-social" - As above, incredible commitment to involving other parties to try to build great specifications. No surprises. Everything announced far ahead of time, tested. Spec review & TAG & security review. Everything is extremely public. "way of developing software the world has ever seen" - There's nothing like this. No one does 1/3rd as much a Google does when trying to advance the web. It's incredible. "higher responsibility" - Spoken to by the above. "more responsive" - blink-dev and the spec repos are both incredibly high responsiveness, with enormous amount of back & forth & give & take with external parties of all kinds to see what makes sense to build. "& shared-early," - So much warm up for anything they do. Incubating with use case/scenarios/explainer. Creating a Chrome Status entry. Announcing to blink-dev. All before any actual work happens. Incredible visibility. "with more safeguards than almost everyone else on the planet" - I can't think of a single other company with anywhere near this level of maturity about iterating forwards. > Google's weapon of monopoly is change. They have the manpower to churn the "standard" more than anyone else and modify their browser accordingly, If this were a problem, wouldn't we see the old web be broken? Do we see that problem? The only instances I'm aware of the web breaking in the past decade or so is Apple shipping Intelligent Tracking Protection, which they had to largely roll back & create allowlists around to allow the web to keep working. Google is now spearheading the effort to make actual specifications to for how we can do similar, but with, you know, actual specs, & just just waving the magic wand & changing things unannounced overnight. > while at the same time spreading propaganda about using features only their browser (now) has, The amount of tech that other browsers have adopted from Google is also notably high too. Since Google's open source, heck yes it's great that so many others can re-use & leverage the WebRTC stack Google was core to developing. Heck yes it's great that Google went off & built incredible software WebGL implementations in ANGLE, which again everyone else also uses now. There just doesn't seem to be a real problem here. We don't have the IE vs Netscape web, where huge amounts of sites just don't work & use fundamentally different technologies. Things seem to mostly work. Most of these techs being built seem to make sense & be helpful & good. They're things we should have. What is the propoganda Google is spinning here? Where do they haze the competition? If anything I see it as exactly the opposite. Google isn't negatively campaigning. But we see Apple then a week latter Mozilla make a big stink about how proud they are not to be implementing Web MIDI, or Web USB, which can be such direct & competent ways for users to make user of their devices. https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16-web-apis-in-safari-due-to-privacy-concerns/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16... > Oh for fucks' sake...that essentially controls the entire Internet. This is the weirdest strangest version of control I've ever seen. I think most people who read blink-dev see an entirely different world. This doesn't seem based in reason, in judgement over the actions of Chrome teams. It seems based in bias, in personal Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. I do think there's real problems with Google as a company, and there are real problems. But this company's success is directly coupled to the web. If you look at blink-dev for real, it's incredibly easy to see the truth of what Google does for the web. They try to take care of it. They try to help. The hypermedium we have has indeed made them big and strong, but the only way for them to stay big & strong is to keep the web from going bad, to keep it a good medium. Which they have done an excellent job of. Which they have poured enormous good genuine unshady effort into doing, for years.

vasco 3y ago

I'm going to say AMP, and hope that's enough to prove their main goal isn't to advance the "great hypermedium", but serve more ads and pay less fees to anyone else. Google has Chrome because Firefox Safari and IE could cut them out and make other search engines the default, that's about it, the rest are side reasons.

rektide 3y ago
AMP is definitely a bad taste. The bad feelings here are legitemate for sure. Still, I recognize at least some of the desires here. The web did have a huge problem with sites loading slow, and it on average could be better; AMP did prune things down & make a number of picks that would make things a lot faster. It was a careful subset. People detested that AMP sites got privilege in search rankings, and that was definitely a huge issue & uncool as heck. Right off the bat, Google did say they wanted to try to open up the capabilities to other sites. They wanted to make generic web technology where sites could safely embed content in a "search carousel", without AMP. But AMP stuck around for years as the only way to do that. The third AMP issue is what they kept wanting to make Google the first party host of a lot of this stuff, again crying that it was the only way they felt sure users would have fast experiences. And again, they said they hoped to have web specs to let them not have to do this in the future, coupled with the above search carousel/packaged site ideas. Which again was just incredibly slow to mature. I think AMP really polarized people stronger than it should have. It wasn't great. And worse, it was one of the rare times we've seen Google really try to play at picking favorites; they said they were going to open things up so others could also have similar benefits without being AMP, but it was incredibly slow to mature (in part because the standards development for WebPackage has gone soo slow). But they really did tackle real issues & did try to make things better; they really did have a very fast loading, lower jank page system that sites could quickly build with & get consistent good results from. Still, there were so many political land mines they created with this attempt; I want to recognize there are real interests here, but absolutely, in the end, this was an incredibly damaging bad experience. Still, I think there's an Occam's Razer view here. Either Google is an incredibly crafty top-down well-planned mastermind, who has incredibly complex schemes to "take over" the web. Or it's just a variety of different attempts to try to make things better, different organizational fiefs within a huge entity, and sometimes people are a little short-sighted about what a lightning rod their work might become. Yes: I think AMP is a pretty exceedingly bold & indeed misguided attempt, a huge lightning road for understandable frustration. But it's 7 years old now, and we haven't seen this kind of balderdashery since. Google isn't pushing AMP like they were, they're fine with it being a sparsely adopted toolkit, most of the teams have moved on, and we don't see a lot of similar picking favorites plays since. Some of WebPackage has shipped & we can do a lot of cool things now that AMP dreamed up, with no Google involved.