10 ms·

Every time Firefox introduces a cool new feature, they emphasize how it's standard, or being put into the standardization process, and how every web developer w

by graue 13y ago

Every time Firefox introduces a cool new feature, they emphasize how it's standard, or being put into the standardization process, and how every web developer will be able to use it. Chrome? Not so much. And it isn't just that this news article left something out — the official Chrome blog[1] never hints that this feature will ever work on anything but Chrome. To me it's uncomfortable how much Google's tactics with Chrome resemble Microsoft's "embrace and extend" from the late 90s. They seem to want everyone to make Chrome apps, not web apps. If that happens, ultimately we all suffer from the loss of an open web. [1] http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/05/richer-notifications-coming-to-chrome.html http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/05/richer-notifications-comi...

drivebyacct2 13y ago
"Every time" as long as you ignore WebRTC, Media Source API, among others. Chrome has always had privileged special, non-standard APIs for their browser apps and extensions. I wonder how blown your mind will be when you find out Firefox does too?
shadowfox 13y ago
I must say that it bothers me mildly too, having been through the latter half of the MS embrace-and-extend era as a professional. On the other hand, the perception on HN seem to tend towards Google being immune to such power plays. Maybe they are right; I dont know.
- yen223 13y ago
  The difference between Google and Microsoft is their business model. Microsoft sells software, and so it's in their interest to lock users into Internet Explorer, and by extension Windows. Google sells advertisements. They don't actually care which browser you use, as long as you're using a Google service. There's no incentive (yet) for them to lock users into Chrome.
  - hashtree 13y ago
    Chrome is tightly integrated with Google services and has a default search engine of Google. This seems plenty of, if not more, incentive.
    - yen223 13y ago
      FWIW Google pays Mozilla a lot of money to keep Google the default search engine on Firefox. They probably aren't too concerned if everyone switched to Firefox.
      - threeseed 13y ago
        Of course they would be concerned if people switched to Firefox. It's a business risk. Because what happens if Microsoft outbids Google and suddenly 1/3 of all browsers switch overnight to Bing.
    - endtime 13y ago
      My personal perspective is that Google wants people using performant, standards-compliant browsers. Doesn't matter who made it.
      - threeseed 13y ago
        No. Google wants people to view and click their ads. That's how they make their money. The only reason Chrome exists is because they know that most people just search using the text field in the top right corner of the browser.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
paulirish 13y ago
Part of this communication difference is that the Chrome blog's audience is users, people who aren't concerned with web standards. The Chromium blog, however, is where the developer story is told. Chrome 28's was covered the same time as the post you link: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/05/chrome-28-beta-more-immersive-web.html http://blog.chromium.org/2013/05/chrome-28-beta-more-immersi... Here, the W3C standard fullscreen API was covered for Android as well as the web standards WebGL and WebRTC being available through about:flags. Then CSP, @supports, Custom Elements.. all standard stuff. Mozilla does a great job communicating the web standards story of the features they're working on. This definitely inspired the Chrome team when we released Blink, so we worked on http://chromestatus.com http://chromestatus.com to capture the full cross-browser standardization story and give everyone a means to shame Chrome if we're implementing something for the web platform that doesn't have cross-vendor buy in. There is a lot of exciting APIs available in Chrome Apps but it's certainly not slowing down on the web platform side of things. I would definitely recommend you check out the "Intent to Implement/Ship" threads [1] on blink-dev. Here you can see the activity and discussions around compatibility risk, standardization and responsibly adding new features to the platform. [1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topicsearchin/blink-dev/subject$3Aintent https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topicsearch... or spreadsheeted here http://goo.gl/loaQ5 http://goo.gl/loaQ5
- coldtea 13y ago
  Thanks for the rundown. Checking the chromestatus page, I have another question: why so little movement in relation to the new Javascript features?
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  That's great and all, but you didn't address the issue. We're discussing this new notification system that will only ever work properly on Chrome. The latest posts on that chromium blog are even worse: 1) Richer access to Google services and better OS integration in Chrome packaged apps - Identity API - Google only - In App Payments API - Google Wallet only - Analytics API - Google Analytics only - Native Messaging API - The problem we are discussing 2) Dart - obviously a way to create a two-tier web with Chrome being the only option for performance. (You can bet it will be incredibly difficult for other browsers to package/integrate the Dart VM easily). Your roundabout answer to this question leaves me very concerned for the future of the web if Google actually thinks this isn't a problem. I do believe it's looking like the only responsible option for an open web is to ditch Chrome and try my best to lower Chrome market share. We're going to look back on this in 5 years and kick ourselves over letting Google do this. I hate to say it, but Google is now the biggest threat to an open web.
iamkhush 13y ago
But mostly they also assist in making the technology standardized, so that other players can use it as well. As they call it - pushing the web forward.
jessaustin 13y ago
Every time Firefox introduces a cool new feature, they emphasize how it's standard, or being put into the standardization process, and how every web developer will be able to use it. Except that's not really up to them is it? A feature that's only ever present in Firefox can't really be called a "standard". I know Mozilla's hearts are in the right place most of the time, but at some level they're trying to improve Firefox in largely the same ways that Google are trying to improve Chrome. The major exception to this would be if Google started imposing a "strategy tax" on Chrome: e.g. a deep inescapable G+ integration or something similarly awful. I can imagine Google doing that, while I can't imagine it of Mozilla.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  One big difference is that Mozilla is a non-profit whose stated purpose is to help move the open web forward. And they follow through on that time and again. So much of our open web today would be nowhere near what it is without them.
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    > So much of our open web today would be nowhere near what it is without them. You mean like WebRTC, WebM, WebP, Web Components, SPDY, WebSockets, the Chrome UI and process system copied by all, a huge part of the HTML5 api (Ian Hickson), also who's been paying Mozilla bills for the last 10 years? Yeoman? Closure compiler? etc. There're no other companies or non-profits who have spent as many human and financial resources as Google has on the web platform, we're talking billions of dollars here and thousands of people. I love Mozilla and I know bashing Google is a lot of fun, but you have to give Google credits here. Their dedication to the open web platform is simply unmatched.
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      WebM and WebP aren't widely used and WebM is patent-encumbered and dead in the water (being unencumbered by patents was its big advantage over the MPAA-backed formats and they lost that). The Chrome process system isn't being copied by all, just the other webkit/chrome folks and is much less efficient with lots of tabs open. The Chrome UI was a basic refinement of the UI progression amongst many browsers including web-pioneer Opera (who never seems to get much credit). In short, none of these are happening in a vacuum and Google generally seems to implement things that benefit their advertising/corporate arm rather than the open web (see: proprietary Chrome 'apps' vs open web apps). Mozilla and the volunteers around the world that have worked on Netscape since it went open source as well as Netscape before that have far more man-hours into this than Google does. Google wasn't 'paying Mozilla's bills' out of kindness or dedication to the open web. They were giving them a percentage of the MASSIVE amount of money they made because Mozilla had Google as the default search engine. Same reason other companies pay for inclusion or being the default in other countries. Heck, many argue (rather correctly, I say) that one reason for Chrome was so Google could control more of the web and have to pay Mozilla less money. I'm not a 'Google-basher' and use many of their cloud products within reason (knowing that they can pull the plug on them or me on a whim and I have zero recourse), but you're giving them too much credit. Mind you, none of this is meant to minimize Google's contributions, but their contributions are more on the search side and the mobile OS side than the 'open' web side in many ways.
nwh 13y ago
The raw notifications themselves are already in the latest Safari, though you're right, the "rich" ones will never ever be.
jrockway 13y ago
To me it's uncomfortable how much Google's tactics with Chrome resemble Microsoft's "embrace and extend" from the late 90s. I'm pretty sure Emacs came up with this idea: "embrace and extend" TECO. They seem to want everyone to make Chrome apps, not web apps. If that happens, ultimately we all suffer from the loss of an open web. Stallman seemed to want everyone to make Emacs apps, not TECO macros. If that happens, ultimately we all suffer from the loss of an open TECO community. (How is a Chrome/Chromium App different from a Gtk3 app or a Tk app? Those aren't open standards. They're just libraries the authors wanted to write and to share with the world. Not everything needs to be a standards process, sometimes you just do something and see if anyone likes it.) More seriously, there are quite a few differences between adding a feature to an open-source project and adding a feature to a web browser shipped as an inseparable component of the operating system installed on 99% of personal computers. As a thought experiment, imagine you want to use some dongle you just bought. There is a driver that comes with Windows, but you use Linux. Do you think you'll be using your dongle anytime soon? Probably not. But imagine the driver comes with FreeBSD instead. While you probably can't use the driver code verbatim (different APIs), you can probably port it in significantly less time than it would take to reverse engineer. So while FreeBSD may have bypassed the standards process for supporting that dongle, it still works for you with very little effort. I think if you're going to get outraged, it should be about how much memory Chrome uses, not that websites can now have prettier notifications when running under Chrome.
- jfoutz 13y ago
  That's a cute argument, but Microsoft never held a gun to a developer's head and said "use this feature or else!" Neither will Google. IE was just a nice feature to have available. If you happen to need a web browser control, there's one built in for you right there on every copy of windows. You could get in touch with Netscape and figure out what's required to redistribute their runtime, or just make the call to load up the ActiveX control. whichever is easier for you, dear developer. Notifications will work great on chrome, and non-chrome clients will kinda degrade gracefully by throwing a javascript error. It's fine. it's just there if you decide you need it, no gun to your head.
  - 13y ago
jmillikin 13y ago
The blog post mentions that the notifications API is for use by extensions and Chrome-based desktop apps. That means it's roughly equivalent to Firefox's XUL APIs, which are definitely not standardized.
- Skalman 13y ago
  And since XUL is not standardized, Mozilla has removed support for that in webpages. Try going to http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul in Firefox: "This page uses an unsupported technology that is no longer available by default in Firefox"
  - VMG 13y ago
    Chrome's notification API is not available from web pages as well.
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    But it's still supported by Firefox extensions https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/developers/docs/reference https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/developers/docs/reference Chrome apps are like Firefox addons, they have their own non-standard APIs. So complaining that Chrome Apps have their own non-standard APIs is not a valid argument when compared to Firefox.
est 13y ago
It's hard to imagine someone only embrace something without extending it.
- gkop 13y ago
  You're missing the context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
dannyr 13y ago
Would you rather have Google not build anything that is not based on standards?
- jrockway 13y ago
  I think the average HN reader would rather have Google go out of business. I'm not sure why, but that's what they want.
ahoge 13y ago
> Every time Firefox introduces a cool new feature, they emphasize how it's standard, or being put into the standardization process [...] No, not really. They just added `let`, iterators/generators, destructuring assignment, etc in 2006 without asking anyone. Today, you can even use it without opting-in (via: type="application/javascript;version=1.7"). This stuff is supposed to be in ES6 in the future. Same deal with APNG. They just added it in 2008. It also isn't standardized. Firefox also supports "jar:" URLs for some reason. Here is a demo: http://kaioa.com/b/0907/jartest.html http://kaioa.com/b/0907/jartest.html Well, all browser vendors are like that and it's generally a good thing. If one of those experimental things turns out to be useful, other browsers will adopt it. Good examples for that are things like JavaScript, XHR, or text-overflow:ellipsis.
- icebraining 13y ago
  No, not really. They just added `let`, iterators/generators, destructuring assignment, etc in 2006 without asking anyone. Today, you can even use it without opting-in (via: type="application/javascript;version=1.7"). This stuff is supposed to be in ES6 in the future. Parent said or being put into the standardization process. All those ES6 features are obviously in the standardization process.
  - ahoge 13y ago
    > All those ES6 features are obviously in the standardization process. Today they are, yes. Just like text-overflow:ellipsis (which was introduced with IE6) is now part of CSS3.
    - diroussel 13y ago
      And indeed most of the best web features were added before standardization. And some others that were standards first, like xhtml, well, didn't go so well.
- nnethercote 13y ago
  2006 was seven years ago; circumstances were different. Nowadays, at least for the JS stuff, we're much more circumspect about adding features, and really only do it for ES.next kind of stuff.
rogerchucker 13y ago
How else would you like Google to differentiate Chrome in the eyes of a non-techie person?
- Ygg2 13y ago
  How about on performance? Differentiating on a standard is not really following standard. That is to say, I'm not against it doing something crazy, like a replacement language for JS. Extraordinary efforts should bring equally extraordinary results.
  - rogerchucker 13y ago
    I doubt these matter much to people outside the tech world. Everybody more or less now knows that Chrome is crazy fast. Also, I'm pretty sure the day Google decided to launch an entire OS based on this browser, everybody should have assumed that they wouldn't be that dogmatic about standards anymore.
    - Ygg2 13y ago
      That's conflating problems. Google doesn't need to add non-standard API to Chrome Browser so that Chrome OS can use non-standard API. They probably have branches.
workbench 13y ago
> To me it's uncomfortable how much Google's tactics with Chrome resemble Microsoft's "embrace and extend" from the late 90s They're no better than 90s MS at this point, look at what Reader did to the RSS market.
VikingCoder 13y ago
That's a crap argument, because MS always purposefully left the status of the IP up in the air, while Google tries to standardize, and releases open source code.

by graue 13y ago

drivebyacct2 13y ago

"Every time" as long as you ignore WebRTC, Media Source API, among others. Chrome has always had privileged special, non-standard APIs for their browser apps and extensions. I wonder how blown your mind will be when you find out Firefox does too?

shadowfox 13y ago

I must say that it bothers me mildly too, having been through the latter half of the MS embrace-and-extend era as a professional. On the other hand, the perception on HN seem to tend towards Google being immune to such power plays. Maybe they are right; I dont know.

yen223 13y ago
The difference between Google and Microsoft is their business model. Microsoft sells software, and so it's in their interest to lock users into Internet Explorer, and by extension Windows. Google sells advertisements. They don't actually care which browser you use, as long as you're using a Google service. There's no incentive (yet) for them to lock users into Chrome.
- hashtree 13y ago
  Chrome is tightly integrated with Google services and has a default search engine of Google. This seems plenty of, if not more, incentive.
  - yen223 13y ago
    FWIW Google pays Mozilla a lot of money to keep Google the default search engine on Firefox. They probably aren't too concerned if everyone switched to Firefox.
    - threeseed 13y ago
      Of course they would be concerned if people switched to Firefox. It's a business risk. Because what happens if Microsoft outbids Google and suddenly 1/3 of all browsers switch overnight to Bing.
  - endtime 13y ago
    My personal perspective is that Google wants people using performant, standards-compliant browsers. Doesn't matter who made it.
    - threeseed 13y ago
      No. Google wants people to view and click their ads. That's how they make their money. The only reason Chrome exists is because they know that most people just search using the text field in the top right corner of the browser.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

paulirish 13y ago

Part of this communication difference is that the Chrome blog's audience is users, people who aren't concerned with web standards. The Chromium blog, however, is where the developer story is told. Chrome 28's was covered the same time as the post you link: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/05/chrome-28-beta-more-immersive-web.html http://blog.chromium.org/2013/05/chrome-28-beta-more-immersi... Here, the W3C standard fullscreen API was covered for Android as well as the web standards WebGL and WebRTC being available through about:flags. Then CSP, @supports, Custom Elements.. all standard stuff. Mozilla does a great job communicating the web standards story of the features they're working on. This definitely inspired the Chrome team when we released Blink, so we worked on http://chromestatus.com http://chromestatus.com to capture the full cross-browser standardization story and give everyone a means to shame Chrome if we're implementing something for the web platform that doesn't have cross-vendor buy in. There is a lot of exciting APIs available in Chrome Apps but it's certainly not slowing down on the web platform side of things. I would definitely recommend you check out the "Intent to Implement/Ship" threads [1] on blink-dev. Here you can see the activity and discussions around compatibility risk, standardization and responsibly adding new features to the platform. [1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topicsearchin/blink-dev/subject$3Aintent https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topicsearch... or spreadsheeted here http://goo.gl/loaQ5 http://goo.gl/loaQ5

coldtea 13y ago
Thanks for the rundown. Checking the chromestatus page, I have another question: why so little movement in relation to the new Javascript features?
RyanZAG 13y ago
That's great and all, but you didn't address the issue. We're discussing this new notification system that will only ever work properly on Chrome. The latest posts on that chromium blog are even worse: 1) Richer access to Google services and better OS integration in Chrome packaged apps - Identity API - Google only - In App Payments API - Google Wallet only - Analytics API - Google Analytics only - Native Messaging API - The problem we are discussing 2) Dart - obviously a way to create a two-tier web with Chrome being the only option for performance. (You can bet it will be incredibly difficult for other browsers to package/integrate the Dart VM easily). Your roundabout answer to this question leaves me very concerned for the future of the web if Google actually thinks this isn't a problem. I do believe it's looking like the only responsible option for an open web is to ditch Chrome and try my best to lower Chrome market share. We're going to look back on this in 5 years and kick ourselves over letting Google do this. I hate to say it, but Google is now the biggest threat to an open web.

iamkhush 13y ago

But mostly they also assist in making the technology standardized, so that other players can use it as well. As they call it - pushing the web forward.

jessaustin 13y ago

Every time Firefox introduces a cool new feature, they emphasize how it's standard, or being put into the standardization process, and how every web developer will be able to use it. Except that's not really up to them is it? A feature that's only ever present in Firefox can't really be called a "standard". I know Mozilla's hearts are in the right place most of the time, but at some level they're trying to improve Firefox in largely the same ways that Google are trying to improve Chrome. The major exception to this would be if Google started imposing a "strategy tax" on Chrome: e.g. a deep inescapable G+ integration or something similarly awful. I can imagine Google doing that, while I can't imagine it of Mozilla.

JohnTHaller 13y ago
One big difference is that Mozilla is a non-profit whose stated purpose is to help move the open web forward. And they follow through on that time and again. So much of our open web today would be nowhere near what it is without them.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  > So much of our open web today would be nowhere near what it is without them. You mean like WebRTC, WebM, WebP, Web Components, SPDY, WebSockets, the Chrome UI and process system copied by all, a huge part of the HTML5 api (Ian Hickson), also who's been paying Mozilla bills for the last 10 years? Yeoman? Closure compiler? etc. There're no other companies or non-profits who have spent as many human and financial resources as Google has on the web platform, we're talking billions of dollars here and thousands of people. I love Mozilla and I know bashing Google is a lot of fun, but you have to give Google credits here. Their dedication to the open web platform is simply unmatched.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    WebM and WebP aren't widely used and WebM is patent-encumbered and dead in the water (being unencumbered by patents was its big advantage over the MPAA-backed formats and they lost that). The Chrome process system isn't being copied by all, just the other webkit/chrome folks and is much less efficient with lots of tabs open. The Chrome UI was a basic refinement of the UI progression amongst many browsers including web-pioneer Opera (who never seems to get much credit). In short, none of these are happening in a vacuum and Google generally seems to implement things that benefit their advertising/corporate arm rather than the open web (see: proprietary Chrome 'apps' vs open web apps). Mozilla and the volunteers around the world that have worked on Netscape since it went open source as well as Netscape before that have far more man-hours into this than Google does. Google wasn't 'paying Mozilla's bills' out of kindness or dedication to the open web. They were giving them a percentage of the MASSIVE amount of money they made because Mozilla had Google as the default search engine. Same reason other companies pay for inclusion or being the default in other countries. Heck, many argue (rather correctly, I say) that one reason for Chrome was so Google could control more of the web and have to pay Mozilla less money. I'm not a 'Google-basher' and use many of their cloud products within reason (knowing that they can pull the plug on them or me on a whim and I have zero recourse), but you're giving them too much credit. Mind you, none of this is meant to minimize Google's contributions, but their contributions are more on the search side and the mobile OS side than the 'open' web side in many ways.

nwh 13y ago

The raw notifications themselves are already in the latest Safari, though you're right, the "rich" ones will never ever be.

jrockway 13y ago

To me it's uncomfortable how much Google's tactics with Chrome resemble Microsoft's "embrace and extend" from the late 90s. I'm pretty sure Emacs came up with this idea: "embrace and extend" TECO. They seem to want everyone to make Chrome apps, not web apps. If that happens, ultimately we all suffer from the loss of an open web. Stallman seemed to want everyone to make Emacs apps, not TECO macros. If that happens, ultimately we all suffer from the loss of an open TECO community. (How is a Chrome/Chromium App different from a Gtk3 app or a Tk app? Those aren't open standards. They're just libraries the authors wanted to write and to share with the world. Not everything needs to be a standards process, sometimes you just do something and see if anyone likes it.) More seriously, there are quite a few differences between adding a feature to an open-source project and adding a feature to a web browser shipped as an inseparable component of the operating system installed on 99% of personal computers. As a thought experiment, imagine you want to use some dongle you just bought. There is a driver that comes with Windows, but you use Linux. Do you think you'll be using your dongle anytime soon? Probably not. But imagine the driver comes with FreeBSD instead. While you probably can't use the driver code verbatim (different APIs), you can probably port it in significantly less time than it would take to reverse engineer. So while FreeBSD may have bypassed the standards process for supporting that dongle, it still works for you with very little effort. I think if you're going to get outraged, it should be about how much memory Chrome uses, not that websites can now have prettier notifications when running under Chrome.

jfoutz 13y ago
That's a cute argument, but Microsoft never held a gun to a developer's head and said "use this feature or else!" Neither will Google. IE was just a nice feature to have available. If you happen to need a web browser control, there's one built in for you right there on every copy of windows. You could get in touch with Netscape and figure out what's required to redistribute their runtime, or just make the call to load up the ActiveX control. whichever is easier for you, dear developer. Notifications will work great on chrome, and non-chrome clients will kinda degrade gracefully by throwing a javascript error. It's fine. it's just there if you decide you need it, no gun to your head.
- 13y ago

jmillikin 13y ago

The blog post mentions that the notifications API is for use by extensions and Chrome-based desktop apps. That means it's roughly equivalent to Firefox's XUL APIs, which are definitely not standardized.

Skalman 13y ago
And since XUL is not standardized, Mozilla has removed support for that in webpages. Try going to http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul in Firefox: "This page uses an unsupported technology that is no longer available by default in Firefox"
- VMG 13y ago
  Chrome's notification API is not available from web pages as well.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  But it's still supported by Firefox extensions https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/developers/docs/reference https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/developers/docs/reference Chrome apps are like Firefox addons, they have their own non-standard APIs. So complaining that Chrome Apps have their own non-standard APIs is not a valid argument when compared to Firefox.

est 13y ago

It's hard to imagine someone only embrace something without extending it.

gkop 13y ago
You're missing the context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

dannyr 13y ago

Would you rather have Google not build anything that is not based on standards?

jrockway 13y ago
I think the average HN reader would rather have Google go out of business. I'm not sure why, but that's what they want.

ahoge 13y ago

> Every time Firefox introduces a cool new feature, they emphasize how it's standard, or being put into the standardization process [...] No, not really. They just added `let`, iterators/generators, destructuring assignment, etc in 2006 without asking anyone. Today, you can even use it without opting-in (via: type="application/javascript;version=1.7"). This stuff is supposed to be in ES6 in the future. Same deal with APNG. They just added it in 2008. It also isn't standardized. Firefox also supports "jar:" URLs for some reason. Here is a demo: http://kaioa.com/b/0907/jartest.html http://kaioa.com/b/0907/jartest.html Well, all browser vendors are like that and it's generally a good thing. If one of those experimental things turns out to be useful, other browsers will adopt it. Good examples for that are things like JavaScript, XHR, or text-overflow:ellipsis.

icebraining 13y ago
No, not really. They just added `let`, iterators/generators, destructuring assignment, etc in 2006 without asking anyone. Today, you can even use it without opting-in (via: type="application/javascript;version=1.7"). This stuff is supposed to be in ES6 in the future. Parent said or being put into the standardization process. All those ES6 features are obviously in the standardization process.
- ahoge 13y ago
  > All those ES6 features are obviously in the standardization process. Today they are, yes. Just like text-overflow:ellipsis (which was introduced with IE6) is now part of CSS3.
  - diroussel 13y ago
    And indeed most of the best web features were added before standardization. And some others that were standards first, like xhtml, well, didn't go so well.
nnethercote 13y ago
2006 was seven years ago; circumstances were different. Nowadays, at least for the JS stuff, we're much more circumspect about adding features, and really only do it for ES.next kind of stuff.

rogerchucker 13y ago

How else would you like Google to differentiate Chrome in the eyes of a non-techie person?

Ygg2 13y ago
How about on performance? Differentiating on a standard is not really following standard. That is to say, I'm not against it doing something crazy, like a replacement language for JS. Extraordinary efforts should bring equally extraordinary results.
- rogerchucker 13y ago
  I doubt these matter much to people outside the tech world. Everybody more or less now knows that Chrome is crazy fast. Also, I'm pretty sure the day Google decided to launch an entire OS based on this browser, everybody should have assumed that they wouldn't be that dogmatic about standards anymore.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    That's conflating problems. Google doesn't need to add non-standard API to Chrome Browser so that Chrome OS can use non-standard API. They probably have branches.

workbench 13y ago

> To me it's uncomfortable how much Google's tactics with Chrome resemble Microsoft's "embrace and extend" from the late 90s They're no better than 90s MS at this point, look at what Reader did to the RSS market.

VikingCoder 13y ago

That's a crap argument, because MS always purposefully left the status of the IP up in the air, while Google tries to standardize, and releases open source code.