|
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| Technical question: What would a third party browser rendering
| engine allow, that using the safari renderer doesn't? I figure if
| you make a browser by just wrapping the safari renderer then you
| can make it do whatever you want it to. Why does the renderer
| make such that big of a difference?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Actual extensions (like ublock!), bleeding edge/experimental
| web features like new webassembly or web APIs (firefox and
| chrome usually implement these before Safari does), stuff Apple
| has decided to sabotage because it threatens the app store
| (like fullscreen).
| scarface74 wrote:
| Safari has supported "actual extensions" for two yeass.
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| Yes but their API is very limited and by design doesn't
| allow a good ad blocker like ublock to be built.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The actual "extension" framework does. It's used by
| 1Blocker. Not just the "we send you a JSON set of rules".
|
| But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy,
| why would you trust a third party to intercept all of
| your web traffic?
| commoner wrote:
| > But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy,
| why would you trust a third party to intercept all of
| your web traffic?
|
| uBlock Origin is free and open source, and its code is
| thoroughly reviewed by many contributors every release. I
| trust uBlock Origin over a filtering mechanism built into
| a closed source browser such as Safari.
| scarface74 wrote:
| WebKit is also open source and you can see exactly how it
| works.
|
| But did you personally download the open source version
| review the code and install it?
| [deleted]
| dmitriid wrote:
| > web APIs (firefox and chrome usually implement these before
| Safari does)
|
| What you meant to say: Chrome implements its own non-
| standards against strenuous objections if both Firefox and
| Safari.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I said what I meant to say, I've literally drafted web
| standards before and Safari is often the last to implement
| them. I'm not talking about WebUSB or WebGoogleAnalytics or
| whatever
| robertoandred wrote:
| So what are you talking about? Sticky? Has? Subgrid?
| creatonez wrote:
| Firefox addons on iOS, ported directly from the desktop
| versions with no modifications, will be possible. Gecko has a
| lot of under-the-hood knobs and dials that simply don't exist
| in Webkit, but are needed by the addon ecosystem.
| gnicholas wrote:
| That would be great! Is it currently available on FF for
| Android?
| Mogzol wrote:
| Yes, you can run standard desktop Firefox extensions on FF
| for Android. There was a whitelist of extensions Mozilla
| allowed you to install though, I'm not sure if that still
| exists on the most recent versions.
| rektide wrote:
| Your scope is way way off.
|
| It's far from just the render engine that's being constrained.
| The whole virtual machine is restricted. The DOM, the js
| engine, the wasm engine, anything at all running or touching
| web code is locked the heck down.
|
| There's a couple places browsers can add or supplant web
| platform features, but it largely prevents browsers from doing
| much at all to add to the web platform in any way.
|
| In the rendering case, there's always work on css features &
| especially tuning that the browsers are up to. Just being
| faster, lighter weight, having more or better tuning is a great
| capability, a place where more than one small in-group should
| be able to experiment & improve & explore.
| shmerl wrote:
| Good. But Apple shouldn't get away with just allowing it. They
| should pay for violating competition law for years. Otherwise
| this law is a joke.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Here's a video of the GeckoKit demo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE-4b082Upw
| chadlavi wrote:
| oh good I can't wait to have to support more mobile browsers,
| great
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Safari, especially on iOS is the new IE.
|
| What I really like to see next to this is the requirement that
| when I tap a link in an app that it opens in the default browser.
|
| Too many apps, such as Reddit open with the WebView of Safari,
| which sucks. I'm not signed in there, it doesn't add to my
| history, and most importantly, they get to inject a whole bunch
| of tracks that I don't want. See [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32514793
| tristan957 wrote:
| Doesn't Android open the Chrome web view too? On F-Droid I
| think you can get a Bromite web view, but I'm not sure how
| these web views work, and if I can get a Firefox one.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| When you open a link in an app, you're often directed to a
| Custom Tab (you can recognise them by the menu in the upper
| right corner being the browser's). Those are handled by your
| default browser. I'm using Firefox Focus in that capacity and
| it works great.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Would love to have real Firefox on iPhone. I hope Chrome gets
| banned from the App Store though.
| vhanda wrote:
| Could you please elaborate why you hope 'Chrome gets banned'?
|
| I understand not being fond of the its ubiquity, especially
| with many Websites now requiring Chrome. And Google is
| _allegedly_ abusing their dominant position. But banning it?
| Why?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Browser monoculture = shitty internet future.
| lxgr wrote:
| And the solution to that is (almost certainly illegal,
| under the new regulations) market manipulation by a direct
| competitor?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Hey I'm just dreaming here, not like offering legal
| advice.
| kelnos wrote:
| So the solution to a browser monoculture is to... approve
| fewer browsers? Seems backwards to me.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Yes, that's right. Not fewer at random though.
| amelius wrote:
| > Apple could still conceivably impose limitations on the way
| these browsers work
|
| God damnit it's my device.
| vehemenz wrote:
| But it's not your decision to buy an Android phone?
| kevingadd wrote:
| A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to
| make a truly informed decision about this at the time. They
| find out way later what the actual consequences of apple or
| google's walled gardens are, and can only escape the garden
| if they have an android phone with an unlocked bootloader
|
| It's not cheap to swap ecosystems
| tehwebguy wrote:
| > A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to
| make a truly informed decision about this at the time
|
| I mean the devices change year to year but are people
| seriously finding themselves surprised by what iPhone can
| do but Android can't or vice versa?
|
| If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a
| mortgage then yeah I'd say `not able to make a truly
| informed decision about this at the time` but this is like
| the lowest stakes decision possible no?
|
| > It's not cheap to swap ecosystems
|
| Is that true? Seems like there is always a nearly free
| phone deal out there and your network will probably migrate
| everything for you anyway.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a
| mortgage
|
| Why are you giving examples where all of the terms are
| explained completely, up front, by law?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Walled garden policies make full migration not possible,
| at least for free. Things like your music library,
| ebooks, in-app currency, etc are often not allowed to
| move.
|
| If I were to move to iPhone now, I'd have to spend at
| least a hundred bucks finding and buying alternative
| apps.
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, in my case, I would also lose access to all of the
| books, music, movies, and--very notably--apps that I have
| purchased over the years.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Where is this narrative coming from? Only about 20% of App
| Store revenue coming from non game in app consumables (came
| out in the Epic Trial) and the other big money makers are
| from services like Netflix and Spotify where you can easily
| use your app cross platform. Even Apple Music is available
| for Android.
|
| Most users aren't complaining about any "walled garden"
| kelnos wrote:
| Buying an Android phone certainly allows you to run other
| browsers that use their own rendering engines, but Android is
| hardly open; you are still restricted in many ways from doing
| what you might want to do, with little recourse. Installing a
| third-party OS image is possible, but then removes your
| access from some things that you might still like (any app
| that requires SafetyNet to pass, for example).
|
| The bottom line is that there is no open phone platform out
| there that even remotely provides feature parity with Android
| or iOS. Anything you do is going to be a trade off, and for
| some people, there is no way to satisfy 100% of their needs
| and wants. That doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain
| about the bits that can't be satisfied.
| detaro wrote:
| And if they'd bought one, and were unhappy about some aspect
| of that, you'd be here and write " _But it 's not your
| decision to buy an iPhone?_". We don't live in a world were
| you can get your perfect choice with no compromises, and
| having made a compromise does not imply that you can't
| criticize decisions made by the system you choose.
| irrational wrote:
| You could have chosen any device. This is just the consequence
| of choosing the wrong device (for you).
| amelius wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo
| detaro wrote:
| And you have no way of knowing if a "non-wrong" device exists
| for their criteria among the "any device" they could have
| choosen from.
| irrational wrote:
| It is simple, choose an Android device. There are many
| premium android devices.
|
| If you don't know by now that on iOS devices all the
| browsers are running the same engine under the hood,
| especially on a tech site like HN, then there isn't much
| hope for you.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm a reasonably-satisfied Android user, but Android is
| nearly as locked down as iOS. Sure, I can (and do) run
| "real" Firefox on my Pixel, and can (and do) side-load
| apps, but there are quite a few things I can't do.
|
| For example, my Pixel 4 just fell out of Google's 3-year
| support period, so I no longer get security updates. I
| would be completely happy to run LineageOS or some other
| alternative that would extend the life of the phone with
| regular updates, but I can't if I still want to be able
| to use Google Pay and other apps that require the phone
| to pass SafetyNet. Those sorts of apps are a part of my
| day-to-day, so being unable to use them would be a
| showstopper. (I've read various things about tricking
| apps into believing the phone passes SafetyNet, but none
| of the methods seem particularly reliable, and for every
| user who says it works, there's another person who
| couldn't get it to work.)
|
| So sure, it is technically possible for me to treat the
| phone as "open" and run whatever OS image on it I want,
| but then I become restricted in other ways as to what I
| can do on it. Maybe you don't care about being able to
| pay for things using your phone (etc.); that's fine. But
| I do, and I consider it a critical feature these days.
| lxgr wrote:
| Given that there isn't an individual vote on each property of
| a device/ecosystem, iOS is probably the least evil rather
| than a completely optimal choice for many (if not most!)
| users.
|
| Just imagine that type of reasoning applied to other parts of
| life, like politics, work, interpersonal relationships...
| "Love it, change it, or leave it" has three components, not
| two.
| saurik wrote:
| People in this situation could also have chosen to not buy a
| cell phone in the first place, eschewing that benefit for
| using landlines or cordless phones; and yet, I don't think we
| would consider that a reasonable limitation, right?
|
| Clearly, then, there is some line that we must draw where
| people are buying something they think they want and yet
| should still get to have full access to, and I don't see why
| it would correlate with Apple vs. Google.
|
| In my case, I barely wanted a phone: I want a good camera
| attached to a good touch screen; I have requirements past
| that largely dictated by size, weight, and durability. That's
| the device I am looking for.
|
| The devices which satisfy my needs are mostly from Apple or
| Samsung, both of whom lock down their devices. (Can I install
| an alternative browser on a Samsung Android device? Sure. But
| is it my device? No. No it is not and it has never been, by
| far. Samsung is only ever so slightly better than Apple with
| respect to that shit.)
|
| The reality is: every device should be open. It shouldn't be
| some trade-off in the space where you don't get to have a
| device with any of the other key properties you want just
| because it is _always_ a better business model to build a
| walled garden and then shill your services, charge a usage
| tax, or run advertisements.
|
| That said, in a world where it _is_ allowed to build closed
| devices, and it _is_ some random set of tradeoffs that we all
| have to tolerate, we have to get to complain about it,
| because then it is just yet another property of the device,
| and we get to complain about all of the shitty decisions we
| had to put up with, whether that 's the pricing, the
| functionality, the quality, the experience, the "tactile
| feel"... or whether it is open or not.
|
| So like, I don't really see the framework in which this one
| axis is something where people don't get to complain because
| "they should have gotten some other random shitty device that
| isn't at all what you wanted but was open"... this seems to
| just be some broken narrative--mostly pitched by people who
| clearly aren't also tracking the anti-trust work against
| Google and haven't been a part of the fight to jailbreak all
| of the random locked down Android devices--pitched by people
| who seem to just like locked down stuff and Apple's
| puritanical control over morality :(.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Where in your mind does an OS cease its responsibility to
| maintain device security and performance standards?
| goodSteveramos wrote:
| Why doesnt mozilla work on a privacy protecting replacement for
| third party cookies? Because they are funded by google.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| They did. _about:config - > privacy.thirdparty.isolate = true_
| throwawayapples wrote:
| at least they made that really easy to find and do.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Follow the money.
| dralley wrote:
| It breaks things because a lot of websites expect it to
| work. If websites stop working then Mozilla will lose
| marketshare even faster. Still, it's not that difficult for
| people who know what they're doing to find.
| kelnos wrote:
| I see a _privacy.firstparty.isolate_ , but no _thirdparty_
| variant. Was that just an error on your part, or is it a pref
| that needs to be manually created, even?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Was that just an error on your part_
|
| Yes, sorry about that. It's _privacy.firstparty.isolate_
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Because Firefox has a tiny user base and nobody is going to
| follow their standards as long as other browsers do enable
| third party cookies. Also, there are alternatives to third
| party cookies for most use cases, they're just more difficult
| to implement.
|
| Neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Apple seem to care much
| about re-engineering third party cookies. Until that changes,
| any attempts from Mozilla to change the standards is a waste of
| time and effort, really.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Apple and Mozilla did a lot to restrict the scope of third-
| party cookies: isolation, partitioning etc.
|
| It's hard to change them without breaking most of the web.
| baq wrote:
| 1% of a billion is 10 million.
| kevingadd wrote:
| What makes you think we need a replacement for third party
| cookies when we can just disable them?
| orangecat wrote:
| Yeah, I've never understood this. Disabling third party
| cookies is the first thing I do with any new browser (uBlock
| Origin is second). It takes 30 seconds and very rarely causes
| problems.
| yorwba wrote:
| You might be interested in learning about state partitioning:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/State_P...
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It seems that the way iOS implements W^X protection would prevent
| a performant JS JIT from being created. It will be interesting to
| see if/how this is worked around.
| nashashmi wrote:
| An anti antitrust move?
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Here's a demo of the Gecko port from some years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE-4b082Upw
|
| Most of the code needed is still in Gecko's repo at
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/uikit but
| probably doesn't build anymore. Would not be surprising if
| someone had an up to date branch in a private tree somewhere
| though...
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I look forward to seeing if any of the dire predictions from
| Apple fanboys who once vehemently opposed this sort of thing will
| come true. Will confused proverbial grandmothers get tricked into
| using firefox and then pwned by scammers? Will everybody abandon
| Safari and give Google a total browser monopoly?
|
| Guess we'll find out!
| crazygringo wrote:
| That is a total strawman, and please don't use the perjorative
| term "fanboys".
|
| Not many Apple fans have ever defended Apple's exclusivity on
| the browser engine. It's long been an annoyance, honestly.
|
| But it also has never had anything to do with scamming
| grandmothers. That's always been an argument for not allowing
| arbitrary untrusted app downloads and/or 3rd party app stores.
| Nothing to do with browser engines, where Apple's (weak)
| argument has always been about the risk of unknown browser
| vulnerabilities allowing malicious code to escape the app
| sandbox.
|
| And if iOS browser share winds up mirroring macOS browser
| share, then it'll go to about 2/3 Chrome.
| snailmailman wrote:
| My "confused proverbial grandmother" has already been tricked
| away from using safari. She does all of her web browsing
| through the Google app.
|
| Not the Google Chrome app. The Google app. :facepalm:
|
| I've tried to explain why this isn't necessary but as far as
| she knows, google is the internet. And I cannot say anything to
| convince her otherwise. After all, every search in safari will
| re-advertise to her "hey you should be doing this in the google
| app" and she will click the button without even thinking.
| echelon wrote:
| I'd like to take a moment to appreciate how we're afraid of
| which search interface Grandma uses.
|
| A hundred years ago, we'd be worried about getting knifed by
| strangers, bear maulings, starving to death, being homeless,
| eating food laced with botulism and lead, influenza,
| tuberculosis, diphtheria ...
|
| Things are pretty good.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| To be fair, I think the origin of the worry may be that the
| elderly and less technically inclined are prone to being
| taken advantage of (rightly or wrongly). You're very
| correct that things are better than ever, as it were, but
| vulnerability seems to have endured in some ways.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Just like mine, who also accesses her photos by unlocking her
| phone, going to the camera app, and then to her photo roll.
| She never goes to the Photos app directly.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| My wife seems to only use the Google app as well. The G app
| has a confusing multiple back button design. The normal
| safari back button takes you back to Google homepage and the
| other back button iPad the bottom in your history. Whenever
| she shows me something in the Google App I always pick the
| wrong one.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I don't make the connection between "Apple fanboys" and
| preventing a Chrome monopoly. Surely one's opposition to a
| monopoly is independent of one's choice of operating system.
|
| But yes, most likely this will result in a Chrome monopoly.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| It's just a strange notion that we will fight google monopoly
| by _forcing_ people to use Safari.
| vehemenz wrote:
| It would be strange to force Apple to allow its competitors
| to establish footholds on their own platform, against their
| will, only for a Chrome monopoly to emerge months later. A
| web monoculture will be harder to undo than enacting
| smarter antitrust legislation.
| [deleted]
| mrtksn wrote:
| > Will everybody abandon Safari and give Google a total browser
| monopoly
|
| This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think
| that IE was a backward browser and MS forced it upon people but
| what actually happened is that IE was very innovative until
| Microsoft diverged from the standards and lock people into it.
| When the ecosystem(websites) integrates enough that your
| platform(the browser) is the only way to run all that(through
| Google services for Chrome?), they stop innovating and start
| monetising.
|
| "Works with Chrome" is the new IE, not Safari.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine,
| Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the
| rendering engine are open source as Chromium). So they can't
| lock anyone into anything. If they try that they'll just get
| forked. Indeed we _already_ have Edge as a well-maintained
| fork.
|
| Which isn't to say that Safari and especially Firefox aren't
| important drivers of competition. But the situation is
| nothing like the situation with IE.
| ssss11 wrote:
| There is lock in it's just more subtle than the IE
| situation. Have you seen the chromium codebase?
|
| It may be open source but no individuals or small teams
| would be able to manage a competing product, you'd need
| huge investment to compete. There's a barrier to entry all
| the same.
|
| Plus keeping up with the constant updates while trying to
| build a competitor...
| shkkmo wrote:
| This point doesn't make any sense.
|
| The standards and functionality that are required in a
| modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual
| or small team" could build from scratch.
|
| The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much
| more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if
| Chrome was entirely closed source.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Anything forked from Chromium can't be significantly
| different from Chromium, because any change of that
| nature increases divergence from Chromium and makes it
| more difficult to keep pace with the firehose of changes
| being pumped out daily by Google's massive Chrome/Blink
| team. It means that forks can never be anything but
| mostly-cosmetic reskins unless the party forking sinks
| resources equally large as Google's into the fork, which
| gives Google power to shape the web as they please
| unopposed.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > unless the party forking sinks resources equally large
| as Google's into the fork, which gives Google power to
| shape the web as they please unopposed.
|
| I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would
| also depend on said fork having a big slice of market
| share before they even try to drift away from Chromium,
| otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die
| exactly because of said differences.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| That's true. No matter the situation, the fact that
| Chromium/Blink is open source changes little due to the
| sheer amount of power Google wields.
| esperent wrote:
| Right, but it doesn't need Google or Microsoft scale to
| compete.
|
| Firefox is a clear example that a smaller organization
| can manage the complexity of a modern browser.
|
| There's plenty of other examples too - like linux - which
| show hugely complex open source projects are possible.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Firefox is great, but it's barely hanging on at ~4%
| marketshare. That might skewed by Firefox users having
| tracking mitigations set up, but the result is the same
| regardless: devs and the suits above them calling the
| shots will see the tiny usership and ask why they're
| spending _anything_ on supporting it. It's barely
| competing at all.
| taftster wrote:
| Yes, but in the case of both Mozilla and Linux, they had
| a huge running start and have developed their moats (for
| what they are) over a long period of time.
|
| A new organization coming in fresh and thinking, "hey I
| know what, let's fork Chromium", does not seem like a
| very long lived effort. I also don't see any new
| operating systems coming out from an unknown team anytime
| soon.
|
| The open source projects you use as examples are
| entrenched, and it's going to take a major shakeup and/or
| cracks in the large organizations for something new in
| the browser or operating system space to emerge.
| sbuk wrote:
| Chrome uses the blink engine, which is a fork of Webkit,
| which is open source.
| kimixa wrote:
| Which in turn was a fork of khtml
| babypuncher wrote:
| I always knew Konquerer would eventually take over the
| browser market.
| sbuk wrote:
| I don't see what relevance this has to the discussion.
| dcow wrote:
| You don't see how adding another parent node to browser
| engine code lineage is relevant in a subthread about
| browser engine code lineage?
| sbuk wrote:
| I'm the OP. I'm questioning the relevance, which is in
| response to the assertion that _" The difference being
| that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed
| source but the important parts like the rendering engine
| are open source as Chromium)"_. _My_ aim is to point out
| that WebKit is also open source, and that the engine
| being touted by the GP is actually a fork of Webkit. Its
| provenance in this case irrelevant.
| kimixa wrote:
| Just pointing out there's a whole family of HTML engines,
| and Webkit wasn't the origin. It's also likely that it's
| the reason why Webkit is GPL, and we're able to have this
| discussion.
|
| In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-
| source friendly - I know working with them there's a
| rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated
| and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build
| process if they're GPL3+.
|
| I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from
| scratch it would use a different license, and the entire
| landscape of browsers would look very different today.
| MayeulC wrote:
| About as relevant as the parent... Not very relevant, but
| since the parent gives a short overview of browser engine
| history, we might as well point out that it started with
| the then-excellent khtml from the KDE project, that
| powers konqueror. That's little known, and a very
| interesting history tidbit.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Up until forking, Google was the largest contributor to
| Webkit. Google made Blink open source as well.
| scarface74 wrote:
| WebKit is just as open source as Blink.
| [deleted]
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Have you ever seen a serious "fork war"? Open Source may be
| possible to fork, but that isn't a guarantee that
| everything will be hunky dory after a hard fork. The drama
| and chaos of "we need a trustworthy fork" after a bad actor
| does something unsociable can be awful (especially if that
| bad actor remains in play). Security/safety/IP audits of
| past code pre-fork after a major fork has become necessary
| isn't free or cheap and takes resources. Drama can draw
| weird boundaries between project attempts and create a lot
| of internecine fighting among the "survivors" of the
| "upstream crash". There's so much sociopolitics that may be
| involved. Open source projects still involve a lot of
| people, at the end of the day, not just code. Open source
| applications _have_ died in a fork war.
|
| The situation is different from IE, but there's still a lot
| of similarities and open source isn't necessarily the balm
| it appears to be. They code may still "be there", but code
| still needs people to believe in it/trust it/work on it.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.
|
| Google isn't trying to kill the web and grow desktop App
| development, so yes it's different. And also people weren't
| complaining about Internet Explorer while it was innovative
| and competing against Netscape Navigator with annual
| releases. It was after 5 years of stagnation, not
| supporting new W3C standards, and unfixed bugs.
|
| Google learned from Microsoft's mistakes. They participated
| in standards, they update often, and resolve bugs quickly.
| Everything Microsoft didn't do.
|
| They also implement new features outside of standards but
| just as temporary experiments mind you. If developers
| happen to adopt them and implement them on their sites,
| well Google's hands are tied and y'all might as well make
| them standards (e.g. SPDY, QUIC).
|
| Or, because the control the standards process they can
| propose a change to a private list, push it to WHATWG and
| get representatives from Apple and Firefox to pull it into
| the "living" standard without any public discourse or
| feedback (e.g. removing alert();).
|
| This isn't to say everything they're doing is bad, but that
| doesn't mean they aren't working in their own self
| interest.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Of course they can, it's about the marketshare and not the
| code. They can make some part of the browser running in
| their cloud services and no matter how much you look into
| the Chromium code the websites which support this will run
| in Chrome only.
|
| Why would websites support this? Well, it can provide good
| rankings in search or some other goodie like speeding up
| the loading times through Google CDN or something and works
| for %90 of the people(because they use Chrome). Once enough
| websites integrate this, it's over.
| warning26 wrote:
| Sure, but forcing people to use Safari against their will
| isn't the right way to approach that problem.
|
| If Google is indeed leveraging their market position in an
| anticompetitive way to push Chrome, then they should be
| stopped from doing _that_.
| mrtksn wrote:
| They surely can get a few billions of a fine in 10 years.
| benced wrote:
| Allowing a dominant OS to foist a bad browser on all of us is
| not a good way to prevent a dominant internet search company
| from potentially foisting a bad browser on all of us.
| dcow wrote:
| Safari is just as bad about not following standards though. I
| could sympathize a lot more if your argument was between
| Firefox and Chrome/Safari. In my mind Chrome/Safari are the
| hegemony.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I agree that Safari should do better but Embrace, Extend
| then Exterminate is a real thing and lacking functions is
| not the same as having alternative "standards".
|
| "You need to download Chrome" is the scariest thing these
| days, especially if you see it in Firefox.
| klodolph wrote:
| I don't know why you think that, it certainly sounds wrong
| to me. Like, not just wrong in a technical sense, but like,
| crazy wrong.
|
| Did you live through the IE5 and IE6 days? Does the term
| "quirks mode" mean anything to you? Do you remember how Mac
| IE was completely different from Windows IE? Internet
| Explorer, back in the early 2000s, was a serious support
| burden for anyone doing web development at the time. Around
| 2010, Google dropped support for IE6 (in apps like GMail +
| Youtube) and a ton of other sites followed suit. It made a
| big splash across all the news sites and all the web
| developers breathed a sigh of relief, because they could
| say "we're dropping IE6 support because Google did."
|
| Meanwhile, there was a parallel world of IE-only sites.
| Some of them were built on future widespread web
| technologies like DHTML, others were built on stuff like
| ActiveX. ActiveX ended up in the trash bin (where it
| belongs) and DHTML became normalized. It was... common, and
| annoying, to deal with corporate sites that only worked in
| IE, and then build your own site and fight to get it
| working in IE. It was not a fun time to be a web developer.
|
| Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I remember that Safari was missing
| some of the newer features that Chrome or Firefox had, but
| when I investigated, it usually turned out that I was using
| some future/experimental feature in Chrome or Firefox, and
| it wasn't a problem with the standards-compliance of Safari
| per se. Or sometimes I was relying on behavior that was not
| part of the standard at all). Nowadays, my sense is that
| Chrome tends to have more experimental stuff available and
| a better set of dev tools, but otherwise, most stuff works
| in Safari or Firefox with little to no modification.
| bityard wrote:
| > what actually happened is that IE was very innovative
|
| We remember things very differently, then.
|
| IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the
| |