Hacker News Reader

> As much as I herald the ongoing march toward mass HTTPS adoption, I'm not sure Google should be taking the credit.

Are they taking credit? I read this as more of a report on the state of HTTPS in 2016, not as Google taking credit for HTTPS adoption on the web.

Though to be fair, Google absolutely has done a lot to promote the adoption of HTTPS. They're a platinum sponsor of Let's Encrypt, they [made HTTPS a (small) positive ranking signal][1] back in 2014, and they're even using Chrome to push HTTPS adoption by [making the security problems with HTTP more visible to users][2].

[1]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-s...

[2]: https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-...

The "ranking signal" for https sites has been instrumental in me selling full https adoption within multiple organizations. It's an easily understood, immediate positive benefit from SSL adoption.

> There's a one smoldering on in Germany[2], but it's getting almost no press - most probably because Google are suppressing any mention of it in their results or in Google News (Crazy? Maybe, but you can't disprove this either).

I agree with a number of things in your post, but I don't think this is a likely explanation. A couple of months ago, a German newspaper published some data about their traffic sources[1], showing that 20% of their visitors came from Google. Some others released similar data (see the linked thread - note that it's mostly in German). I don't think that's anywhere near enough to effectively suppress these reports (though the whole echo chamber thing is a problem of its own), so I don't think it'd be worth it for them to even try and risk possible legal ramifications.

I think the more likely explanation is that just about no one cares, which is much more worrisome.

[1]: https://twitter.com/zeitonline/status/781779996473958401

Modern (US) Anti-Trust law requires prove that the end user is actually harmed. Proving the existence of monopoly is not sufficient for conviction (This is a change that happened in the 70-80s and has been adopted and accepted as a useful defined interpretation of the law).

Do you want everybody to just not do anything until there is a standard? The modern web you have to start by having a working implementation for testing and refinement. Once that is done, you go for the standard. Mozilla also 'just implements' stuff and then tries to standardise it later.

> You simply cannot do anything on the web without Google seeing in one way or another.

without Google seeing SOMETHING, but that does not mean that SOMETHING is useful

> There are no web standards anymore - if Google want to add a feature to Chrome, they just go ahead and do it, forcing the other browser makers to adopt that feature lest they be left behind in the browser market.

Isn't that normal? First you add the feature to your browser, then if people start using it you think about standardizing it. The alternative is to spend a bunch of effort standardizing things nobody wants.

If anything, I'd like to see more standards that first require a concrete implementation. I think everyone's been handed a spec that has loads of problems when you actually try to implement it. Look at the 'export' keyword in C++.

> If anything, I'd like to see more standards that first require a concrete implementation.

This is how the standards process has always worked! Per RFC6410, a proposed standard can't advance to an "Internet Standard" until there are at least two independent working implementations.

The W3C has a bad habit of writing "standards" before any code has been written; sometimes even before it's clear that any code should be written. (EmotionML, for example.)

Never heard of EmotionML before. OMG.

No, it's not normal. That's how we got things like the awful WebKit gradient syntax that everyone is now being forced to implement for legacy compatibility reasons.

The thing currently considered "normal" at least for Google and Mozilla goes like this:

1) Send an intent to implement to a public mailing list, describing the thing you want to implement and its existing standardization state, if any.

2) Add the feature to your browser, enable it on your nightly/dev/canary/devedition/whatever channels but not release.

3) Get feedback from people trying out the feature on those channels. Explicitly solicit feedback via twitter, conversations at conferences, etc, etc.

4) Write a draft spec, run it by other browser implementors.

5) Send a public intent to ship, indicating what other browser vendors think of the idea, what web developers think of the idea, stability level of the spec, etc.

6) If the relevant people in your org (the API owners for Blink; for Mozilla it's a bit less clear so far) approve, you ship.

Step 6 can precede finalized standardization. But it can come after too; in particular the "two implementations" criterion for standardization can be fulfilled by pre-release implementations that are on track to become released.

Never understood the comparison re: Microsoft and Google. At the time of the Microsoft litigation (and still), they were the dominant OS. The OS wasn't/isn't free. It restricted competition esp. browsers. Google is (mostly) free and ad based. They can't keep other search engines off the internet. They're just what people use (so far).

Windows was (and is) effectively free, in that the vast majority of users got it with their purchase of a PC.

Furthermore, "they can't keep other search engines off the internet; they're just what people use" could equally well be said about browsers in 1998. Microsoft never prevented anyone from downloading and installing Netscape.

OEMs pay for those Windows licenses, that's definitely not what anyone would call "free". It's like saying CPUs are effectively free because the vast majority of users got one with their purchase of a PC. Sure, you didn't send any money to Intel or AMD directly, but you still paid for it.

  > Therefore for 90% of internet users

I would not be so sure that 9/10 phones running android directly translates to 9/10 mobile traffic being from android phones.

Not sure why this was downvoted; it's making a very good point.

There are a lot of cheap Android phones in the wild which are used primarily, or even exclusively, for voice and SMS. These devices count towards Android's overall market share, but they have very little effect on web usage.

Even beyond that, studies have consistently shown that iOS users use the web more than Android users:

http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-beating-ios-in-web...

(Old study, but no reason to suspect the results have changed dramatically.)

That article suggests the results had been changing dramatically for 10 months.

> As much as I herald the ongoing march toward mass HTTPS adoption, I'm not sure Google should be taking the credit.

The post seems to say that they're trying to get out of the way of https adoption. It doesn't even mention their initiatives such as requiring encryption for http2 or the location API.

> - most probably because Google are suppressing any mention of it in their results or in Google News

Is the world going completely mad[1]? This is so obviously wrong, simply because people don't google [news] to be informed, nor does Google News have enough influence to be meaningful. You think the WSJ/NYT/Daily Mail/SPIEGEL depend on google to find out the news? Then where would these news reports actually come from that google is supressing?

> There are no web standards anymore - if Google want to add a feature to Chrome[...]

Which isn't actually true, because Safari is large enough to require support. And because Google is a dependable participant at the WHATWG. It's also the only way that actually works, because you need an implementation for any specification. Looking at the pace of browser improvements and level of compatibility – if that's the result of Google's corruption, I want more of it.

> forcing the other browser makers to adopt that feature lest they be left behind

Or as they used to call it: competition. It's markedly different than MS's extend-and-extinguish strategy back in the days. I can't think of any features that disproportionally benefit Google.

> You simply cannot do anything on the web without Google seeing in one way or another.

There seems to be some sort of newfangled "adblocking software". I'm also not quite sure if google correlates analytics data with user profiles – I know they don't do it on my sites because I'm using their feature to anonymize the last 3 digits of IP addresses (as required by law in my country).

> Put simply, the Internet is dead; All we have now is the Googlenet.

As long as I can substitute "Google" with "Facebook" and make the sentence actually more believable I don't think we're quite there, yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_Nut(Gullible)

Fortunately, the country with the largest number of Internet users is still a no-Google zone.

The big difference is that apparently Google is a Silicon Valley sweetheart and Microsoft never was.

Well, Microsoft kind of predates Silicon Valley and grandpa might be cute, but he's not as cool as the kids you're playing with.

Exactly and somehow the hipster kids believed that companies are abstract entities with human behaviors and not money making machines that only answer to their board.

Huh? Silicon Valley. Think about it. What comes first, the hardware or the software?

That Microsoft was convicted to pay millions, for actually harming users for profit, might be another difference.

You mean just like Google is going to be?

I never felt harmed by Microsoft, using their products since MS-DOS 3.3.

> I never felt harmed by Microsoft

That's why justice, thankfully, isn't based on your own personal feelings. If you read the sentence, it's pretty strong.