ReferenceError: customElements is not defined
Also apparently some assertion errors with webcomponents (minified so line numbers not useful).
I don't want to be unreasonable, but Google used to at least generally support the idea of the open web. There are a bunch of different UAs out there; while I accept it's more challenging to support some than others, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a product launch from a large-scale web company should at the very least give us an error message.
The web is deteriorating right in front of us, and a big contributor to that is Google's continued failure to realise that the web isn't all-Chrome, all the time. The attitude displayed here—a minor thing when compared to the overall problem—has strengthened my resolve to avoid Chrome at all costs.
Yes, but history teaches us that they are terrible at product management. I mean, they could at least just call it "Chrome TTS" or something until they put the whole thing together.
Chrome actually has its own TTS engine (as does FF, Safari, etc), though the quality obviously isn't as good.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynth...
(I work for GCP)
But it's the lack of care displayed here that's really disappointing. It's like nobody involved with this demo went "Hey, maybe people aren't using Chrome and we should at least not totally fail when that happens". It's disappointing; as a mostly front-end dev at a small company, I put a lot of time into making sure that things work cross-platform, even if I don't always get it right. It's disappointing that Google's culture doesn't rate that highly enough.
The reason is simple, Chrome is Google's bitch just like IE was Microsoft's bitch.
Other browser vendors don't support WebComponents out of the box (yet).
This is a Machine Learning product, I don't think anyone at Google, at least as part of this team, is trying to "get you" or destroy the open web or something. This isn't even a case of Google using something non-standard -- WebComponents is part of the standard, you can even see it in Mozilla's MDN [0]. Firefox, Safari, Edge, et al simply haven't implemented it yet (or landed in stable). Is that somehow also Chrome's fault?
Filing a bug report is good, but ranting on HN about how this is a sign of Google trying to steal the open Internet is at best unnecessary, and absolutely unreasonable.
Coincidently, I'm working on an application that uses complicated SVG with CSS animations, and I've spent a ton of time optimizing it. I've never tested it outside of Chrome before today. To my surprise, while everything works fast in Chrome, in Safari it's bearable, but in FF it's simply too laggy to use. Now, I probably won't ever get to fix the performance issues in FF and Safari, simply because I don't have the time. Am I also out there trying to destroy the open web? Maybe I'm just bad, not evil.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components
This is a basic audio playback widget on the web. The web is nominally an open platform. Whichever team built this decided to build it in a way that it would only support Google’s own web browser. It’s not unreasonable to expect a massive web company to build cross-browser support for their user-facing demos, especially in cases where there is obviously no reason that it needs to be incompatible.
Like I said, I appreciate that building cross-browser is not always possible. The difference between you and Google is that you aren’t one of the largest companies in the world, and you don’t publish your own browser.
(Should be as "simple" as a polyfill for webcomponents, but I don't want to put words in the team's mouth)
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...
Call me paranoid all you want, but that is their plan. just like it was microsoft's plan for nothing on IE4/6 to work on netscape. Heck, a third of my corporate sites have DHTML popups saying "Use chrome" when i reach them with firefox already.