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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

> It's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions.

I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? It's okay for a user to override their user-agent string, and fine for browsers to mention other browsers for compatibility, but uncool for a browser to not identify itself at all and steal another browser's user-agent string.

The OpenGL API includes vendor strings for a reason. Chrome isn't doing `strings` on the library or anything.

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I get the predicament that caused Chromium to blacklist Nouveau. Nothing against the incredible work done in Nouveau, it's just reality: given a thousand eyes, apparently not all bugs are shallow (see also: Heartbleed and Shellshock). That being said:

>I'm curious why you hold this position.

Agreed. There are countless AAA titles (games) that do vendor checks on the GPU. Game developers are a bunch of people who have been working with GPUs for more than a decade, possibly approaching two decades. For some reason, GPUs are the one thing that the OS HAL isn't able to sort out. Windows (and Mac?) drivers are always proprietary, so different hardware vendors are all Windows developers have to worry about. I can't imagine the headache of dealing with differing hardware vendors (and families), on top of differing driver vendors.

Reality fucking sucks and I guess this is just Chromium acknowledging it. I doubt there's a grand conspiracy here.

> It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right?

No. Its more like blocking the access to your website to some browsers.

At best they should give a warning that youre using an unsupported browser/driver so beware if unexpected issues.

It's nothing like blocking access to the website. It just falls back to unaccelerated rendering. It makes it more likely to work.

Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text.

>I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering.

So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible.

>It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs

This is also a very dumb anti-practice.

> So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible.

If a Windows graphics acceleration component spied on its users, Chromium should absolutely blacklist that component, and use software rendering instead.

Personally I believe a non-crashing browser is a good user experience.

They don't blacklist Windows because it spies on users, but they absolutely blacklist anything from AV to malware because it causes instability. https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes-ca... This seems like exactly the same thing. They're responsible for delivering a browser that renders webpages successfully. They're doing what needs to be done to make this happen.

> So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users?

That's such silly rhetoric, no wonder you're in the situation you're in.

> This is also a very dumb anti-practice.

So is crashing users machines and then blaming Chrome for doing what's best for its users.

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