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Comment by drb91 | Hacker News Reader

> I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users

Are you talking about chrome, the least user friendly of all browsers? This is just corporate talk for “we don’t care about making our software work with nouveau”.

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I think Chrome is empirically quite user friendly - it's not installed by default anywhere and people choose to use it. It is true that Chrome isn't particularly power-user friendly for certain use cases, but that's different.

Also, if you look at the bug report, it's quite clear they spent a lot of time trying to make nouveau work.

Well, people have always used bad software; popularity has never been a good metric of quality. Nothing about Chrome protects users from Google. This is a fundamental role of the browser.

That may be true but I'm not sure how that is relevant. Why would a browser not protecting users from Google be positively correlated with a browser not wanting to successfully render pages?

There's more to being user friendly than having a dumbed down UI and being technically correct.

Helping corporations spy on users is definitely not user friendly, and Chrome is by far the worst offender there. Saying, "nobody cares," because they're ignorant that it's going on is no excuse, either.

That may all be true but I'm really unsure what that has to do with user-friendliness in the way described. The argument was an attempt to rebut my claim that Chrome is trying to do the best job possible of rendering pages isn't true because Chrome isn't user-friendly. If their goal is to spy on users and have a dumbed-down UI, isn't it all the more important that pages successfully render, so that the sheeple keep using it?

User-friendliness is usually understood as being about usability and interface design. Spyware-riddled software may be shitty, and that should be called out, but it's orthogonal to user-friendliness.

Edit: You seem to disagree. Google "user-friendly" and realize that I'm not defending Chrome.

Just because corporate language doesn’t include any way of expressing representing consumer and user interests outside of what can be represented in a transaction doesn’t mean it isn’t worth expressing.

There's plenty of ways to express it. Call it exploitative, dishonest, money-grubbing, soulless. If you instead call it "non-user-friendly," expect people to be confused, because that's not what "user-friendly" means.

As someone who has used IE (especially 5-9) far too many times because I had to, Chrome could impale my palms with stakes and I'd still probably call it more user friendly.

They are making Chrome work for nouveau users by disabling the hardware acceleration.

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