Hacker News Reader

Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

The challenge with standards is feature creep. Example: amd64

One day Intel goes and implements instructions which support video decoding. And then Microsoft takes advantage of them, and now users have a better experience. Now open source compilers have to implement them and AMD has to implement them and the cost of competing with the giants goes up.

Same thing with browser DRM. Either Firefox implements it, or Netflix tells all of their users that chrome is a requirement.

I don't know how to stop this type of creep.

View on HN

> I don't know how to stop this type of creep.

For one, it would've helped if Firefox didn't drop the ball in the late-00s, when Chrome became the de facto best browser around. Google + Chrome did more bad for the web than Microsoft + IE ever dreamt of doing. Having the very same companies that make browsers vested in certain web features is a big no-no, but that cat's already out of the bag.

I'm not really sure if we can put it back in.

> Google + Chrome did more bad for the web than Microsoft + IE ever dreamt of doing.

I'm not sure that's really true. Do you remember the bad old IE days? Half the web was simply broken on non-Microsoft operating systems, because Microsoft refused to follow standards.

They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement. And despite all that effort, we often never managed to do it - cough _ActiveX_ cough.

The situation back then was much, much worse than today in terms of open standards and cross-browser (let alone cross-OS) compatibility. And that was pretty much Microsoft's fault.

Google and Chrome have lots of problems. But they build on top of Chromium, which is completely open source. It does not have 100% of the features of Chrome, but from a practical perspective that seems to be mostly a non-issue, at least for me.

"They built proprietary extensions to the web, which the rest of the world - and particularly the open source world - had to reverse engineer and spend ridiculous amounts of effort to implement."

One example is XHR, which is probably the single defining feature of the modern web.

Good standards simply codify whatever "proprietary" features we've found are useful.

Microsoft broke the web in more spectacular ways than Google. Even IE6 itself didn’t always work properly.

But Google has done more lasting damage I think. The effects are more subtle, things work. ...The way Google wants. We may never know what was crushed or lost by submitting to Google’s will. So the harm will be less visible.

Remember most people shit on Chrome and Webkit as the new IE think of IE era as IE 7.

It is like a kid just a saw a few rounds of cross fire than ran and tell the world how is was like World War 2.

Talking oft the late 00s, it was actually about Webkit. Nowadays Chrome collects all the merits for the foundation it was once built on.

It's crazy how much dev mindshare Google captured with Chrome and V8 to the point where WebKit and JavaScriptCore are almost forgotten despite Safari making huge progress in JS performance before Chrome was even released.

IIRC, Netflix used Silverlight until DRM in the browser was good enough for their purposes. If it weren’t for web standards, Flash and Silverlight would probably still be in use, and any browser that deprecated plug ins would get the “this site doesn’t work here” message.

Honestly, and I know this isn't a popular opinion, but I'm okay-ish with DRM (Netflix has to prove, legally speaking, they're at least trying to protect IP). What I'm not OK with is the current Google AMP-page/hiding-URL shenanigans, Chrome limiting/banning ad-blocking plugins, etc. These are all very clearly Google-centric "features."

DRM is just security theater that makes us all culturally poorer. Give me the name of a movie on Netflix or any of the other mainstream streaming services, and I'll find you a high-quality copy of it, often with subtitles in many different languages, for the cost of a usenet subscription (you don't even need to worry about a DMCA notice from your ISP for torrenting). DRM is not stopping anything. The studios and streaming services have made it just convenient enough to pay, with nice UI/UX on top.

The reason people pay is the convenience! The DRM isn't required for that. If they dropped all DRM tomorrow, they would lose far fewer subscriber dollars than they spend on DRM implementations, license servers, key management, etc. They're just greedy, want control, and want to keep it illegal to break out of that control.

Meanwhile, any media "purchases" you make are gone in a blink if the company you bought them from goes out of business or just decides they don't feel like offering the service anymore. The funny thing is that most of the buy-to-"own" (where you don't actually own it) prices are similar to the cost of a DVD or blu-ray disc. Ditto for Kindle books and their paperback counterparts. All the promises of digital distribution giving consumers lower prices were predictable lies.

I despise DRM as much as the next guy, but its existence makes perfect sense. The moment someone explains to a C level at a studio how easily the content could "leak" from a site without it, it's out of the question to not have it. As the parent poster implied, yes it's security theatre to a large extent, but it does block the very easiest forms of content sharing (i.e. just sharing the video manifest or simply saving segments).

Regarding purchases and licensing, those are still stuck in the same business model and pricing as in the analogue days, this is true. But saying overall consumer prices are the same is ridiculous, since all-you-can-eat content subscriptions is a massive transition with no comparable offerings in the analogue past.

If you want to culturally enrich people, there has never been a better time to consume huge amounts of quality stuff for barely any money.

Thanks to napster and co., who forced the fat cats to look for a solution mind you.

I think feature creep is the #2 issue after adoption, and I think the solution is to adhere to a strong set of priorities, namely: simplicity.

Take your example. In 2020 there are already many ways that video can be decoded simply, efficiently and with excellent quality. We don't need to accept marginal user experience improvement at the cost of simplicity. So we don't accept changes to the standards at the expense of cost implementation complexity.

It's about having a different mantra. Instead of an emphasis on backwards compatibility and bleeding edge user experience, there's an emphasis on a democracy by simplicity.

Right after a comment I realized #3 or perhaps #1 Most popular sites won't adopt the simpler web even if they can afford to do 2 version of their site, even if users like it. Because the lighter web most certainly will be worse for ads and tracking.

FWIW, check out CNN's light page [0]. It's an amazing experience for a text-only page that loads blazingly fast.

[0] http://lite.cnn.com/en

If you like CNN's, also check out NPR's and CSM's pages! VoA also has a Gopher mirror and an RSS feed with actual content instead of just a link. I'm still looking for more text only sites like these, but so far these 4 cover general news pretty well.

Brilliant. There should be some way to incentivize lite pages, even if only for news websites.

Using them instead of the main page is a good start.

Wow, that's such a pleasant experience for a news site.

I think any version of a simpler web would still be 100% compatible with the full version of the web. So you’d really only need to build one version.

Perhaps AMP? A declarative specification for websites that is fully backwards compatible with the traditional web via a JS runtime.

Maybe the right approach (feature creep beware) would be to bundle this lite web standard tightly with a pay per view API or some other monetary distribution scheme for web content.

Each of the two standards might not receive enough attention on their own, but they complement each other: getting rid of the necessity of ads means going lite is an option for website owners, and the lite web will allow for many different lite web clients (that might finance itself through in-app ads shown to the user). In combination these two might overcome some threshold and gain traction!

That's sadly the thing - you can't. Not until you have community-owned companies providing services being directly competing against tech giants.

Which might not happen, ever. Sadly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com