Chrome is not the new IE
threadreaderapp.com
threadreaderapp.com
The standard is open, the code is open - I don't understand how "is Chrome the new IE?" even a question. It's not like they're bundling it only on ChromeOS and Android , it's not like they have the equivalent of VbScript /ActiveX and plenty of people are making browsers based on Chromium.
Google is playing a winner takes all game of dominance. Imagine if Ford became so popular that mechanics can't be bothered to fix other cars because Ford does everything differently.
People are being forced to base browsers on Chromium because no one will use anything else due to sites depending on Chromium only features! This is very anti-innovation.
You came up with a cool new feature in firefox (like containers) and you want to standardize it? Well if uncle google says no you're out of luck. Standards exist for a reason and engineers(even at google) use to have enough professionalism to respect the concept and process of having an internet where everyone participates democratically.
I hate to keep on coming to similar conclusions but Browsers need to be regulated if the browser industry is always being overrun by some monopoly.
HTML5 just provided a suitable replacement for Flash, but suddenly having a large browser (Mobile Safari) that just couldn't play Flash content at all provided the incentive for web devs to actually invest the effort to switch to HTML5.
It wasn't Google, it was Apple that very famously and publicly killed Flash.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple...
Today, you can be on one or the other. But that wasn't the case back then.
Last I checked Apple really isn’t a big web standards pusher or implementer
I'm sorry you wasted your time checking on something that I didn't state.
people just have to romanticize everything Apple
No romanticizing needed. I was there, and lived through it.
Just saying no Flash use our app store apps without contributing to open xp alternatives does not amount to killing Flash. Making the alternative better, accessible to all in an open way does.
"standard" means nothing when Google is churning it every day. It coined the completely idiotic term "living standard" and has basically used its propagandic powers to drag everyone else along.
Its idea of "progress" is the exact opposite of what the web needs.
So, go to a long URL, like paging through a forum. Then edit the URL. Place cursor at end and hit bksp. As you continue to delete chars the purple-phantom highlight where it tries to autocomplete goes crazy and flickers the heck out of the UI. It's definitely a regression.
I don't know the best way to capture screen on this device tho, and I don't have time to spin up any emulators and go through those steps
Yup, that's Fenix. By the way, you can switch it back to the top, but the (+) button (new tab) still remains at the bottom, which irks me.
I actually just tried and I'm not seeing your issue - but I have different issues (mainly that when I open the browser, the topmost tab can never seem to figure out whether it has a page loaded or it's on the new tab page).
By the way, I'm just a fellow user, so don't spend too much effort describing your bug to me, haha. It might be worth reporting it to their bug tracker, though: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues
If your device happens to be a Samsung phone, it should come with a screen recorder (at least on the newest major version of Android)
They haven't shut down Search yet, even though it's pretty boring as a service.
I'm sure you can understand there are "core" projects, and non-core ones.
That's probably why the team behind Chromium is composed of so many contributors who are not at Google?
The day that people/organizations are upset with the direction Google takes with Chromium is the day where a real fork will start existing and being actively developed by a larger community.
For current chromium forks (and also for firefox forks) the answer is no.
The only fork that would have the resources would be from microsoft, but it would be a huge, expensive, and non-trivial task.
The counterexample is the Linux kernel. No single company can actually sustain its development, so in practice many companies work on it together with an agreed governance to direct where things go.
For chrome as long as google exist I don't really see an industry consortium to invest in marginal improvements (considering also how the interested industry partners are likely heavy google customers)
Google is big company. I think trying to paint whole google as evil is not effective.
Chrome and all of it's open source awesomeness, again, mostly used to fold people into the bigger profitable picture. So even though there are developers that work at Google creating protocols that help everyone, including non-Chrome browsers - that benevolence has a product manager paying that developer's time. At some stage it's not all free beer.
Sure, I don't believe Chrome has the same problems that IE did either, but I definitely do believe Chrome uses its dominant position primarily in service to extending Google's desires for the web. E.g. signed HTTP exchanges are more AMP shit that nobody asked for.
To suggest that an end user would go about disabling JavaScript and other reasons just shows how HN is in a bubble and don’t really understand that 99% of the users don’t care.
Amp gets ride of those.
- the video is automatically muted before autoplay starts
- when the video is scrolled out of view, the video is paused
- when the video is scrolled into view, the video resumes playback
- when the user taps the video, the video is unmuted
- if the user has interacted with the video (e.g., mutes/unmutes, pauses/resumes, etc.), and the video is scrolled in or out of view, the state of the video remains as how the user left it. For example, if the user pauses the video, then scrolls the video out of view and returns to the video, the video is still paused.
Source: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-v...
So why isn't it done?
Google doesn't create standards. They are one of the major stakeholders, but they don't have the final say.
>That's the whole issue here.
No. The issue is that Google built a browser that is better than anything now, and was better than anything out there for the past decade and got themselves into a dominant position. They haven't yet abused that position - contrary to a lot of the posts in this thread - but people are nervous. I can respect that viewpoint because it is something to worry about.
That is leveraging their existing position as a search engine and aggregator to force a standard.
You think Google could get away with stripping or editing commercial pages by default? Be serious.
>Reader mode on browsers do a good job of it on most sites
Then use it.
>they can publish guidelines on how to structure your site to make it easier for reader mode to work which wouldn't be that problematic (it would also encourage accessibility).
Google actually does a lot of that. They publish a lot of guidelines, including testing tools (like Lighthouse) to have developers build faster websites. Case in point: https://web.dev/measure
No one said anything about default. It can be opt in like amp but the difference is here simply that they don't require a new standard.
Other ways they could solve is just disincentivise slow loading pages. They have said speed is a factor and tried to introduce some features such as showing how fast a page is on chrome as an experiment.
They could have pushed that more.
But that's exactly what amp is. An opt-in set of standards for creating fast-loading, cach-able pages. There is also no reason why websites couldn't replicate this outside of amp ... but they don't.
>Other ways they could solve is just disincentivise slow loading pages.
They do that ... in all kinds of ways. The problem is that with their position, they can destroy a lot of businesses if they apply these kinds of rules haphazardly. There's no simple solution here.
Not exactly. For one, you could introduce opt in for Google to cache your page through a meta tag. No need for entirely new markup and tools. I have no problem with amp as a concept but the implementation leaves me sour. Amp specification has been growing in complexity that I don't notice speed differences on many sites anymore.
They also inject their own js which I don't find amusing.
Many sites are abusing amp to rank on Google. Reddit, pinterest, etc. It's a terrible experience as a user. They also didn't fix url and domain problem until recently. It's a usability problem.
I can't search for the specific tab by the domain name of the site on my browser. They default opt-in to downloading content in the background for amp feed on chrome android. There are many little annoyances like this one that make me dislike amp.
Plus, amp isn't heuristic based. If my network speed is fast enough, I don't need the stripped out page.
Switch your search engine to something else.
Google search results have become less and less relevant unless I'm actually trying to buy something.
I don't think AMP is necessary for that.
This can be solved by blocking 3rd party JavaScript, no need for anything Google related.
Half the argument is "Google is taking too much control over the web by forcing people to use AMP" and the other half is "Google is to blame for companies using non-Google related services when they don't use AMP because they created the platform for it (??)".
I can understand the first half of the argument. The second half seems to blame Google for creating the web or something?
JavaScript based ad/analytics tech is bloating the web. Everyone knows this, and there's no denying it. Google is one of the main advertising/analytics platforms on the web. Google is aware that JS is poisoning the web, but they don't want to kill the golden goose and they do want to entrench their ad monopoly. How to square the circle?
They should but won't just tell advertisers that creatives need to be static image/video assets, thereby saving bandwidth, protecting privacy, and not really doing anything to ad buyers (because ad buyers are driven by their fixed budgets and not by absolute platform capabilities, just relative capabilities). Since that's too risky to Google's core business, instead they create a new format (AMP) with deliberately limited JS capabilities and, oh yeah, built in support for Google ads.
For everyone who is not Google, this solution sucks. It means duplicate work to create a new format, the new format is different than the web but not a meaningful source of new traffic because it's just a splinter of existing traffic, and it further exposes your business to Google as the core gatekeeper of revenue (FaceBook is the other revenue gatekeeper). That is, you need Google search and Google ad money to survive and if they change the search algo or ad rates (ie now ads need to be videos or now ads need viewability or whatever), you can be crushed without notice.
But that argument doesn't hold up with Javascript based ad serving, which was around prior to Google.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed...
Sure it would be great if Google wasn’t a de-facto monopoly or that they have massive conflicts of interests as the Internet’s biggest advertising network. But what people need to understand is that Google knows what’s best for all of us when it comes to what the Internet is and should be. So when Google rams half-baked APIs into their browser well before they even have gone through third party certification, often releasing features with glaring security holes, they’re doing it because it’s best for all of us, not just Google.
All the nay-sayers need to just relax and know their place.
I seem to be behind the times. Could you please elaborate on these and include instances of these?
I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.
I remember maintaining a bunch of sites and university, and while IE11 was missing a couple of APIs (like Promise) at least I could download a VM straight from Microsoft and figure out what was going wrong. I still have no way to test on Safari which is becoming more and more annoying as they "fall" behind.
KHTML isn't officially dead, but it's also not very active: https://phabricator.kde.org/source/khtml/history/master/
Ostensibly, this is a fine position to have. But would this not more than likely not just result in Chrome having near total dominance of both the mobile and desktop rendering engine market. From a completely practical point of view, it seems that Safari on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome's engine from having total market dominance.
I don't want to say that Webkit's dominance of iOS is a good thing, but it appears to be the lesser of two evils. I'd rather have Webkit dominate iOS, than Google and Chrome dominate everything. Google being the only major player in web standards is good for nobody but Google.
Web notifications are great for developers, but I'm not convinced they've been all that positive for end users. I've noticed that more novice users tend to inadvertently opt-in to a lot of very spammy web notifications, particularly from online retailers and adult websites. And because they're novice users, they generally do not know how to filter or disable these notifications. I'd suggest that web notifications need a better mechanism to filter out notifications from bad actors, before said notifications reach end users. Otherwise the standard is doomed to be littered with spam like SMS or email.
Safari is more limited but some of us like the tradeoff for more privacy.
I like to see Google experimenting with new tech in Chrome but I don’t want everyone to be forced to use Chrome because a few high profile web properties only work with Chrome.
Also, I don’t see anything wrong at all with individual web developers to make some of their sites only work with Chrome if that is what they really want. The global market is huge and targeting subsets and niches is not so bad for small businesses.
This is literally the problem though. If you consider all the Chrome derivatives and WebKit as one single browser. Then Firefox is the main competitor and Chromes market share is at the rate of IEs.
Just because you worked on IE and Chrome doesnt mean you are not biased. The issue we all have is that exactly that Google assumes control of what the web will look like and other browsers are left scrambling to implement things that were not standardized beforehand.
If you want to argue Chrome is not the new IE then Chrome needs to stop pushing out features not yet fully approved by their respective standards committees.
Chrome is the new IE in several ways including websites only working on Chrome as they once only worked on IE.
Lastly... A good number of things Google has added to the web could be argued that it is indeed about Googles own interests. WebRTC was useful for Google Hangouts for example. AMP only exists to give Google total control. Their adblocking changes only exist for the same reasons. Removing URLs from the URL bar also are not part of an open web standard. This is beyond anything I remember IE doing. Chrome is literally worse than IE for the open web.
WebKit has a very different direction from Chromium and it is usually not very useful to model them as being related anymore in most cases.
Google have consistently shown they're great at data, struggle to build platforms, and approach product development by throwing stuff at a wall. They have a heavy cultural bias towards developing and shipping new initiatives over supporting existing products.
None of these attributes are good things for supporting an open platform. Google does a good job at firewalling their data gathering tendencies from Chrome and web standards, but over the last ten years they've consistently pushed new standards and experiments that no one has asked for: Dart, GWT, Angular, Web Components, AMP, Service Workers, notifications, payments, DRM support, web bundles, etc. The actual innovations that have helped the platform grow have largely happened elsewhere.
Some of the stuff they do will be great, but there is going to be a long term cost to the platform from this relentless push to use the web as Google's personal playground for innovation.
But since you don't have that inside Google knowledge, just trust them.
IE was a stagnant platform with proprietary technology that still haunts my workplace: Cognos < v.11 only has complete functionality with IE. For a couple of years we could only use our primary ERP system with a specific version of JVM in a specific version of IE. IE failed (at least in part) because it failed the consumer experience.
Chrome generally gives users a good experience: Page load times, better in its own very popular apps (though apparently sand-bagged against competitors) built in high-quality search, etc. The reasons it fails are, in my opinion, primarily on the privacy front.
E.g., did a Microsoft executive say something to a journalist, who wrote it down somewhere where you subsequently read it?
E.g., do you know people who work at Microsoft?
I was under the impression that HTAs were what they viewed as "next", letting developers host and dynamically generate applications that would run over the network on Windows (or otherwise IE-equipped, hence IE for Solaris, et al) clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
It even has that whole super-granular "Zones" security system to e.g. trust an intranet-hosted HTA more than a publicly-hosted one. Am I off-base here on my historic Microsoft speculation? :)
You can criticize Google for any number of things, but they certainly want browsers to be as good and as capable as possible.
I remember when IE got tabs, a crash would bring down the whole instance. After all, there’s no point segregating the tab from the chrome (no pun intended) when it was single “tab” only.
Like I said, it is very fair to criticize google and fear the monopoly of Chrome, but it won't be like the monopoly of IE.
BTW you should take a look at YouTube Vanced.
This is not the experience I have. Are you sure you're on the latest version?
Oh, you guys have internal processes!
You're close to able to unilaterally set the direction the web should be taking, but that's ok, because you have processes!
But with all of these, you constantly ran into IE-only websites. Which got away with it because most people were running IE.
And that's why people are saying that Chrome is the new IE - because we're seeing that history repeating, with websites written only for and tested only on Chrome and Safari (and I doubt Safari would be anywhere if it weren't effectively forced onto iOS users).
If you want try out something that feels new and different you can try out what I'm working on! It's designed to make you more productive and feel more like an OS than a browser...
The real problem is when things like EME make it into the standard and you need to use Widevine and friends to see things.
Also, I hate having to stand with people who rail against everything because then no one takes you seriously when there is a thing that needs railing against.
Given that and given that my life is short, I'm not going to lose any sleep over this.
An open-source engine that is under majority control by one company.
> Not gonna happen
It is already happening!
> So much that they won't entertain any adjustments to permit adtech.
The WebKit team has created special features to essentially restore things lost with ITP, and really has no other purpose to exist: https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
I mean, I feel like that's so much worse.
[0]: https://fossbytes.com/google-accused-of-sabotaging-microsoft...
Open source doesn't mean you have any infuence or say in the future of the project. It only means you can take a copy make changes and roll your own version.
The roadmap changes the internet unhealthy ways.
Exactly, just because you have a change you want, doesn't mean you can force in on everyone. The maintainers of the project decide weather they want it or not.
Unfortunately the best open-source projects have some-kind of [1] top-down control. For example; Linux is developed the same way. You can fork and submit changes, but there's no guarantee that Linus Torvald's will accept those changes....
What would be a better alternative? Developing in behind closed doors? Some kind of democratic system of implementing features... these projects usually suck as there's nobody in charge and it tries to please too many people.
Anyway, it's definitely better than the IE situation, which was much less transparent and resistant to changes... with absolutely ZERO input from the community...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
When people 'got a computer' to 'get on the internet', seeing that icon on the desktop got them where the thought they needed to be.
Very, very few people, even years after after Chrome and Firefox came out, even knew they had a choice over the (browser) matter of getting 'on the web'. (There are some classic videos out there of voxpops of people being asked about 'the web' and 'the internet' etc.)
(To begin with, for me, it was Spry Mosaic then Netscape from about '93.)
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Microsoft wanted IE to be a wedge to drive Windows into enterprises. An open, standards-based web threatened that quite deeply (particularly one where the experiences that could be created could rival desktop apps).
Microsoft adopted a two-pronged approach. One was the inclusion of IE into the operating system to ensure the ground was seeded, and IE would be ubiquitous (keep in mind this was prior to Apple products being a realistic alternative in enterprise settings, so it was PC/Windows everywhere).
The second part was investing significant engineering efforts into ensuring that Windows- and Office-specific capabilities could emerge through IE (and only IE).
For example, if you wanted vector graphics you could use Office to produce VML and that could be viewed through IE (only). Pointedly, IE did not support SVG, which was the other major vector graphics standard at the time.
This neatly (and painfully) fragmented the market for anyone who wanted to produce vector graphics as part of a solution. You had to find a way to support VML and SVG if you wanted that to happen (and many early graphical toolkits for the web did precisely that).
All development for IE was conducted as closed source. Microsoft had no particular interest in making the browser compatible with the web standards, because as synergy between Windows and IE created a development target with benefits for Microsoft. Nobody else could create an equivalent to IE that would replicate the Microsoft-specific capabilities. The lack of standards-support created stickiness that kept IE around for a long time, because enterprises couldn't (or didn't feel like paying for) the changes necessary to bring apps into standards compliance.
A wholesale shift towards Adobe Flash was made a big crack in IE's armor. Flash ran everywhere, and sophisticated solutions could be built with it. Real web standards also made a lot of progress, and IE's creaking old engine was easily outperformed and "out-standarded" by Chrome. The subsequent rise of Apple and fall of Flash cemented Chrome (and Safari) as solid performers that could be used to deliver enterprise solutions and worked on multiple platforms.
Is Chrome the new IE? Well, is Chrome being used to drive Google-specific functionality that can only be used with other Google technologies, and can't be implemented elsewhere? Does Chrome actively avoid standards? Is Chrome actively attempting to fragment the standards? Is Chrome developed as closed source?
The thing is, Microsoft's strategy stood a pretty good chance of working. I'm always amazed at how IE stuck around when there were better alternatives, and how long it took before market pressure forced Microsoft towards web standards. A lot of money was spent on Enterprise Windows, and a lot of solutions used Microsoft-specific parts of IE. Enterprise dollars cast a long shadow, over time.
No support for fetch. Has its own non-standard APIs. Doesn’t implement basics like atob.
The new IE obviously is webkit which miraculously can still run most websites,but for how long? After the mozilla lay offs, it's probable that they will slowly but surely get massive webcompat issues too
Even in the case of IE, the issue wasn't a technical one. The issue was that MS held a monopoly on the web. They might not have abused it the same way Google is trying to today, but the specific means of abuse isn't the primary problem.
Let me use your words to illustrate my point better. You said, "... chromium is making the web a better platform in real-time", but it is not "the web" that chromium is improving, but Google's private version of it.
A great mental exercise would be for you to look at the list and select at least one feature that should be reasonably a net negative to the user experience.