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And, let's be clear, Google's ability to enact change is a result of their pervasive influence over the internet.

It took _years_ for XMLHTTPRequest to become a dominant influence on site design. Google can push new standard changes in fraction of the time because _their services demand it_.

> Even webapps, which are more sensitive to browser environments due to their heavy use of JS, should not stop working on an older browser just because a newer version appeared

Those are vendor-bound apps.

They're Google Chrome Apps, not web apps.

Well, it's not like the entire web community haven't warned about it for the last 10 years.

At this point, what can we do?

10? This was a problem even before 2001, which is when Internet Explorer 6 was released which (unfortunately) quickly became the Internet. Things weren't so multi-platform back then so swaths of the Internet became inaccessible unless you were using IE6 on Windows. Things are a bit different these days with smartphones and Apple's viability, but the landscape is starting to look strangely familiar.

Many have warned, most have not understood or unfortunately cared enough to listen. Now we are fighting the uphill battle for it.

One thing could be to define layered standards for various use cases.

Like the archiving standard for PDF. Perhaps a formalized version of “graceful degradation” if you will with a known set of target.

One target could be a self contained, script-less, bundle f.ex.

Test everything in w3m, netsurf and other niche browsers.

It will not change until dev stop developing on Chrome as their main browser. Maybe tooling could be an excuse for very large webapps, but otherwise and especially for websites (hello simple forms broken except if you use Chrome) it's definitely not.

Also it's orthogonal with JS usage, anecdotically I mainly work on JS heavy websites and don't use Chrome.

I dev in Firefox. It’s great! The tooling’s really good. It’s subtly different from Chrome and you’ll feel a twinge of friction moving, but by and large, it’s easy.

Just shut it down and restart it every couple of days because it’s memory usage isn’t as tight.

Are you using the Firefox Developer Edition[1], or just the current stable one?

Fellow web-dev here, using Firefox (the one that comes with Ubuntu) as main driver. And I'd like to know if the Developer Editiion offers any benefits over the stable one, for webdevelopment.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/developer/

Yes, I use the developer edition. TBH I’m not aure what the benefits are! ;-)

I do too, but what I miss is customized throttling settings (I need to optimize for fast overseas connections: high bandwidth but also high latency). Chrome (and Edge) have this.

Firefox has this too. You can do it the network tab[1] or in the Responsive Design Mode[2]. There's drop downs there where you can control how much you want to throttle

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Network_Monit...'

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Responsive_De...

Thanks, I know these settings. One can only choose from the predefined settings. You can't customize those (as for me, to high bandwidth and high latency).

> ...its weapon of monopoly is effectively change...

Rather novel weapon. This won't work, rapid change will just leave the large base of web developers behind. Tutorials and practices based on the Old Way hang around for decades.

Google putting out a standard is only going to help them if it is (a) in demand by web devs and (b) competitive with the old way of doing things.

I don't particularly like web apps, but they are a new field and rapid change in the standards is not really a sign of monopoly.

Unfortunately, this isn't how (web?) devs work. For a whole host of reasons, devs always prefer the new thing. This is likely a combination of factors: fashion (the same general social tendencies that make fashion a thing in any other industry), youth (new people are continuously joining the profession) but probably most of all: curiosity and a desire to learn new things.

You can try and model things on the idea of rational experienced senior devs all making tech decisions based purely on hard evidence-based demonstrations of material benefit of new tech over old tech, but reality is much softer than that.

Another factor is that Google's hold over SEO allows them to drive change through SEO requirements. E.g. there's always been a lot of overlap between new tech introduced and Chrome and requirements for Google search indexing, and that stands to increase with things like Core Web Vitals,

> rapid change in the standards is not really a sign of monopoly

Your statement here seems to be just picked from the ether and not actually based on anything in reality: there's no reason rapid change cannot be associated with monopoly.

There are many differences between how Google is approaching tech and how Microsoft did in the late 90s / early 00s but the its worth noting that second E in their infamous Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy most certainly involves rapid change in standards. This is hardly the only example, but it's notable I didn't even have to pick a different industry to find one.

Think we're mixing up two things here: Google monopolizes the Web as a runtime with constant forward motion on the standards; no browser vendor can keep up, this is true.

However web dev practice has been driven by Facebook and its quasi-functional programming advocates for at least 5 years now (Redux/React). There's a whole generation of Web Devs that don't know that DOM Event handlers can be objects that bear the handleEvent interface because React prohibits that application for example, but that's a whole world of memory efficient async handling rather than generating throwaway functions for ever little thing

Chrome started forcing tab grouping on mobile so I've tried switching to Firefox. My bank's log in screen doesn't work and posting to Facebook Marketplace is broken. Not sure why basic functionality like that doesn't work but it does force me to keep Chrome around.

> [..] it is churning the standards so much that its weapon of monopoly is effectively change --- Firefox can barely keep up, and Microsoft already surrendered.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

It really looks like w3c standard === Chrome at this point. Is "standards body capture" a thing like "regulatory capture?"

"any browser that supports the standards before they became Google-ified because it is churning the standards so much that its weapon of monopoly is effectively change --- Firefox can barely keep up, and Microsoft already surrendered."

Almost all if they're abusing their search monopoly to force their preferred web "standards" on the rest of us?

If I see a website that fails to display text with JS disabled I close it and never come back out of respect to blind people who also can't visit that site.

This is a common myth. The vast majority of blind and partially sighted users don't use text-based web browsers. They use normal web browsers in conjunction with screen readers; these browsers can execute Javascript normally. There is nothing inherently inaccessible about Javascript-based content.

Screen readers work just fine with regular browsers and JavaScript - it's not like visually impaired users are using Lynx.

Exactly! All big ones like NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, etc, are fully capable to read and interact with craziest single page application build and rendered in your browser