I'm tired of seeing "your browser is unsupported" and denied access while using a chromium based alternative. Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles
It's like Internet Explorer all over again! Why would anyone do this?
We need to use the business website that Auth0 logs us into, but I’m not touching Auth0 until they fix their stuff to work with more privacy-respecting browsers. I can appreciate how difficult that may be from a technical point of view, but as an end user, no thanks.
Opera is basically Chrome, and supports the same features, but alot of websites will complain to high heaven, or somehow find a way to break a feature due to whatever it thinks the useragent means.
Like it or not, at least Google blazes ahead and brings new features to the browser sphere. It's not like innovation can be expected from Firefox any more, not with them cutting costs on the development team.
If someone says it's bad because corporate interests shouldn't push innovation... well, I'd like to understand why they're okay with the explicitly bought and paid for OpenJS board seats, or the permanent corporate tetrarchy for HTML. A lot of developers seem to have unrealistic expectations about how software governance works.
At least for AMP, I indeed am glad because it finally forced the big media houses to provide pages that didn't suck ten freakin' megabytes off my 50€/2GB data plan (yeah, that were German mobile data prices until not too long ago!) for a single page load with under 10KB of actual content.
I'm not particularly liking the situation, but the fact is that the only entity able to actually force change is Google.
ETA: Sorry, I forgot Apple who managed to get the Web rid of the proprietary, expensive (for authors) and insecure scourge that was Adobe Flash, but that was about the only progress that came from Apple. I'm not counting PWAs because Apple utterly failed to make web apps actually competitive with App Store apps for profit reasons!
The end effect is a broken, incompatible web.
Yes, some of that, e.g. srcset, animations and media queries, was possible using Javascript... but god, it was awful to use, even more awful to debug (especially "stuttering" issues or unresponsive pages due to some animation locking the render thread) and, worst of all, a couple tabs with JS animations open and you could watch your battery go empty faster than the gas needle of a BMW X7 on a German Autobahn!
The only thing that is still, for now over than thirty years, needing massive effort is HTTPS client certificates.
ETA: And... best of all, Chrome and FF forced people to regularly update, meaning the days of supporting a browser that hadn't seen an update in a decade (IE6) are gone. Mobile devices aside, you only need to take about half a year worth of browser versions to test, and cross-browser compatibility issues have all but vanished for standard stuff (with the notable exception of Apple).
Sounds like you're in the business of making that crappy web bloat the rest of us despise. Which makes your whining about "download ten megabyte for ten kilobytes of content" doubly ironic.
The majority of these things are not from Google/Chrome and not from this past decade.
<img srcset> was first introduced by Safari and proposed by Apple to the WhatWG in 2012; I believe for their iPhone 4 with the 2× Retina display. But Webkit was already thinking in 2006 about High DPI.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2...
https://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/
The <video> element was first proposed by Opera to the WhatWG and standardised there. I believe the first big adopter was Safari on iPhone, because of no Flash, of course.
https://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-Fe...
Media Queries were first proposed and specced by Håkon Wium Lie of Opera in 2001. (Good) Browsers for the first years implemented just a subset of that feature (the media types). In 2007 Apple released the first iPhone and adopted the media queries syntax, especially the viewport width and height which made the former mostly unknown specification more popular.
https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-mediaqueries-20010404/Ove... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...
CSS animations (and transitions and transforms) were proposed by Apple in late 2007 after implementation in Safari:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090....
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080....
I thought I remember that Apple first used these technologies for Mac OS X‘ web-based Dashboard widgets but in retrospect that must have been <canvas>.
WebRTC and WebASM seem to be more Chrome things, yes, and from the past decade.
(I don't have a big point; just some annoying memories of following web standards in that decade more closely than now.)
From what I remember, web developers (including me) were so utterly pissed about IE6 being in a state of a years-long feature freeze that Firefox and later Chrome actually had their chance to rise.
The idea is that the advertiser ultimately wants to buy a certain amount of conversions. With their ad budget being roughly constant, better targeting means that you need to show fewer ads of that advertiser to get to that point. So, you're decreasing the denominator, increasing cost per impression.
This is obviously oversimplified, because actual payment happens at the intermediate step of click. But the inherent feedback loops finally work out to the above.
That's not right at all for a large segment of advertising: the cheaper conversions are, the more most advertisers are willing to spend.
Imagine I currently earn a marginal profit of $10 on each conversion (widget sold etc): this means roughly I'm willing to pay up to $10 for a conversion that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Conversions that cost more than $10 are definitely not worth it to me. I have some appetite for conversions that cost close to $10, but at some point I run into (likely temporary) capacity constraints and my marginal profitability decreases. The cheaper conversions are, the more I can continue to increase volume, and so the more I'll spend.
Additionally, internet advertising is competing with other forms of advertising, and advertisers want the most cost effective medium. Increase the cost of a conversion, and the marginal advertiser shifts away from online ads.
One way to see this is to imagine that instead of talking about online ads we are talking about any other product. Raise the price (cost per conversion) and people will decrease the amount they buy.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
This is just a form of supply/demand curve.
The issue here is Google controls most of the market, giving them far more power to optimize the supply curve to maximize Googles profit leaving the consumer no other competitor to fall back on to lower prices (FB maybe?, more likely to collude and keep prices high).
Google cannot act like ads are 'any other product' where there are healthy, competitive markets.
That said, Google and Facebook captured most of the value from targeted advertising and left only crumbs to publishers, so they don’t really have an incentive to maintain the status quo. The use of invasive tracking technology is forced onto them by advertisers.
As an advertiser, why would I pay big money to target an ad to the affluent New Yorker reading audience when I can target those same people for pennies on the dollar on other websites?
The same happened when covid first broke out. Brand conscious advertisers didn't want to be associated with any covid-related content, no matter what the context.