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Comment by vehemenz | Hacker News Reader

MathML's removal in 2013 in Chrome was a huge deal in the accessibility community. Fixing the bugs and vulnerabilities of MathML in blink would have been entirely possible with Google's resources. In hindsight, it's easy to see why—now we consider Google an ad company first—but back then it was truly bewildering, given that Firefox continued their support of MathML.

There was a big push at the time for native presentational MathML, and Chrome basically undercut it completely. MathJax picked up some of the slack, but it was never a true replacement. Either way, it's nice see presentational MathML is back.

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> MathML's removal in 2013 in Chrome was a huge deal in the accessibility community

That sounds ahistorical to me. Maybe removal of the (potential) promise of future MathML from Chrome was a huge deal?

MathML support across browsers in 2013 was very spotty and buggy (there's a reason that even back then MathJax didn't prioritize MathML output), but the accessibility story was atrocious.

That's actually slowly changing for the better now. Some background and planning here: https://w3c.github.io/mathml-docs/gap-analysis/

"Ahistorical" is not the word you're looking for, and even if it were, you're incorrect.

Firefox and Internet Explorer (with a third party plugin) both had support for MathML reading for screen readers. The support wasn't complete, but it was good enough for high school level math in HTML textbooks. I produced several dozen of these, so I should know.

> "Ahistorical" is not the word you're looking for, and even if it were, you're incorrect.

In the sense that there were certainly people lamenting the feature loss, yes, in the sense that there were large parts of the accessibility community actually using MathML and left without an alternative, no. It was largely not usable (Igalia has been fixing MathML bugs in Firefox and WebKit as well), let alone in an accessible fashion.

> The support wasn't complete, but it was good enough for high school level math in HTML textbooks

Maybe basic algebra, but that would be it. The document I linked gives some good basic examples even screen readers today trip over due to their inherent ambiguity (as rendered and/or as markup). Anything beyond that you currently have to annotate yourself, and you can do that just as easily without a native markup dialect.

> now we consider Google an ad company first

Google has been an ad company way before 2013.

AdWords was launched in 2000. Google bought DoubleClick in 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick

Second paragraph of the Google 2004 financial report (first paragraph described what Google is):

    We generate revenue by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising. Businesses use our AdWords program to promote their products and services with targeted advertising. In addition, the thousands of third-party web sites that comprise our Google Network use our Google AdSense program to deliver relevant ads that generate revenue and enhance the user experience.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505...

Note they did not say "Google is now an ad company", it was "now we consider Google an ad company first", it is a matter of perception.

In 2013 it was not a commonly held position that Google was primarily an ad company.

It's neither here nor there, but it's worth mentioning that Google as a search engine was around for five years before that SEC filing. As I'm sure you remember, that was a very long time in the history of the Internet to that point. Plenty of time to build good will and ruin it later, as we saw a similar pattern with Chrome years later.

Google was routinely referred to as "one-trick pony" already by the end of 00s due to the obvious fact that 95% of its revenues were from search ads.

IMO the difference is that many people perceived it as a benign deal - someone would take money from the advertisers and use it to actually make a better product for the users. It took a while for enough people to realize that this very reliance on ads means that "better product" from Google's perspective is not necessarily better for the users.

Although by 2013, I'd say that even that was not an uncommon sentiment, especially since Google started doing stuff like this around then: https://commerce.googleblog.com/2012/05/building-better-shop...

I get the frustration, but MathML was and is still extremely buggy in Firefox. I would get hard crashes of the entire browser on MathML sites in Firefox and this was only a couple months ago.

And yet some of us have managed to use MathML in Firefox for a decade without seeing any browser crashes whatsoever... Strange how that happens.

> it's easy to see why—now we consider Google an ad company first—but back then it was truly bewildering

I get what he means. Back in the day I naively looked at Google like it was some kind of technology Santa Claus. Giving a decent email client to the people. Fighting of big bad Microsoft IE with a standard compliant browser etc. As a teenage programmer I hoped I could some day work for Google (or develop games). How things have changed... (still would like to create a game though)

You'd be better off working at Google than developing games, IMO.

That might be the most pragmatic and convenient answer, but comfort is the death of joy. A life truly lived aught to include some decisions that from the outside might seem ridiculous.

Depends on your value system, really. Some people would find working for an advertising company like Google to be unethical, even though it would probably pay more and have a better work-life balance.

The games industry's biggest problem isn't even crunch anymore. It's sexual harassment. I imagine there are a lot of people here who would view long hours as a viable trade-off to make a creative work but not have the same view towards, say, your boss being a sex pest.

Do journalists have concerns over working for advertising companies?

Ethics generally lies on a sliding scale of what you consider to be acceptable.

If we were talking about 2004, then fine. But by 2013 it was very clear to everyone what Google was (an advertising agency).

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