Not to say I don't believe you, I'm just curious. In what way(s) does Google uniquely believe in the web as a platform where Apple/Mozilla don't? Can you provide some examples of this?
I'm sorry I really want to find the links & show this off more. It was the most boldfaced & honest admission that basic useful interesting things were not welcome, profiteering off suspicion & hostility while telling users that the anti-feature was undecidedly the only acceptable way.
One can also review moz's standards positions. It's a great effort & I applaud Moz for their transparency & don't want to hurt the effort. There's aot of good too. But there's such a long sordid history of Moz saying no absolutely not this is awful, then eventually having to circle back around & at least make some effort to not be a huge stick in the mud, to at least help figure out at some degree what would fit if this was a goal. And often deciding yeah, we will do it https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
They just don't seem to have any ability to differentiate between what a privileged/permission-ed site should be granted versus what the baseline security model should be. Any potential information leak anywhere seems like cause to terminate effort.
If I wanted a paternalistic entity telling me what I can and can’t do with my device, I’d use an iPad.
As in: everything they said is true, and the moment they launched it they found it's used for fingerprinting (and Google doesn't even hide it behind a permission prompt)
If Mozilla are really serious about fingerprinting then they need to remove <canvas> right now and make every website render in Times New Roman.
Fingerprinting cannot be solved by disabling browser features in a standard browser. It can be mitigated by using content blockers such that the fingerprinting code never runs, or by using a specialist browser like the Tor browser.
Yes and that's a major issue
> If Mozilla are really serious about fingerprinting then they need to remove <canvas> right now
Ad absurdum is not as great an argument as you think it is
> Fingerprinting cannot be solved by disabling browser features in a standard browser.
It also shouldn't be facilitated by just blindly turning them on without propert mitigation. And proper mitigation is complex
> It can be mitigated by using content blockers
So now you're shifting the responsibility onto the user. Even though it's been shown time and again that users can't really understand all the complexities of modern systems, their capabilities and the far-reaching results of what these systems can and do.
> Finally, if we find that features and web APIs increase fingerprintability and offer no safe way to protect our users, we will not implement them
https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/07/apple-fingerprinting-priv...
Strangling the web platform to keep users safe, forcing them onto much less secure much more invasive apps is not justified nor reasonable. Watching Mozilla adopt the same condescending paternalistic platform murdering "protect the children" absolutist authoritarianism with no possible consideration or affordances was a sad sad sad week. It's extremely reckless & hostile behavior, at deep deep deep injury to making so many great futures possible.
What really happens is that Mozilla brings multiple well-argued objections (Safari, too) that span both technical and non-technical reasons, but Chrome just releases its half-baked non-standards and calls it a day.
Fear Uncertainty & Doubt are being used again and again to obstruct basic sensible user asks like being able to use Arduino Web Editor or work with their midi keyboard. Fear is the worst demagoguery of all.
Put it behind a permission! Only turn it on if the user installs a PWA! The idea that Moz/Safari know better than to give users what they want, to deny the web basic possibilities: that is demagoguery. It was never based in sound perspective.
I'm sure it still bugs them to no end that they have zero control over the app experience on iOS, which they possibly could have had more input on had webapps ended up being the dominant way of doing things on mobile.
They are stillborn and i don't see a way out.
The respective users, specially the corporate ones, have no alternative other than using them.
The lack of empathy for how long change takes keeps letting doom & gloomers send good things to the graveyard.
At work we only target mobile devices via the Web.
If you believe in a big web it was not justified, otherwise it was, as the original comment was asking for an example of.
By definition their stance is 100% about "a big web". It's an ideology that the browser shouldn't become another OS competing vs one that it should.
And while one side of the conversation tends to see their approach as 100% correct, the history was people downloading random exes with 0 sandboxing to do 99% of what SPAs offer today, so there's merit to both trains of thought.
"Big web" isn't a term. It's some vague unspecified idea that you may have.
> By definition their stance is 100% about "a big web".
By what definition?
> It's an ideology that the browser shouldn't become another OS competing vs one that it should.
Of course this is not Firefox's stance.
> There's no real debate because 2/3 players actively believe & push for a small web. It's a miserable rock & hard place situation, trying to figure out what to do when there's only one ayer who believes in a web platform at all.
And dozens of replies have all managed to understand what they meant. They didn't need to define small vs big web because for those familiar with the subject matter it's a pretty intuitive way to describe the two opposing ideologies
Not every comment can be written for every reader. Which is why I recommended you read more of the thread to gain some understanding before replying.
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> Of course this is not Firefox's stance.
The "of course" is unnecessarily condescending and simply doesn't follow. Firefox OS was code named "Boot to Gecko"... as in boot into Mozilla's browser engine. Mozilla openly stated they'd push for new Web APIs to enable it.
https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/dmip1GpD5...
For a long time all the major players were for a "big web", it's no coincidence that the only one left pushing is the only one that didn't abandon their personal web based platform.