I'm so sick of this bullshit. AMP, Manifest V2, buying their way into every corner of the web, ...
In the meantime, please call your legislators and regulators. Tell them Google's too big to be allowed to have a web browser and that one solution is splitting out their business units.
It's hard to support a heterogeneous space of user agents running on a heterogeneous set of platforms. Eventually, abstractions break and you end up with a weird bug that only manifests on such-and-such browser in so-and-so configuration.
How much easier life is if you only have to support a few browsers on hardware that checksums to have a known-good configuration...
Chasing down render errors in the deep interactions between declarative HTML rendering and an esoteric-but-important hardware / software configuration is drudgework.
Some of my best ideas even, came out of clearing drudge.
Google employees are the ones writing this code, doing the designs, the QA, the project planning.
You can't expect the people who work for these companies to do the right thing. Time and time again, it requires outside forces. Either customers or legislation.
Gen Z knows nothing of what the web was once like, and lots of folks now embrace companies being stewards of the commons, eg. Apple App Store.
There's also the current down hiring market and macro economic conditions.
In hindsight, perhaps none of us should have been surprised the latter was a better proposal for most people.
A commonly repeated concern is that if WEI is implemented, banks will leap on it and it will become infeasible to do online transactions at most banks without either using a WEI-blessed software / hardware configuration or the bank's app in a commercial app store.
Banks are lazy, they shouldn't need to rely on infrastructure of commercial app stores, blessed devices since they've already proven they could develop it themselves (chip cards, dongles, time-based one time codes, etc.).
WEI is mainly aimed at suppressing the unauthenticated noise, when reading a signal from GET requests (ie tracking) that was never meant to convey any information beyond what is asked for, in the first place.
I'm not really seeing how we're reaching that conclusion. Suppressing GET request noise isn't any of the use cases described at https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
Some examples of scenarios where users depend on client trust include:
* Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
The rest of the time I can use a non-WEI browser and the sites that lock me out would probably be doing me a favor.