The insanity that the web platform is just "whatever Google's whims are" remains insane and mercurial. The web platform should not be as inconsistent as Google's own product strategies, wonder if XSLT will get unkilled in a few months.
Who do you suppose should be in charge of web standards? I can’t imagine the train wreck of incompetence if standards were driven by bureaucrats instead of stakeholders.
Honestly, what's really funny here is how absolutely horrified people are by the suggestion a single company which has a monopoly shouldn't also define the web platform. I really think anyone who has any sort of confusion about what I commented here to take a long, hard look at their worldview.
Is your proposal essentially that Mozilla defines web standards Google is legally bound to implement them?
> what's really funny here is how absolutely horrified people are by the suggestion
Not horrified, but asking what the alternative is. I don’t think you’ve actually got a sensible proposal.
Cooperation in the WHATWG is voluntary. Even if there were some workable proposal for how to drive web standards without Google having any decision making power, they could (and presumably would) decline to participate in any structure that mandated what they have to build in Chrome. Absent legal force, no one can make Google cede their investment in web standards.
Requiring Google implement the standards as agreed by Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft is not remotely outside the realm of the legal force that could be applied.
I feel like Mozilla would end up being a Google proxy in this case as they fear losing their funding and Apple and Microsoft would be incentivized to abuse their position to force Google not to do the best thing for the public but the best thing for Apple and Microsoft.
I would again agree Microsoft and Apple will heavily endorse their own interests, Microsoft much more so in terms of enterprise requirements and Apple much more so in terms of privacy-concerned consumers. The advertising firm influence will be significantly dimished and that is a darn shame.
They don't. In general browser specs are defined via various standards groups like WHATWG. As far as I know there is no standard for what image formats must be supported on a web browser,[0] which is why in this one case any browser can decide to support an image format or not.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
Web authors? Maybe. WHATWG was created specifically because W3C wasn’t really listening to web authors though.
I don’t think there are a lot of scenarios where standards aren’t driven by implementers, though. USB, DRAM, WiFi, all this stuff is defined by implementers.
Rather: WHATWG was founded because the companies developing browsers (in particular Google) believed that what the W3C was working on for XHTML 2.0 was too academic, and went into a different direction than their (i.e. in particular Google's) vision for the web.
Google was not involved in the founding of WHATWG, though certainly the WHATWG vision was better aligned with Google than with what the W3C was doing.
But that's not very relevant actually. The WHATWG is more like a private arbitrator, not like a court or parliament.
Their mission is to document browser features and coordinate them in such a way that implementation between browsers doesn't diverge too much. It's NOT their mission to decide which features will or will not be implemented or even to design new features. That's left to the browser vendors.
And the most powerful browser vendor is Google.
“Oh, yeah? Well they paid Hickson’s salary. And the WHATWG doesn’t matter anyway. And also Google is really powerful.”
Um, ok.
WHATWG was founded in 2004 by Mozilla, Opera, and Apple. Google had no browser at that point and didn’t hire Ian Hickson until 2005.
Google is currently a WHATWG member and clearly wields a great deal of influence there. And yeah, the 4 trillion dollar internet giant is powerful. No argument there.
Mozilla, Opera and Apple. Google didn't have a browser then, hadn't even made the main hires who would start developing Chrome yet and hixie was still at Opera.
Users are a key information source but they don't know how to build a web engine, they don't know networks, and they don't know security; and therefore can't dictate the feature set.
Reading over the minutes for the last W3C WG session before WHATWG was announced, the end result seems obvious. The eventual WHATWG folks were pushing for investment in web-as-an-app-platform and everyone else was focused on in retrospect very unimportant stuff.
“Hey, we need to be able to build applications.”
“Ok, but first we need compound documents.”
There was one group who thought they needed to build the web as Microsoft Word and another that wanted to create the platform on which Microsoft Word could be built.
Apparently they failed. The web version of Word is still far from having feature parity. Of course doc is one of those everything and the kitchen sink formats, so implementing it on top of a platform that was originally intended to share static documents is kind of a tall order.
Okay, and do they align on every other web standard too?
SquareWheel implied that Mozilla doesn't count as an "other party" because they are aligned with Google on this specific topic.
My comment was pointing out that just because they are aligned on this doesn't mean they are aligned on everything, so Mozilla is an "other party".
And, as you have reinforced, Google and Mozilla are not always in alignment.
The fact that Mozilla aligns with Google on both of these deprecations suggests the reasons are valid.
I personally see no reason for XSLT today. Outside of the novelty of theming RSS feeds, it sees very little use. And JPEG XL carries a large security surface area which neither company was comfortable including in its current shape. That may change based on adoption and availability of memory-safe decoders.
>"Which other parties? Because Mozilla's stance on JPEG XL and XSLT are identical to Google's"
If this isn't an implication that Mozilla isn't an other party, than I'm not sure what you were trying to say with "Which other parties?".
Whatever you meant to say, it read as an implication that Mozilla just does what Google does so Mozilla isn't really an "other party".
You seem to be reading subtext into a statement that was put plainly.
The comment you replied to was speaking generally, not specifically to XSLT or JPEG XL. They obviously didn't say "Google should be barred from having standards positions" just in context of XSLT/JPEG XL, but they're totally cool with the Google monopoly with every other standard.
>You seem to be reading subtext into a statement that was put plainly.
Nah, I'm really not.
But I'm just farming downvotes, apparently, so nevermind. You win! yay
(It's fun that people are coming to a conversation over 24 hours old, however many levels deep, to downvote!)
If only there was a way to detect which features a browser supports. Something maybe in the html, the css, javascript or the user agent. If only there was a way to do that, we would not be stuck in a world pretending that everything runs on IE6. /s
If Mozilla wanted Firefox to succeed, they would stop playing "copy Chrome" and support all sorts of things that the community wants, like JpegXL, XSLT, RSS/Atom, Gemini (protocol, not AI), ActivityPub, etc.
Not to mention a built-in ad-blocker...
No significant number of users chooses their browser based on support for image codecs. Especially not when no relevant website will ever use them until Safari and Chrome support them.
And websites which already do not bother supporting Firefox very much will bother even less if said browser by-default refuses to allow them to make revenue. They may in fact go even further and put more effort into trying to block said users unless they use a different browser.
Despite whatever HN thinks, Firefox lost marketshare on the basis of:
A) heavy marketing campaigns by Google including backdoor auto-installations via. crapware installers like free antivirus, Java and Adobe, and targeted popups on the largest websites on the planet (which are primarily google properties). The Chrome marketing budget alone nearly surpasses Mozilla's entire budget and that's not even accounting for the value of the aforementioned self-advertising.
B) being a slower, heavier browser at the time, largely because the extension model that HN loved so much and fought the removal of was an architectural anchor, and beyond that, XUL/XPCOM extensions were frequently the cause of the most egregious examples of bad performance, bloat and brokenness in the first place.
C) being "what their cellphone uses" and Google being otherwise synonymous with the internet, like IE was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their competitors (Apple, Microsoft, Google) all own their own OS platforms and can squeeze alternative browsers out by merely being good enough or integrated enough not to switch for the average person.
One possible way is doing things that Google and Chrome don't (can't).
Catering to niche audiences (and winning those niches) gives people a reason to use it. Maybe one of the niches takes off. Catering to advanced users not necessarily a bad way to compete.
Being a feature-for-feature copy of Chrome is not a winning strategy (IMHO).
Good thing they aren't? Firefox's detached video player feature is far superior to anything Chrome has that I'm aware of. Likewise for container tabs, Manifest V2 and anti-fingerprinting mode. And there are AI integrations that do make sense, like local-only AI translation & summaries, which could be a "niche feature" that people care about. But people complain about that stuff too.
But I'm agreeing with you! These features are important to you, an advanced user. The more advanced users for Firefox, the better.
What “community” is this? The typical consumer has no idea what any of this is.
If one of these advanced/niche technologies takes off, suddenly they will have a reason to use Firefox.
IE lost the lead to Firefox when IE basically just stopped development and stagnated. Firefox lost to Chrome when Firefox became too bloated and slow. Firefox simply will not win back that market until either Chrome screws up majorly or Firefox delivers some significant value that Google cannot immediately copy.
From the jump, the article commits a logical error, suggesting that Google killed jpegxl because it favors avif, which is "homegrown". jpegxl, of course, was also written by Google, so this sentence isn't even internally consistent.
In a very real sense Google is currently stopping web authors from using JPEG XL.
Yeah, that’s what I said.
If the user agent does not support JPEG XL, then you cannot use it.
“Nobody is stopping you from using jpegxl” except Google.
As for JPEG XL, of course they unkilled it. WEBP has been deprecated in favor of JPEG XL.
Otherwise, I love webp and use it for all my comics/manga.
For photographs, jpeg has really been optimized without reducing compatibility, and also in another less compatible way (incompatible viewers can display it without erroring out, but the colors are wrong) and there's such an encoder in the JPEG XL repo.
Similarly, AVIF uses little more code than the AV1 keyframe decoder, so since every browser supports AV1, every browser also supports AVIF.
Can you point to somewhere that Google or anyone else indicated that they would support xslt once there’s a secure, supported version?
Who said this? I was never able to find any support among the browser devs for "keep XSLT with some more secure non-libxslt implementation".