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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Just call it the "Chrome-ification" of Firefox.

Chrome is automatically updated to be jam-packed full of browser-specific APIs and functionality.

Like when Chrome automatically updated and registered itself as a background service without permission.

Or when Chrome automatically installed a microphone listening service for always on "OK Google" hotword detection.

Or the fact that Chrome Apps are less and less "webpages" and more and more "applications that only support the Chrome API".

"To add insult to injury, there is no simple way of disabling the functionality"

I wish I got paid my hourly rate for the sheer amount of time I spend combing through Google Product Forums reading about what arcane chrome://flags or commandline ---arg is required to disable their new functions.

It's a shame what's happening to the web.

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You know, all of this already happened once.

This time we don't have an all powerful Microsoft fighting the web, but Google seems very wiling to take their place. Last browser wars stopped the web evolution for about a decade, just because of a single party that didn't want to be nice.

It's a shame what's happening to the web.

We've apparently decided that we should use "the web" for everything, whether or not it's a good fit. So yeah, browsers are unavoidably going to accumulate features that used to be the responsibility of apps or the OS. And there will be lots of browser-specific functionality unless you're willing to wait 5 years for W3C or WHATWG or whoever to finalize a standard.

imo the browser is just a better navigation model for a wide range of apps than typical OS GUI shells. so it's natural that either native apps get hosted in the browser (the plugin model) which has gone out of fashion, or APIs to do whatever an native app wants to do get added to the standard web API.

That's a good point. The net is great for shoving data backwards and forwards but for the web it doesn't necessarily mean that the browser should be expected to do EVERYTHING.

There used to be a time when most of the posts here on HN were "something native IMPLEMENTED IN JavaScript in a BROWSER" but thankfully those times have passed to the most part.

The Internet was heralded as solving cross-platform problems (hurray for XML?) but it seems that writing a native app actually involves less testing. You now have to test in 3 or 4 browsers per platform, not including mobile devices and changes between different versions. The relentless shoving of features into browsers is no different to what they've been doing for years but I can see why people would not enjoy it, particularly with the repeat of "only works in IE" that you see ("only works in Chrome").

Pretty sure Google would love for the web to not suck so much. I think the strategy is to support some decent technology and hope the rest of the world will get their shit together. The W3C is just slooooooooowwwwww.

There's no need to disable the functionality. It's just WebRTC. It's not using any resources unless you're actually using it.

This is a thread about firefox, when you make an answer entirely about chrome. This is neither the place nor the time for your rant.

There are no hard and fast rules about threads.

A thread about Firefox is also a thread to discuss web browsers in general, the web, html, etc.

It is very relevant. Both Chrome and Firefox are getting extremely bloated and feature-creeped. Besides bloat/performance/quality, each new feature is a new security attack vector [0].

This is a very valid discussion. Software engineers would naturally have concerns when a browser built to render web pages gets turned into a pseudo operating system. The risk here is that without focus it won't be a good browser nor a good OS.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-0...

This, however, is just a little UI over WebRTC, an existing feature that is accessible to web content already. Hello doesn't add any significant area for new security attacks.

It's possible your argument could be against adding WebRTC itself, instead of Hello, but the topic here is Hello.

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