The article is just an opinion and some claims, supported by zero evidence. Yes, Google is interested that Web continues to live. But article omits that Google only wants the Web that exists on Google's terms. That's why they practically rebuilt the web themselves, on all levels, from protocol to the client (spdy, webp, amp, dart, chromeos & android, chromium).
But that is also progress. If it wasn't for Google's investment we would still maybe running Flash. People have had a lot of time to advance the web before Google came along.
The standard is open, the code is open - I don't understand how "is Chrome the new IE?" even a question. It's not like they're bundling it only on ChromeOS and Android , it's not like they have the equivalent of VbScript /ActiveX and plenty of people are making browsers based on Chromium.
I do think google innovated a lot but I think htlm5 killed flash not google. Html5 is a web standard. Chrome is very much the new IE, it use to be I was forced to run IE for some b.s. legacy corporate webapp now I am forced to run Chrome. Why? Because devs have to prioritize a browser and the amount of non standard supposed engineering by google means they can't support other browsers.
Google is playing a winner takes all game of dominance. Imagine if Ford became so popular that mechanics can't be bothered to fix other cars because Ford does everything differently.
People are being forced to base browsers on Chromium because no one will use anything else due to sites depending on Chromium only features! This is very anti-innovation.
You came up with a cool new feature in firefox (like containers) and you want to standardize it? Well if uncle google says no you're out of luck. Standards exist for a reason and engineers(even at google) use to have enough professionalism to respect the concept and process of having an internet where everyone participates democratically.
I hate to keep on coming to similar conclusions but Browsers need to be regulated if the browser industry is always being overrun by some monopoly.
HTML5 just provided a suitable replacement for Flash, but suddenly having a large browser (Mobile Safari) that just couldn't play Flash content at all provided the incentive for web devs to actually invest the effort to switch to HTML5.
This is the correct answer. To add historical perspective, I had friends who would go into Apple stores and point all the demo machines at newgrounds.com to show people that they shouldn’t waste their money on devices that couldn’t even play flash animations as well as a low end laptop.
Most browsing still happens on desktop and without the equivalent HTML5 standards there would be no replacing Flash. Last I checked Apple really isn’t a big web standards pusher or implementer. I guess people just have to romanticize everything Apple. Sure it was a factor but Apple hardly was the only factor.
It’s very revisionist history to say that Apple has never been a big standards pusher or implementer. Basically every modern browser engine other than Gecko is descended from Apple’s Webkit.
Porting KHTML to macOS and honoring its license to keep it open is very different than contributing to the HTML5 standard and implementing cutting edge features quickly. The latter helps with killing Flash more than declaring we are not going to support it.
Apple made Flash a no-go on mobile. At the time, people had no distinction between mobile web and desktop web, so if your web site didn't work on an iPhone, it was forgotten and left in the dust.
Today, you can be on one or the other. But that wasn't the case back then.
Last I checked Apple really isn’t a big web standards pusher or implementer
I'm sorry you wasted your time checking on something that I didn't state.
people just have to romanticize everything Apple
No romanticizing needed. I was there, and lived through it.
> I'm sorry you wasted your time checking on something that I didn't state.
Just saying no Flash use our app store apps without contributing to open xp alternatives does not amount to killing Flash. Making the alternative better, accessible to all in an open way does.
"standard" means nothing when Google is churning it every day. It coined the completely idiotic term "living standard" and has basically used its propagandic powers to drag everyone else along.
Its idea of "progress" is the exact opposite of what the web needs.
Google has a reputation for getting bored of projects and shutting them down, if they controlled the web it’d be gone in six months and everything would have to be AMP
It cuts both ways. Shutting down projects that aren't core can also be seen as focusing on what matters. Google shutting down products also gives room for other companies to fill that need. The Google Reader shutdown was the besting thing ever to happen to Feedly. I wish Firefox was a little more aggressive in shutting down some of its side-projects to focus on the things where they can provide value that other strictly-commercial companies will not.
Looking at Pocket. Hey, FF I want to love you but I feel you lack focus. Also, fix the autocompleter on the URL bar on mobile - it should not aggressively autocomplete when I'm pressing bksp !
I'm on Android, using Firefox 79.0.5 (Build #2015758619) - which is like freshest bits for GP - it's where they moved the address bar to the bottom.
So, go to a long URL, like paging through a forum. Then edit the URL. Place cursor at end and hit bksp. As you continue to delete chars the purple-phantom highlight where it tries to autocomplete goes crazy and flickers the heck out of the UI. It's definitely a regression.
I don't know the best way to capture screen on this device tho, and I don't have time to spin up any emulators and go through those steps
> it's where they moved the address bar to the bottom
Yup, that's Fenix. By the way, you can switch it back to the top, but the (+) button (new tab) still remains at the bottom, which irks me.
I actually just tried and I'm not seeing your issue - but I have different issues (mainly that when I open the browser, the topmost tab can never seem to figure out whether it has a page loaded or it's on the new tab page).
By the way, I'm just a fellow user, so don't spend too much effort describing your bug to me, haha. It might be worth reporting it to their bug tracker, though: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues
If your device happens to be a Samsung phone, it should come with a screen recorder (at least on the newest major version of Android)
> Google has a reputation for getting bored of projects and shutting them down, if they controlled the web it’d be gone in six months and everything would have to be AMP
They haven't shut down Search yet, even though it's pretty boring as a service.
I'm sure you can understand there are "core" projects, and non-core ones.
I wonder when they will drop Google Search, about the time they should get bored soon!
Oh unless such belief doesn't make any sense for product that are necessary to Google lucrativity?
Yes, Google devs on non necessarily lucrative projects such as flutter or dart might get bored to some extent.
I hear this argument come up a lot and frankly it's just misleading to even bring it up. When a company controls an open source project, the project follows their vision–regardless of whether there are a couple other groups with slightly-more-than-nominal contributions. Ask yourself whether any one group could prevent a commit from going in that Google corporate had decided they wanted in Chromium–the answer is of course no. It'd be like saying Apple doesn't have essentially full control over WebKit's direction, even though this page lists a bunch of people who aren't from Apple: https://webkit.org/team/
Free and Open-Source projects, unlike IE, can be forked anytime by just anyone or any other organization. There is nothing preventing anyone to go ahead and rework Chromium for their own needs - and that's what happening in practice already with Brave, Edge, etc...
The day that people/organizations are upset with the direction Google takes with Chromium is the day where a real fork will start existing and being actively developed by a larger community.
For this I would propose a litmus test for forkability of a project. If the original parent company disappeared would the fork be able to sustain its development and maintenance alone?
For current chromium forks (and also for firefox forks) the answer is no.
The only fork that would have the resources would be from microsoft, but it would be a huge, expensive, and non-trivial task.
> If the original parent company disappeared would the fork be able to sustain its development and maintenance alone?
The counterexample is the Linux kernel. No single company can actually sustain its development, so in practice many companies work on it together with an agreed governance to direct where things go.
Indeed Linux is not forkable in practice, most current forks rely on the cooperation and coordination of the linux foundation at least partially.
For chrome as long as google exist I don't really see an industry consortium to invest in marginal improvements (considering also how the interested industry partners are likely heavy google customers)
spdy become HTTP2, quic become HTTP3 it is expensive in time and money to develop and test new ideas in protocols. I think it is a bit unfair to to bundle android, chromium and AMP into same bag. AMP is clearly driven by money but there is a lot of open source that benefit everyone.
Google is big company. I think trying to paint whole google as evil is not effective.
It's like this beast that does these benevolent things, but at some point it catches up to them and they shut something down after getting people kinda hooked. For example Picasa - massively popular - free and pretty amazing desktop photo management tool. It slowly morphed such that all of the users of it were just folded into a cloud offering: Drive.
Chrome and all of it's open source awesomeness, again, mostly used to fold people into the bigger profitable picture. So even though there are developers that work at Google creating protocols that help everyone, including non-Chrome browsers - that benevolence has a product manager paying that developer's time. At some stage it's not all free beer.
I kind of like seeing articles like this, where you get to see the mental gymnastics (sometimes a simple somersault, sometimes a double twisting triple backflip) that employees use to justify to themselves "why I am not as evil as those people in that other company."
Sure, I don't believe Chrome has the same problems that IE did either, but I definitely do believe Chrome uses its dominant position primarily in service to extending Google's desires for the web. E.g. signed HTTP exchanges are more AMP shit that nobody asked for.
Sorry but I like amp. I don’t want sites like the guardian to drain my phone battery and load in 10 seconds. I understand if it’s bad for publishers but as a consumer I love it.
To suggest that an end user would go about disabling JavaScript and other reasons just shows how HN is in a bubble and don’t really understand that 99% of the users don’t care.
Psst, the thing that drains your battery on news sites are the ads, which Google is 100% responsible for by encouraging an ecosystem of third party JS.
A great advantage of having standards like Amp is that we can then control and limit how things behave. See criterias for autoplay video on Amp:
- the video is automatically muted before autoplay starts
- when the video is scrolled out of view, the video is paused
- when the video is scrolled into view, the video resumes playback
- when the user taps the video, the video is unmuted
- if the user has interacted with the video (e.g., mutes/unmutes, pauses/resumes, etc.), and the video is scrolled in or out of view, the state of the video remains as how the user left it. For example, if the user pauses the video, then scrolls the video out of view and returns to the video, the video is still paused.
None of these features should need Google's proprietary platform. See, for example, Mozilla's `media.autoplay.enabled` or `media.block-play-until-visible`
There are many ways to go about speeding up the websites for the end users that are less technically involved for everyone and require a new subset of markup and standard.
>There are many ways to go about speeding up the websites for the end users that are less technically involved for everyone and require a new subset of markup and standard.
>Because the people creating the standards (i.e. Google)
Google doesn't create standards. They are one of the major stakeholders, but they don't have the final say.
>That's the whole issue here.
No. The issue is that Google built a browser that is better than anything now, and was better than anything out there for the past decade and got themselves into a dominant position. They haven't yet abused that position - contrary to a lot of the posts in this thread - but people are nervous. I can respect that viewpoint because it is something to worry about.
Google could simply cache the web pages and strip them naked. Reader mode on browsers do a good job of it on most sites and they can publish guidelines on how to structure your site to make it easier for reader mode to work which wouldn't be that problematic (it would also encourage accessibility).
>Google could simply cache the web pages and strip them naked
You think Google could get away with stripping or editing commercial pages by default? Be serious.
>Reader mode on browsers do a good job of it on most sites
Then use it.
>they can publish guidelines on how to structure your site to make it easier for reader mode to work which wouldn't be that problematic (it would also encourage accessibility).
Google actually does a lot of that. They publish a lot of guidelines, including testing tools (like Lighthouse) to have developers build faster websites. Case in point: https://web.dev/measure
> You think Google could get away with stripping or editing commercial pages by default? Be serious.
No one said anything about default. It can be opt in like amp but the difference is here simply that they don't require a new standard.
Other ways they could solve is just disincentivise slow loading pages. They have said speed is a factor and tried to introduce some features such as showing how fast a page is on chrome as an experiment.
>It can be opt in like amp but the difference is here simply that they don't require a new standard.
But that's exactly what amp is. An opt-in set of standards for creating fast-loading, cach-able pages. There is also no reason why websites couldn't replicate this outside of amp ... but they don't.
>Other ways they could solve is just disincentivise slow loading pages.
They do that ... in all kinds of ways. The problem is that with their position, they can destroy a lot of businesses if they apply these kinds of rules haphazardly. There's no simple solution here.
> But that's exactly what amp is. An opt-in set of standards for creating fast-loading, cach-able pages
Not exactly. For one, you could introduce opt in for Google to cache your page through a meta tag. No need for entirely new markup and tools. I have no problem with amp as a concept but the implementation leaves me sour. Amp specification has been growing in complexity that I don't notice speed differences on many sites anymore.
They also inject their own js which I don't find amusing.
Many sites are abusing amp to rank on Google. Reddit, pinterest, etc. It's a terrible experience as a user. They also didn't fix url and domain problem until recently. It's a usability problem.
I can't search for the specific tab by the domain name of the site on my browser. They default opt-in to downloading content in the background for amp feed on chrome android. There are many little annoyances like this one that make me dislike amp.
Plus, amp isn't heuristic based. If my network speed is fast enough, I don't need the stripped out page.
Cool. I can respect that. Google should give users the option of disabling AMP though. The fact that they've gone out of their way to make it increasingly difficult to access non-AMP versions of webpages makes me think their primary motivation behind AMP is to get people behind the Google walled garden, and not out of benevolent concern for performance.
Half the argument is "Google is taking too much control over the web by forcing people to use AMP" and the other half is "Google is to blame for companies using non-Google related services when they don't use AMP because they created the platform for it (??)".
I can understand the first half of the argument. The second half seems to blame Google for creating the web or something?
JavaScript based ad/analytics tech is bloating the web. Everyone knows this, and there's no denying it. Google is one of the main advertising/analytics platforms on the web. Google is aware that JS is poisoning the web, but they don't want to kill the golden goose and they do want to entrench their ad monopoly. How to square the circle?
They should but won't just tell advertisers that creatives need to be static image/video assets, thereby saving bandwidth, protecting privacy, and not really doing anything to ad buyers (because ad buyers are driven by their fixed budgets and not by absolute platform capabilities, just relative capabilities). Since that's too risky to Google's core business, instead they create a new format (AMP) with deliberately limited JS capabilities and, oh yeah, built in support for Google ads.
For everyone who is not Google, this solution sucks. It means duplicate work to create a new format, the new format is different than the web but not a meaningful source of new traffic because it's just a splinter of existing traffic, and it further exposes your business to Google as the core gatekeeper of revenue (FaceBook is the other revenue gatekeeper). That is, you need Google search and Google ad money to survive and if they change the search algo or ad rates (ie now ads need to be videos or now ads need viewability or whatever), you can be crushed without notice.
While Google may have less than charitable motives for pushing Signed HTTP Exchanges, the standard could end up being a way to secure web apps against compromised hosting. If you could pin a specific version of a web app, and make sure that it appears in a public transparency log, that would give web apps roughly the same threat model as desktop apps.
Of course a Google engineer would say this, because only a Google engineer has the perspective to truly appreciate Google’s position as the world’s benevolent steward of technology leadership - not just to maintain web standards but drive them forward in ways that Google knows will benefit everyone.
Sure it would be great if Google wasn’t a de-facto monopoly or that they have massive conflicts of interests as the Internet’s biggest advertising network. But what people need to understand is that Google knows what’s best for all of us when it comes to what the Internet is and should be. So when Google rams half-baked APIs into their browser well before they even have gone through third party certification, often releasing features with glaring security holes, they’re doing it because it’s best for all of us, not just Google.
All the nay-sayers need to just relax and know their place.
> So when Google rams half-baked APIs into their browser well before they even have gone through third party certification, often releasing features with glaring security holes,
I seem to be behind the times. Could you please elaborate on these and include instances of these?
Safari is the new IE. Apple's ecosystem is holding back the web severely by shipping a crippled web browser. Safari severely lags behind other browsers, and due to how iOS and the like require other browsers (like Chrome) to use it's archaic rendering engine, it hurts competition as much as the 30% store tax. No PWAs, no notifications, no native experience.
I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.
Also you can't test on it without paying them thousands of dollars for hardware.
I remember maintaining a bunch of sites and university, and while IE11 was missing a couple of APIs (like Promise) at least I could download a VM straight from Microsoft and figure out what was going wrong. I still have no way to test on Safari which is becoming more and more annoying as they "fall" behind.
I learned that on Linux, GNOME Web (Epiphany) is basically Safari. It will exhibit most of the quirks and rendering issues, and it has a decent dev console. It definitely helps avoid paying the Apple tax.
The Igalia team maintains WebKit for GTK+ (among many other platforms). They are certainly smaller and more resource-starved than Apple, but they do a fairly decent job of keeping it running.
>I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.
Ostensibly, this is a fine position to have. But would this not more than likely not just result in Chrome having near total dominance of both the mobile and desktop rendering engine market. From a completely practical point of view, it seems that Safari on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome's engine from having total market dominance.
I don't want to say that Webkit's dominance of iOS is a good thing, but it appears to be the lesser of two evils. I'd rather have Webkit dominate iOS, than Google and Chrome dominate everything. Google being the only major player in web standards is good for nobody but Google.
Web notifications are great for developers, but I'm not convinced they've been all that positive for end users. I've noticed that more novice users tend to inadvertently opt-in to a lot of very spammy web notifications, particularly from online retailers and adult websites. And because they're novice users, they generally do not know how to filter or disable these notifications. I'd suggest that web notifications need a better mechanism to filter out notifications from bad actors, before said notifications reach end users. Otherwise the standard is doomed to be littered with spam like SMS or email.
Safari is more limited but some of us like the tradeoff for more privacy.
I like to see Google experimenting with new tech in Chrome but I don’t want everyone to be forced to use Chrome because a few high profile web properties only work with Chrome.
Also, I don’t see anything wrong at all with individual web developers to make some of their sites only work with Chrome if that is what they really want. The global market is huge and targeting subsets and niches is not so bad for small businesses.
Firefox could be a fewer compromises option if the end goal is more security (I am tempted to say no-compromises but that is my own bias, because for my use case Firefox is a perfect chromium replacement, but it might not be for you). Rather, Safari seems to be nice from an integration standpoint if all your ecosystem is apple based.
BTW Sony devs are contributors to webkit because it's the default browser of the PS3/4. I hope they will improve chromium instead for the PS5 instead of wasting resources on an obscolete decision, just like QT did
> IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next". Chrome has plenty of ideas of what's "next" for the web - and they're not just about Google. (cont)
This is literally the problem though. If you consider all the Chrome derivatives and WebKit as one single browser. Then Firefox is the main competitor and Chromes market share is at the rate of IEs.
Just because you worked on IE and Chrome doesnt mean you are not biased. The issue we all have is that exactly that Google assumes control of what the web will look like and other browsers are left scrambling to implement things that were not standardized beforehand.
If you want to argue Chrome is not the new IE then Chrome needs to stop pushing out features not yet fully approved by their respective standards committees.
Chrome is the new IE in several ways including websites only working on Chrome as they once only worked on IE.
Lastly... A good number of things Google has added to the web could be argued that it is indeed about Googles own interests. WebRTC was useful for Google Hangouts for example. AMP only exists to give Google total control. Their adblocking changes only exist for the same reasons. Removing URLs from the URL bar also are not part of an open web standard. This is beyond anything I remember IE doing. Chrome is literally worse than IE for the open web.
I think that Chrome is different for the web than IE was, but I'm still wary of Google having such a heavy influence over the web as a platform.
Google have consistently shown they're great at data, struggle to build platforms, and approach product development by throwing stuff at a wall. They have a heavy cultural bias towards developing and shipping new initiatives over supporting existing products.
None of these attributes are good things for supporting an open platform. Google does a good job at firewalling their data gathering tendencies from Chrome and web standards, but over the last ten years they've consistently pushed new standards and experiments that no one has asked for: Dart, GWT, Angular, Web Components, AMP, Service Workers, notifications, payments, DRM support, web bundles, etc. The actual innovations that have helped the platform grow have largely happened elsewhere.
Some of the stuff they do will be great, but there is going to be a long term cost to the platform from this relentless push to use the web as Google's personal playground for innovation.
I frequently find conversations with Googlers with regards to privacy and trust always end this way. The assumption is if you were just a Googler, if you knew what working at Google was like, you'd also believe it is a good thing.
But since you don't have that inside Google knowledge, just trust them.
It's not the new IE in so far as the problems with it are not the same as the problems IE had.
IE was a stagnant platform with proprietary technology that still haunts my workplace: Cognos < v.11 only has complete functionality with IE. For a couple of years we could only use our primary ERP system with a specific version of JVM in a specific version of IE. IE failed (at least in part) because it failed the consumer experience.
Chrome generally gives users a good experience: Page load times, better in its own very popular apps (though apparently sand-bagged against competitors) built in high-quality search, etc. The reasons it fails are, in my opinion, primarily on the privacy front.
this half-article just seems like pointless arguing over definitions. people aren't saying chrome is the new IE because the two situations are exactly alike in every way. but google, as a private entity, now effectively has a monopoly on deciding what the web should function like.
For example they rejected the future changes that were potentially limiting uBlock Origin.
But most of the time, chromium Google devs are just talented engineers and Microsoft has not to conflict much with their excellence
> IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next"
I was under the impression that HTAs were what they viewed as "next", letting developers host and dynamically generate applications that would run over the network on Windows (or otherwise IE-equipped, hence IE for Solaris, et al) clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
It even has that whole super-granular "Zones" security system to e.g. trust an intranet-hosted HTA more than a publicly-hosted one. Am I off-base here on my historic Microsoft speculation? :)
I don't know what other people think, but IE to me is synonymous with a browser that was good, but then stopped improving in any meaningful way for years. The first version of Chrome showed that there was still immense worthwhile improvements that could be made in browsers. If anything, the rate of improvements to Chrome is accelerating, even after they established marketshare dominance.
When Chrome came out I had been using Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox for about 10 years. Then Chrome seemed to blow it out of the water in terms of speed improvements. I switched virtually over night.
Wasn’t Chrome also the start of browsers keeping each tab in its own process? I remember the Chrome “comic” mentioning this.
I remember when IE got tabs, a crash would bring down the whole instance. After all, there’s no point segregating the tab from the chrome (no pun intended) when it was single “tab” only.
Possibly, but I'm not sure they did that at the begining. I remember sometimes a tab would crash with a little unhappy face with a squiggle mouth (or something like that) and all the tabs would go down like that. But then again the whole app didn't come crash and I could refresh the other tabs to get them back without losing everything I had open.
So true. The introduction of Chrome was nearly as big as the jump from MapQuest to Google Maps. The potential for a vastly better experience had been there for a long time, but no one was taking advantage of it.
The excess and non-obvious battery drain that can come from plugins is probably a large part of their reasoning. Fortunately, because of the openness of Chromium, you can install browsers like Kiwi browser that support extensions. Even Firefox only barely supports extensions right now on mobile.
Firefox has support for a lot of extensions but they removed most of the support now which is a shame. It allowed me to play YouTube on the background, a feature that make people actually pay YouTube premium music.
I wonder if there's a similar extension for kiwi? Basically it just nerds to disable the page visibility and full-screen API + some tweaks
just install "New pipe" from f-droid, it really rocks. Allows you to play videos in background, download video or audio - practically everything. The only issue is that it sometimes breaks when youtube changes its protocol
That's after Fenix release... before that' there was plenty of supported plugins. It's only a matter of time when other plugins will support new UI. As for Chromium, I'm more than sure the battery issue is just a nice excuse to toss ad blockers out of the window.
Kiwi browser has backported them and brave browser is currently merging the kiwi browser changes. Only a matter of time before this get on the radar of Edge too
> ... Are they all good ideas? No, probably not, and that's why we have processes (that get revised - hi, that's part of my job now) to make sure we're including lots of external input too. The Web stagnating as a platform for just docs would be bad too. (cont)
Oh, you guys have internal processes!
You're close to able to unilaterally set the direction the web should be taking, but that's ok, because you have processes!
I'm guessing them mean in terms of anything likely to actually unseat IE. Netscape->Mozilla->Firefox had been around years and were still only minor players ~20% market share. Chrome on the other hand saw nearly instant hockey-stick growth. I remember I switched almost instantly after a quick try and everything was so much faster.
But with all of these, you constantly ran into IE-only websites. Which got away with it because most people were running IE.
And that's why people are saying that Chrome is the new IE - because we're seeing that history repeating, with websites written only for and tested only on Chrome and Safari (and I doubt Safari would be anywhere if it weren't effectively forced onto iOS users).
I believe he is in good faith. My concern is that his opinions and what corporate policy is going to push for in a monopoly situation are two different things. You only have so much power as a technical person. Policies that are good for the community align with a company bottom line only when there is competition. Otherwise things degenerate, it might take time but I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. Especially when the barrier to entry is so high.
I will say unlike IE, Chrome (more specifically Chromium) has allowed for a new generation of browsers to compete. Rendering / JavaScript engine is now a commodity.
If you want try out something that feels new and different you can try out what I'm working on! It's designed to make you more productive and feel more like an OS than a browser...
Chrome is the opposite of IE. IE was dragging the rest of the web behind with its glacial update pace and lack of automatic updates. Chrome moves at light speed meaning no one else can actually keep up with all the new features getting added. Chrome has resulted in browsers being more complex than an OS.
Agreed 100%, and IMHO it was a good thing that IE "was dragging the rest of the web behind", because it at least gave some stability to the platform and gave the small competitor browsers a chance, while keeping sites relatively simple. In contrast, Google's "pushing the web forward" propaganda and the explosion of complexity and churn that has basically become a cancerous growth is much worse.
Most of the time it doesn't actually matter that your browser is missing support for webusb or webwhatever but every now and then you hit a site that uses it and it creates a user experience of "Just use chrome and it always works" A good demo is Mozilla spent about 7 years and 43,000 commits on Servo which is JUST a rendering engine and not any of the JS apis and it still doesn't actually work well enough to render most sites.
Not scared of an open-source engine ruining the Internet. Not gonna happen and I'm fine with Google doing whatever they're doing. My experience with the Webkit gang is that they're obsessed with the consumer and privacy and all that stuff. So much that they won't entertain any adjustments to permit adtech. That's enough for me to be convinced that browser engine development is sufficiently separate from Google's main business.
The real problem is when things like EME make it into the standard and you need to use Widevine and friends to see things.
Also, I hate having to stand with people who rail against everything because then no one takes you seriously when there is a thing that needs railing against.
Given that and given that my life is short, I'm not going to lose any sleep over this.
The OP was talking about WebKit in the context of "an open-source engine ruining the Internet", and how "browser engine development is sufficiently separate from Google's main business".
Chrome is without a question the new IE. Worse then IE now that Chrome tracks your Google login directly in the browser and takes away functionality if you don't login. IE forced all other browsers to follow its standards and guess what... Chrome does the same thing.
Except IE was ripe for disruption due to a fairly poor customer experience. Various web apps of the time wouldn't work in different versions. It was slow, and frequently locked up completely needing a force-quit or, worse, hard reboot. Chrome isn't in that same sort of position.
Many comments are saying it's not a technical issue, I think it is. Chrome is mostly developed as an open-source project (chromium), meaning features and bugs are transparently discussed and fixed. Compare that to IE which was closed source, meaning nothing was fixed...
Ever get your ideas on the roadmap? Ever add new features or change how chromium or how google chrome works. I didn't think so.
Open source doesn't mean you have any infuence or say in the future of the project. It only means you can take a copy make changes and roll your own version.
> "Open source doesn't mean you have any influence or say in the future of the project. It only means you can take a copy make changes and roll your own version."
Exactly, just because you have a change you want, doesn't mean you can force in on everyone. The maintainers of the project decide weather they want it or not.
Unfortunately the best open-source projects have some-kind of [1] top-down control. For example; Linux is developed the same way. You can fork and submit changes, but there's no guarantee that Linus Torvald's will accept those changes....
What would be a better alternative? Developing in behind closed doors? Some kind of democratic system of implementing features... these projects usually suck as there's nobody in charge and it tries to please too many people.
Anyway, it's definitely better than the IE situation, which was much less transparent and resistant to changes... with absolutely ZERO input from the community...
Seems reasonable enough to me. If URLs were no longer a thing, for what reason would I Google anything? How would google create results if they couldn't crawl publicly accessible websites? The value of the search engine and a public internet seem hand-in-hand.
Well if Google is already hosting all the content in their walled garden (see AMP), this would still be able to crawl the content, and even be able to be the exclusive platform that could crawl that content (in theory)
Somewhat: there was definitely a walled-garden with an entire AOL ecosystem, but that wall also had a door you could walk through out into the wild west web of the times.
Back in the day IE always had an 'advantage' purely by the name: 'Internet Explorer'.
When people 'got a computer' to 'get on the internet', seeing that icon on the desktop got them where the thought they needed to be.
Very, very few people, even years after after Chrome and Firefox came out, even knew they had a choice over the (browser) matter of getting 'on the web'. (There are some classic videos out there of voxpops of people being asked about 'the web' and 'the internet' etc.)
(To begin with, for me, it was Spry Mosaic then Netscape from about '93.)
I think it's more about the experience of the little people trying to target and use these browsers, not the experience of the super privileged Microsoft/Google people developing the browsers, for a start.
Microsoft wanted IE to be a wedge to drive Windows into enterprises. An open, standards-based web threatened that quite deeply (particularly one where the experiences that could be created could rival desktop apps).
Microsoft adopted a two-pronged approach. One was the inclusion of IE into the operating system to ensure the ground was seeded, and IE would be ubiquitous (keep in mind this was prior to Apple products being a realistic alternative in enterprise settings, so it was PC/Windows everywhere).
The second part was investing significant engineering efforts into ensuring that Windows- and Office-specific capabilities could emerge through IE (and only IE).
For example, if you wanted vector graphics you could use Office to produce VML and that could be viewed through IE (only). Pointedly, IE did not support SVG, which was the other major vector graphics standard at the time.
This neatly (and painfully) fragmented the market for anyone who wanted to produce vector graphics as part of a solution. You had to find a way to support VML and SVG if you wanted that to happen (and many early graphical toolkits for the web did precisely that).
All development for IE was conducted as closed source. Microsoft had no particular interest in making the browser compatible with the web standards, because as synergy between Windows and IE created a development target with benefits for Microsoft. Nobody else could create an equivalent to IE that would replicate the Microsoft-specific capabilities. The lack of standards-support created stickiness that kept IE around for a long time, because enterprises couldn't (or didn't feel like paying for) the changes necessary to bring apps into standards compliance.
A wholesale shift towards Adobe Flash was made a big crack in IE's armor. Flash ran everywhere, and sophisticated solutions could be built with it. Real web standards also made a lot of progress, and IE's creaking old engine was easily outperformed and "out-standarded" by Chrome. The subsequent rise of Apple and fall of Flash cemented Chrome (and Safari) as solid performers that could be used to deliver enterprise solutions and worked on multiple platforms.
Is Chrome the new IE? Well, is Chrome being used to drive Google-specific functionality that can only be used with other Google technologies, and can't be implemented elsewhere? Does Chrome actively avoid standards? Is Chrome actively attempting to fragment the standards? Is Chrome developed as closed source?
The thing is, Microsoft's strategy stood a pretty good chance of working. I'm always amazed at how IE stuck around when there were better alternatives, and how long it took before market pressure forced Microsoft towards web standards. A lot of money was spent on Enterprise Windows, and a lot of solutions used Microsoft-specific parts of IE. Enterprise dollars cast a long shadow, over time.
Chromium is the exact opposite of internet explorer:
Internet Explorer slowed down progress by getting low human resources, chromium on the other hand has more human resources than any browser has ever had (especially since Microsoft joined them) and enrich the web through new features at an unprecedented pace.
Internet explorer was stagnation while chromium is making the web a better platform in real-time
The new IE obviously is webkit which miraculously can still run most websites,but for how long?
After the mozilla lay offs, it's probable that they will slowly but surely get massive webcompat issues too
Even in the case of IE, the issue wasn't a technical one. The issue was that MS held a monopoly on the web. They might not have abused it the same way Google is trying to today, but the specific means of abuse isn't the primary problem.
Let me use your words to illustrate my point better. You said, "... chromium is making the web a better platform in real-time", but it is not "the web" that chromium is improving, but Google's private version of it.
I also call it stagnation. Stability suggests that you are in a good place and don't need to move on. IE was anything but a good place, in particular for the people that had to build things for it. Not all modern trends in web dev are good, but there have been many, many quality of life improvements for developers and users alike since IE finally stopped being so ubiquitously supported.
It was definitely a much better place back then for everyone who did not have to rely on IE, since the heavy abuse of JS was not common and sites were far simpler and more content-focused as a result.
I guess that your brain plasticity has reached stability too? Or you're talking about stuff you actually know, you took the time to read most of the future features on https://chromestatus.com/features like me and judged (unlike me) that ALL (universal quantifier) of them were a net negative to the user experience.
Or I can reinterpret your sentences to means that most of them are a net negative which is still a totally absurd statement that needs to be argued. Extraordinary claims require more than ordinary evidence. Here you provided none hence my snark about conservatism which is definitely something that I will get too when I will mutate and age.
A great mental exercise would be for you to look at the list and select at least one feature that should be reasonably a net negative to the user experience.
