- cross-posted to:
- webdev@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- webdev@programming.dev
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So TL:DR, chrome is like internet explorer was before firefox. It does some things outside the standard, and because it’s the modern day “default”. sites sloppily code to work with it, and other browsers are left carrying the bag because if tiktok doesn’t work on firefox, people will view that as a firefox problem. Even if firefox is the one actually following the standards when tiktok and chrome aren’t.
Reminds me of how much effort GPU driver devs put in to fixing completely borked games that don’t follow spec / violate apis / rely on undocumented or undefined behaviour / etc
It’s a really dumb situation…
Same issue with AMD’s drivers sometimes. Not to say that their drivers are perfect but as a graphics engineer, I’ve had stuff my colleagues wrote and tested on Nvidia work fine but break on AMD because AMD was implementing the OpenGL spec exactly but Nvidia decided to be “lenient” and add hacks that make incomplete code work.
Could also be that nvidia adds fixes in the drivers for specific games, and then other games ended up with the same bugs later, or they add fixes during the development process when they provide “free QA”…
Nah I meant when we’re writing rendering code on our own. Those fixes in the drivers are custom made for those games only and aren’t applied in any other application, especially anything you write yourself.
Shit like this will continue to happen until governments start enforcing interoperable open standards and resume enforcing antitrust laws, which were, in practice, suspended for a long time, for whatever reason.
Shit like this will continue to happen until governments start enforcing interoperable open standards and resume enforcing antitrust laws, which were, in practice, suspended for a long time, for whatever reason.
Which will never happen if we keep ending up with republicans every 4 years. Sad state of affairs, but technology will remain corporate as long as people are awful putting their money where their mouth is (or time, in the case of social web)
This is the reality. As long as the herd keeps using whatever big tech throws at them without question, this will only escalate to infinity.
deeeep tech analysis from lemmings as usual
actually no. IE dominated because MS owned the desktop and still do. IE was fucking awful and did not care about standards
chrome dominated because it was fucking great. chrome now defines standards because the other browsers lag behind and standards themselves lag behind
if anything safari is the new IE in apples fucking awful walled garden
Chrome? This maybe reflects state from about 5-7 years ago. But nowadays it’s waaaay behind firefox.
No ad blocker.
No mobile extensions
No compact bookmarks.
Tracking built in.
Chrome pushes ai llm without consent.
On every update have to disable more things in settings pushed without consent.You are a browser, I don’t need you to store all my addresses and passwords and credit cards or loyalty cards whatever the fuck that is.
It’s basically ms edge now
I can give you they had different ways to get to that position. As much as I hate IE, I do have to admit it was ahead of netscape for quite a significant time. But yes google used less monopolistic practices to get in there, beyond like spamming you whenever you went to google. I will admit even now edge does worse in the monopolistic practices "I see you went all out of your way to download another browser, are you sure you really want to switch to it, have you at least given edge a fair shot? Please try it out for a bit longer. (and of cousre it’s worth noting now edge is basically a skin of chrome),
But how they got there wasn’t what I was talking about anyway, The point is web pages now cater to chrome, as that’s what makes up over 60% of the total usage, with about 20% being safari (of which you can pretty much assume almost all of that is mobile), and almost everything at the top is running chromes engine.
So in short, if you are designing a page.
Does it work on blink engine, that covers 76% of users, then does the mobile site work on safari, that covers another 20%,
Point is a monopoly is a monopoly, even IF the reason they are there is purely good. The point of the article is just noting that to not use chrome’s engine, browsers have to take the time to make things work, because the websites themselves have little incentive to do so. for such a small percent of their userbase.
Google is also abusing its monopoly to push Chrome. They are sabotaging other browsers on their sites while showing Chrome ads.
I think similar how the EU adopted the USB-C as mandatory standard for charging, it should force other industries, including software vendors, to follow commonly defined standards.
In case of browsers that is Chrome using it’s de facto monopoly to force other browser to rush to catch up with their custom crap. Yes, as a side effect that would also break a lot of existing webpages because they rely heavily on browser bending over backwards to accommodate sites serving effectively broken HTML i.e. but in the long term this would improve the internet as a whole.
The industry needs to shift to identifying html, css, and JavaScript versions in browser headers instead of which rendering engine. Saying “I support these versions of these standards” instead of “I’m chromium”.
It’s been a problem since day one. Maybe have some sort of independent certification for each browser to pass before being able to declare that it supports a particular version.
You’d have to indicate “I also support these optional bits” for this to really work, which would lead to truly massive headers.
I prefer the idea of slapping people who put up pages that cater to Chrome rather than reading and following the standards upside the head with a large dead fish. People who write faulty WYSIWYG web design software get smacked once for every bad site deployed with their help.
There shouldn’t be any “optional bits”. Thats part of the problem. Either it’s part of a standard or it’s not. Either you meet the standard for that version number, or you don’t.
We don’t even have standards that strong in programming languages or even fucking machine code (ISAs) anymore.
I think I would like to return to that ideal time (if it ever existed), but… I feel like I’m in a vanishingly small minority.
I think it comes down to incentive structure, and the most clear incentives push away from strong stnadards. The big advantage to (a) strong standard(s) is(are) interoperability, but that’s something end users have to demand because it’s an anathema to rent-seeking-behavior (a central facet of surveillance capitalism, choke-point capitalism, enshittification, and technofuedalism). But, even there, natural incentives fail us, since most users get more utility from “innovative” features instead of low switching costs – or at least the think they do until they actually try to exit a platform/service.
The problem is that the standard is fucking huge and maybe your browser supports every feature of version 5xx but is missing a feature related to authentication using guinea pigs introduced in v369. So it would only be allowed to advertise compatibility with v368 even though it can do everything except Guinea pigs.
Realistically you would trim the standard to a core set and advertise compatibility with a version of that and then advertise optional extensions. And that’s optional bits if you ask me.
A standard is that, a standard. The amount of moving parts (features?) is irrelevant.
Either it’s up to the standard or it isn’t.
Then no browser will be “up to” the last 15 years of the standard as none implement all features.
