zlacker

> The chromium-only web is not google’s fault. It is a symptom of a body of web standards that has grown wild to the point of being all but unimplementable.

what exactly is the benefit of having a byzantine set of standards in the first place? Like why not just have a standard and not dick around with it?

>>i5Aj7P+(OP)
Frustration with the shortcomings of older web standards resulted in the prevalence of browser plugins like Adobe Flash, and non-standard technology like ActiveX.

If there are things browsers can't do natively, then someone will build their own way to do it and then you end up with non-standard implementations.

It's better to get everyone on the same page and develop an open standard.

>>daveoc+b9
Was that all though? I think part of this was just businesses attempting to lock the web into their tech. Microsoft has never wanted the web to be open, first trying to reinvent it with their own MSN. Then trying to lock it in with IE and ActiveX.

Adobe / Macromedia started from the designer perspective but Flash soon became a goal of its own because Adobe wouldn't give up that marketshare.

Only now all parties realise it's too big for one company to own. Well except Google perhaps.

>>GekkeP+N12
Flash was able to support file uploads, video streaming, and clipboard access long before the HTML and JavaScript specs allowed for this.

Users and website creators wanted these features and Flash was the way to do them.

Sure, other technologies like Microsoft's Silverlight allowed similar things, but Flash was so widely used it could be relied on to offer these features.

Even now things like clipboard access aren't supported in the same way across all of the major browsers.

>>daveoc+5a2
File uploads were in HTML almost from the start :) And video was not no, but it was a tricky thing to figure out, not just from an implementation but also licensing point of view. RealMedia was another player that dabbled in this market.

I think the disconnect was more with designers. They wanted visual tools back in those days and had no time for CSS and JavaScript. Adobe/Macromedia gave them what they wanted and also entrenched their commercial position this way (which Adobe already had in the paper publishing market!). It took a long time for the graphical guys to come on board with the open toolchains.

Macromedia wasn't a bad company as such as they did make the excellent Dreamweaver which did promote open standards, but Adobe corrupted them badly.

>>GekkeP+Jx3
The big thing Flash added to file uploads was resumability. Uploading a large video file with pure HTML features on the internet of 2006 tended to fail, and adding a Flash helper worked around that.

And I recall it enabled a progress bar, too.