It is unbelievable that over the course of 3 days, the potential future of the web has been put in such dire straits. There's already an existing, far less troubling (while still bad), proposal in the form of Private Access Tokens going through a standards committee that Google chose to ignore. They presented this proposal in the shadiest way possible through a personal GitHub account. They immediately shut down outside contribution and comments. And despite the blowback they are already shoving a full implementation into Chromium.
What we need is real action, and this is the role Mozilla has always presented itself as serving. A "true" disinterested defender of the ideals of the web. Now is the time to prove it. Simply opposing this proposal isn't enough. This is about as clear and basic an attack on what fundamentally differentiates the web from every walled garden as possible. If someone drafted a proposal to the W3C that stated that only existing browsers should be allowed to render web pages, the correct response would not be to "take the stance that you oppose that proposal," it would be to seriously question whether the submitting party should even participate in the group. Make no mistake, that is what is happening now.
They had enough weight at the time to say "The Web is XHTML2, you can make your own internet if you want " compared to what they can bargain for these days.
Maybe at the time it was a somewhat reasonable decision to abdicate their responsibility over to big internet companies, but that's what brought us to the current state where we're basically going back to original version of The Microsoft Network[1].
It's pretty generally accepted that the correct way to do web standardization is for proponents of some new thing to implement that thing and deploy it and then once it has been shown to actually work bring a spec to the the standards folks for standardization.
That usually works fairly well, although sometimes if that first pre-standard implementation does too well the original implementor may have trouble replacing theirs with something that follows whatever standard is eventually approved, because there are often significant changes made during the standardization process.
An example of that would be CSS grid layout. That was a Microsoft addition to IE 10, behind a vendor prefix of -ms-. Nearly everyone else liked it and it was standardized but with enough differences from Microsoft's original that you couldn't just remove the -ms- prefixes from your CSS and have it work great with the now standard CSS grid.
It was 4.5 years between the time Microsoft first deployed it in IE 10 and it appearing in other browsers by default (Chrome had it within a year of Microsoft, and Firefox had it about two years after that, but both as an experimental feature the user had the specifically enable). In that 4.5 years enough sites that only cared about IE were using the -ms- form that Microsoft ended up stuck with that on IE 10 and 11 instead of the standard.
The internet is made by big companies. Not standards bodies. The WHATWG has the actual living standards, and Google, Apple, Cloudflare and Amazon make the actual software. Nobody cares about the W3C. And Mozilla is long past dead.
Mozilla is far from healthy but calling it dead is overstating things.
NOW would be different because, again, this system is worse than Apple's, and because Chrome has a larger influence on the web than Safari (on Desktop, on mobile its a foregone conclusion since you're not allowed a different engine other than Safari anyways, so the real fight there is allowing third party engines).
Does this answer your concerns? I can't tell if you are defending Apple and Google, or are against both but are using this what-about-ist accusation as a way to vent general frustration.
[1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage And CF stats doesn't depend on JavaScript.
"Move fast and break things." How many here used to cheer this approach?
Yes. However said companies may want to avoid too much scrutiny from governments.
As long as they can pretend the web is an open standard, they are good. If Google were to leave the w3c, it would expose them to antitrust laws and so on.
Microsoft wasn't trying to control the web; they were trying to hobble it so that everyone kept on developing for win32. In retrospect, not a great strategy, but many companies try to kick the can down the road, and it often works, so I can't fault them too much.
Google can turn around tomorrow and say that no browser without WEI can access GMail, GMaps, GSheets, Photos etc; people will have to comply, effectively killing any browser that does not support the feature.
This is the problem with the Chromium monoculture. "We", as generic IT people and developers on HN, definitely have a responsibility for not deprecating this monoculture earlier. If you use Brave, you're guilty; if you use Ungoogled Chromium, you're guilty; if you use Safari, you're guilty. It's high time people start taking responsibility.
The phoenix can rise.
The frozen chicken can not.
Still breathing makes a huge difference.
If you don’t like what Google is doing, don’t pretend that Firefox does not exist. Do something instead. File bug reports, send patches, donate to those who are working on Firefox and countering Google.
Probably better for a different org with different leadership to start over. I wouldn't count on Mozilla to miraculously reinvent itself.
- Behind dev flags
- And then wait for consensus
- And then there have to be at least two independent implementations
And only then does this become a standard.
Chrome doesn't care. They create a semblance of the spec, create a semblance of a discussion, and then enable it APIs in Chrome. And then pretend it's a standard.
If there were a good browser run by a different nonprofit org, I would support that.
This sounds myopic, or what do you mean? W3C is not only about HTML and CSS innovation, but is responsible for and/or involved in a diverse set of relevant standards — many of which "big companies" don't show as much interest in contributing to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#St...
Apple's just more subtle than Google.
I have been using Netscape/Mozilla, in terms of heritage, ideology, and codebase, for almost a third of a century now.
I was there 30 years ago using NCSA Mosaic when it was first released for the VMS Vax system. The only break of any kind I had was with Opera as a secondary browser in the few short years between Netscape 4 and Phoenix (original Firefox). And I was still using Netscape 6, just not exclusively.
They can tear Mozilla (or any one of its forked variants) out of my cold, dead hands.
The DOM is largely abstracted over by JS frameworks and component libraries.
XML, XPath, XHTML, SOAP, etc gave way to haphazard JSON that's easier to use.
JSON-LD is a tiny niche and mostly unknown.
SVG is used only trivially as a PNG replacement or for vector graphics interchange, while Canvas is more common whenever performance matters.
Aria is mostly an afterthought, put in at the last minute with alt tags and roles on random elements.
Maybe MathML is still used on Wikipedia?
Can't comment on the other ones I've never heard of, but the web ones all seem either dead or niche.
I think this illustrates what I meant by irrelevance. It's not that they make bad standards or have bad ideas, it's just that companies have always preferred their own implementations of these ideas rather than some standard. Over the last two decades, the W3C has been at times a strong suggestion, at times a weak consideration, but never an actual standard. It was always the big tech companies making the actual standards. We were lucky when a W3C spec actually reflected real world implementations.
And this isn't just my opinion... the WHATWG was created specifically to bypass the W3C on purpose.
... oh wait, they already did. They force a monoculture on all the platforms they can get away with, and even shipped this WEI crap already.
Explorer and Internet Explorer were deeply married, with the ability to set web pages as desktop background, the Explorer of Windows 98 having a "sidebar" that was an HTML page, the ubiquitous help format being compressed HTML pages with index and search, ActiveX giving webpages desktop-application-like powers, JScript being a powerful javascript-compatible automation language for Windows. Windows was full of web technologies in the dot-com era, many bringing web and desktop closer together. This stopped an reversed course in the early 2000s. You could now say that's classic embrace-extend-extinguish, but the collapse of the dot-com bubble explains explains the sudden lack of investment and increasing distance between desktop and web just as well.
That even Microsoft couldn't manage to keep up with progress only shows how utterly impossible it would be to kickstart a browser engine.
(The fact that Mozilla as an organization is embedded in constant infighting and utter incompetence doesn't help either)
At any rate, 100M downloads across the lifetime of the app isn’t much to write home about when considering the billions (plural) that use Google products. Furthermore, there’s an entire class of people that think Chrome IS the internet. It’s wildly more common than the average HN would think.
I am posting from maintained Mozilla Firefox.
That would be impossible if FF would be dead.
According to these folks[0], Firefox has a 3.29% market share globally. They also claim there are 4.66 billion browser users globally.
If those numbers are correct, Firefox has a bit more than 150,000,000 users worldwide.
If my software had 150,000,000 users, I'd consider that wildly successful.
Other folks have different ideas/takes on that, I suppose. But it's food for thought nonetheless.
[0] https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share#worldwide-browser...
Edit: Fixed prose.
Citation? To be sure, there was not universal outrage over Safari's attestation implementation, but out of curiosity I looked up the only thread I was aware of, in part because I couldn't remember what my reaction was at the time. That thread was a year ago and the overwhelming sentiment of the comments section is critical: >>31751203
Here were my comments at the time:
They're less forceful than they are now with Google, partially because I know more now about how attestation works than I did over a year ago, and partially because (as some people have also pointed out) Chrome's implementation is straightforwardly more dangerous than Apple's is.
But HN "actively defending" Safari? That's not the impression I get from the overall comment section and it's definitely not what I personally was doing. There are a lot of people in these comments calling Apple's implementation DRM. So I'm a little skeptical of the "nobody on HN cared about this with Safari" narrative that has sprung up; from what I can see media coverage was fairly positive, but people on HN were rightly critical. I'm not sure the facts match the narrative: Safari was criticized for this.
It's a fair critique that there wasn't a coordinated attempt to outright stop Apple, but I would once again remind everyone that attestation in Chrome is way more dangerous than attestation in iOS. The market matters, that's not context that can be ignored. So it's not really all that weird to me that people are more willing to react more strongly to abusive behavior in Chrome.
The point is not that Google cares about those sites - they don't. Those services are leverage that they use to control web standards, in order to enable their real cash-cow: AdSense. They will use their web properties to shove down our throats anything that makes AdSense more profitable, from the anti-adblock measures in Chrome to this one.
> If we're all dependent on them enough that that's a problem for us, then that dependency is the problem
I don't disagree - and I use Firefox, keep my important mail outside of Gmail, etc etc. But I recognize that many, many people don't, so the technologically literal out there have an ethical responsibility to push back against corruption of the open web.
We had a shot at open browser engine development with limited scope. Everyone said no, not just Chrome. Mozilla and Apple both have blood on their hands too, if we want to be reductive.
So no, you shouldn't ask for forgiveness and pretend that you're just gathering data.
That's why what Google is routinely doing now (releasing APIs after a very short period in origin trial and without ever reaching consensus) is so dangerous.
0: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
So I don't think this rubber-stamping W3C will do anything. They have no power over Google, and they know it.
And this particular feature? They want to pretend it's s standard. You don't create a spec proposal for a feature you don't just develop internslly
We would’ve gotten Electron any other way if it wasn’t Chromium, it’s the only endgame for UI given how native layers shat the bed.
Mozilla also no longer even supports embedding. ;P
> it is the only game for developers that couldn't care
Yeah, dude. Most devs literally do not care, they just want to write and ship stuff. The native stack(s) are not cohesive enough and the numbers do not lie; devs do not want to rewrite the UI n times.
Signed, someone who also does native and web UI dev. ;P
All of the following are true statements:
- Not all chrome flags are related to spec proposals
- Not all spec proposals are related to chrome flags
- Not all chrome-led proposals are finalized
- At least one browser must implement and test the proposal before the proposal can really be considered, and multiple other browsers must implement it before it can be accepted.
And yet, we've seen many such proposals go through this process because Chrome is paying lip service to it. Whatever Google wants it ships. And Google wants this.
As an adjacent (ads- and tracking-related) example: Google's FLoC flopped, hard. So they immediatey shipped the replacement Topics API [1] despite there being no consensus. E.g. Firefox is against [2] (but Chrome presents Firefox's position as "No signal" in the feature status). And despite the fact that its status is literally "individual proposal, not accepted" [3]
Do not assume any good intent on Google's part when it comes to Google's business interests. Their intent is always malicious until proven otherwise. And there have been fewer and fewer cases when they have been proven otherwise.
[1] https://chromestatus.com/feature/5680923054964736
[2] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622
If chrome implements WEI and it isn't standardized, you're not going to be knocked off the internet if you use firefox. That's extremely silly.
[1]: Keep in mind that things that aren't standardized include third party cookie behavior, so the behavior that FF and Safari have, that you support, isn't standardized either. If you're fully against browsers implementing nonstandard apis or features, you can't be in support of third party cookie sandboxing at all.