Comment by phantomathkg
5 days ago
Chrome basically is abusing its market position, 69.65% globally, and becomes the new IE. Implementing its own HTML/JS standard.
The sad truth is, some companies will look at Statcounter[0] and say because Firefox does not reach 5% global population and decided not supporting it, actively or passively.
This is literally how the standards are meant to work, at least on the JS side. The tc39 process requires at least two live implementations to exist before a spec can move to finished.
In this case, there's also people from Mozilla onboard, so there's no guarantee that it'll remain chrome only or that chrome will keep it if the spec doesn't go anywhere.
In fact, much of the web as we know it evolved this way. We have IE to thank for AJAX, after all.
Standards are democratic controls for democratic institutions, not "organizations" that are entirely captured by corporate interests. Absolutely despise how private entities have ruined software engineering by pursuing things that favor themselves rather than people in general.
That is not how standards work. Some for sure, but the majority are established by groups of companies / a guild establishing rules. The law pressures them often into it (e.g. the EU did not say USB-C port, they said: one standard, you industry figure it out).
There are surely exceptions (maybe the IEEE; which are professionals union).
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Another reason why this is problematic is that their proposed standards follow Google's priorities for its own products, particularly Google Meet.[0][1]
[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/element-captu...
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/document-pict...
Another example is QUIC. What is the benefit of QUIC? On one hand Google boasts it greatly increases page load speed, which is contextually arguable. On the other hand, Google’s design priorities were to introduce UDP to the browser because UDP supports multicast, which lowers CPU utilization in data centers.
They claimed and showed QUIC slightly-to-moderately reduced latency, particularly for mobile. This benefits Google by loading pages with third-party content, i.e. ads, faster.
But QUIC significantly increases CPU utilization on servers, at least the widely used userland stacks do. Unless/until Google deploys QUIC in the kernel (or puts the whole network stack in userland, a la DPDK), this won't change.
The multicast claim is kinda bizarre. I can see how QUIC could help eliminate UDP client barriers, but those barriers pale in comparison to multicast. Multicast routing just doesn't exist on the Internet; it's only supported within some independent, typically small networks. Most ISPs don't support it. Wherever you could manage to distribute content with multicast, you'd necessarily also be resolving the collateral routing problems which QUIC support resolves, whereas even ubiquitous QUIC doesn't materially improve the multicast situation.
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IIRC, QUIC was also the precursor to HTTP/3. I don't like Google's motivations for wanting a faster web, but many of the things they've encouraged and/or provided have made things faster and more efficient. I'm not a google apologist, there's so much wrong and so much harm done... just saying it's maybe worth separating the tech from the motives.
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Interesting to see that on Desktop, Firefox (5.8%) just overtook Safari (5.0%) for third place. It doesn’t feel statistically significant but it’s a bit of data at least.
(I’m a big Firefox fan and idealist.)
This has been happening for a while now, basically anywhere there’s room for a potential compatibility issue there will be one. As if any time some observable behavior is an implementation choice the Chrome team policy is “not what Firefox does”. The result is that if you develop on Chrome and don’t test on Firefox your stuff is very likely broken on Firefox.
IE was bad because Microsoft let it stagnate, not because they were creating new things.
Stop getting history twisted.
It was both.
If you wanted to do dynamic stuff in IE, you had to use ActiveX. Which was IE-only. So many sites only used ActiveX, because IE was the 900lb gorilla, so why support anything else?
Chrome basically is abusing its market position, 69.65% globally, and becomes the new IE. Implementing its own HTML/JS standard.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
We went to this rodeo a generation ago. Nothing was learned.
TIL that Firefox has less than 5% market share. When and why did people stop using Firefox?
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Submitted from Firefox
The use started to decline when Google started the extreme marketing campaign of Chrome around 2010 or so. All Google services had huge banners and included all sorts of dark patterns to get people to install it.
TBF, Chrome probably also had some better features and performance over FF, but I don't think most people think much about their browser quality.
> When and why did people stop using Firefox?
Approximately at the time when majority of the Mozilla resources started going into non-browser projects. And pretty much for the same reason.
So when would that be exactly? Firefox was first released in 2004 and Mozilla Corporation was founded in 2005.
According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2014-... the high point for adoption was 2010 and it has been falling since then. (However, they only have data from 2010 onwards, so the high point could have been even earlier.) This coincidentally [sic] aligns to the launch of Chrome with a massive marketing push in 2008, promising speed, ease of use and security.
I find it hard to believe that there are enough people who closely follow the drama around the internal financial management and politics of Mozilla Corporation that they can be measured in the tens of percentage points of total internet market share.