I wonder how long before we start hearing stories like "How chrome obliterated my 4 year old website"
On a serious note though, why do we keep getting trapped in this cycle so many times? Company walled garden(WG) comes up with a WG, developers build for that WG. WG forgets about the people who made the WG a fun place for everyone to be in. WG screws over the old developers who's hard work it build itself on. And the developers complain about the walled garden being a walled garden. Like what the hell, is there really a solution to this?
Money. A new walled garden is a new opportunity for developers to make money, with little competition (at first). Then when it gets big and there’s tons of competition, the company can stop caring about the developers and still make a pile of money.
It’s going to keep happening because walled gardens appeal to human nature. Everyone (users, developers) wants the immediate benefits, but only the company reaps long-term. The only solution is to fix human nature.
Laws and Regulations are themselves a Walled Garden with all the same problems with the added problem of a monopoly on the initiation of violence to enforce the rules
but then we are in another loop where people who don't understand technology will bring in laws that both fix an issue but creates a whole set of new issues, that might even hinder progress. So I am not a fan of politicians getting involved with things they don't have a good idea about.
Personally I choose to believe in the whole decentralized internet idea that's starting to taking off. 10 years ago bitcoin, smart contracts, decentralized payment systems, decentralized video platforms etc were not that popular or didn't exist and now there's so much progress made in that direction. So I believe there's some good that will come out of the blockchain space. Problem is, only time will tell ha.
Yeah the internet being so predominantly web pages with html on them that you have little power to customize ad a user may seem antiquated one day. The internet should simply beam you data on demand, and you can visualize it any way you like client side
So, apis with multiple non-browser native clients?
Basically the current app model, but decoupling the owners of the client ant the api?
I think it could work, but you'd probably have to mix ads directly into the return values for it to be at all profitable.
Then again, if clients are one time download, and the owner of the api doesn't have to deliver 5-10 meg of JS every single time, you might be able to get away with less ads.
currently the web doesn't let you mix data from sites very easily. Like maybe I want to cross reference my google calendar with my bank spendings on a particular day or something. We also get stuck with crappy UIs all the time (often from banks in particular). Dunno about how ads would work if sites just provided data, but I can imagine an intermediate step where we have a tool that can real time scrape a site for only what we are interested in and discard the rest. Then present it to the user using custom real time presentation
Seriously, fuck that shit. Google is the gatekeeper to the Internet for many people, they should not be allowed to essentially throw away two and a half decades of Internet history to all but vanish.
It's not quite that scary. They're removing content that the site operator explicitly made unavailable to mobile phones. Old pre-mobile sites will be fine. I would direct the "fuck that shit" to those websites that actively decide to give mobile users less information, lower resolution images (even when you zoom in @&@#!), text that goes off the screen while scrolling is disabled, so you can never see it, etc.
Who can guarantee this? What are the criteria that Google uses to determine "the site operator made the site explicitly unavailable to mobile phones"?
> those websites that actively decide to give mobile users lower resolution images
Mobile internet is a joke even in developed countries such as Germany, and data caps on mobile are absurdly low. It's annoying that zoom does not work, yes, but I hate sites with a passion that think it's ok to waste 3 MB of my precious 2GB data volume for a single fucking pageview.
They crawl it with a phone bot so they won't collect things that aren't provided to phone users. Old fashioned HTML+CSS works on phones. It might not be a good size but at least it's all there. I guess it doesn't matter if the search results show a mobile-resolution image. You can still click through to the site to see the desktop resolution version.
We're already starting to see "website works best in Chrome" type messages around the internet so I assumed it's only a matter of time before people stop testing in other browsers entirely.
Recently my employer started limited internal resources (intranet) to chrome/edge/IE. As a Firefox user, it makes me so angry every time I click a link and get served a page that says I need to switch browsers.
I dunno, I for one hope developers build sites according to standards (instead of Chrome-only features), and Chrome has a big test suite to test said features.
I mean 20 year old websites still work just fine in Chrome. It's only those that do nonstandard things - like IE's tech, Flash, Java applets - that they no longer work. Famously, the old Space Jam website seems to work just fine: https://www.spacejam.com/
I think the parent post is alluding to scenarios where Google uses their market position to stop loading websites based on other factors. i.e. a website that does or doesn't implement a certain API. It's a very dystopian view, though.
When you see this cycle of developers flocking to a walled garden and then the same developers who helped uplift the platform get burned repeat enough times you start to lose a bit of hope in the way things are working. But I do have to agree with you, my original post does sound dystopian.
When building web games the browser differences can bite you even if you're following the standard. Firefox is currently rolling out WebRender which hopefully will solve the performance issues I'm facing (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=925025).
On a serious note though, why do we keep getting trapped in this cycle so many times? Company walled garden(WG) comes up with a WG, developers build for that WG. WG forgets about the people who made the WG a fun place for everyone to be in. WG screws over the old developers who's hard work it build itself on. And the developers complain about the walled garden being a walled garden. Like what the hell, is there really a solution to this?