Comment by ocdtrekkie 2 days ago
As a monopoly, Google should be barred from having standards positions and be legally required to build and support the web standards as determined by other parties.
The insanity that the web platform is just "whatever Google's whims are" remains insane and mercurial. The web platform should not be as inconsistent as Google's own product strategies, wonder if XSLT will get unkilled in a few months.
I kind of liked xhtml, though clearly it was not necessary for the web to be successful. I think the bigger issue is that W3C pursued this to the detriment of more important investments.
Reading over the minutes for the last W3C WG session before WHATWG was announced, the end result seems obvious. The eventual WHATWG folks were pushing for investment in web-as-an-app-platform and everyone else was focused on in retrospect very unimportant stuff.
“Hey, we need to be able to build applications.”
“Ok, but first we need compound documents.”
There was one group who thought they needed to build the web as Microsoft Word and another that wanted to create the platform on which Microsoft Word could be built.
> and another that wanted to create the platform on which Microsoft Word could be built.
Apparently they failed. The web version of Word is still far from having feature parity. Of course doc is one of those everything and the kitchen sink formats, so implementing it on top of a platform that was originally intended to share static documents is kind of a tall order.
There are other key browser implementers. Google should not have more than an advisory role in any standards organization.
The other key browser implementers are also part of WHATWG.
Who do you suppose should be in charge of web standards? I can’t imagine the train wreck of incompetence if standards were driven by bureaucrats instead of stakeholders.
And those implementers should make decisions, Google should be bound by the FTC to supporting their recommendations.
Honestly, what's really funny here is how absolutely horrified people are by the suggestion a single company which has a monopoly shouldn't also define the web platform. I really think anyone who has any sort of confusion about what I commented here to take a long, hard look at their worldview.
Which other parties? Because Mozilla's stance on JPEG XL and XSLT are identical to Google's. They don't want to create a maintenance burden for features that offer little benefit over existing options.
They have many millions to spend on engineers. They should do that.
Just come up with some way to make it a huge win for Pocket integration or the like.
> maintain a feature that no one can actually use;
If only there was a way to detect which features a browser supports. Something maybe in the html, the css, javascript or the user agent. If only there was a way to do that, we would not be stuck in a world pretending that everything runs on IE6. /s
Usually it’s Mozilla not wanting to implement something Google wants to implement, not the other way around.
Indeed, you're making my point.
SquareWheel implied that Mozilla doesn't count as an "other party" because they are aligned with Google on this specific topic.
My comment was pointing out that just because they are aligned on this doesn't mean they are aligned on everything, so Mozilla is an "other party".
And, as you have reinforced, Google and Mozilla are not always in alignment.
Which is why Firefox is steadily losing market share.
If Mozilla wanted Firefox to succeed, they would stop playing "copy Chrome" and support all sorts of things that the community wants, like JpegXL, XSLT, RSS/Atom, Gemini (protocol, not AI), ActivityPub, etc.
Not to mention a built-in ad-blocker...
With all due respect, this is a completely HN-brained take.
No significant number of users chooses their browser based on support for image codecs. Especially not when no relevant website will ever use them until Safari and Chrome support them.
And websites which already do not bother supporting Firefox very much will bother even less if said browser by-default refuses to allow them to make revenue. They may in fact go even further and put more effort into trying to block said users unless they use a different browser.
Despite whatever HN thinks, Firefox lost marketshare on the basis of:
A) heavy marketing campaigns by Google including backdoor auto-installations via. crapware installers like free antivirus, Java and Adobe, and targeted popups on the largest websites on the planet (which are primarily google properties). The Chrome marketing budget alone nearly surpasses Mozilla's entire budget and that's not even accounting for the value of the aforementioned self-advertising.
B) being a slower, heavier browser at the time, largely because the extension model that HN loved so much and fought the removal of was an architectural anchor, and beyond that, XUL/XPCOM extensions were frequently the cause of the most egregious examples of bad performance, bloat and brokenness in the first place.
C) being "what their cellphone uses" and Google being otherwise synonymous with the internet, like IE was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their competitors (Apple, Microsoft, Google) all own their own OS platforms and can squeeze alternative browsers out by merely being good enough or integrated enough not to switch for the average person.
I don't disagree with you, but given (A) how will Firefox ever compete?
One possible way is doing things that Google and Chrome don't (can't).
Catering to niche audiences (and winning those niches) gives people a reason to use it. Maybe one of the niches takes off. Catering to advanced users not necessarily a bad way to compete.
Being a feature-for-feature copy of Chrome is not a winning strategy (IMHO).
I agree with you. But a typical consumer will already be using Chrome, and has no reason to use Firefox.
If one of these advanced/niche technologies takes off, suddenly they will have a reason to use Firefox.
For Firefox to win back significant share, they need to do more than embrace fringe scenarios that normal people don’t care about. They need some compelling reason to switch.
IE lost the lead to Firefox when IE basically just stopped development and stagnated. Firefox lost to Chrome when Firefox became too bloated and slow. Firefox simply will not win back that market until either Chrome screws up majorly or Firefox delivers some significant value that Google cannot immediately copy.
This is a vacuous statement. No one is stopping me from using JPEG XL in the same sense that no one is stopping me from using DIMG10K, a format I just invented. But if I attempt to use either of these in my website today, Chrome will not render them.
In a very real sense Google is currently stopping web authors from using JPEG XL.
It's a meta-commentary about the death of critical thinking and the ease with which mindless mobs can be whipped.
From the jump, the article commits a logical error, suggesting that Google killed jpegxl because it favors avif, which is "homegrown". jpegxl, of course, was also written by Google, so this sentence isn't even internally consistent.
Well, they said they would unkill xslt if someone would rewrite and maintain it so that it's not the abandonware horrorshow it was.
As for JPEG XL, of course they unkilled it. WEBP has been deprecated in favor of JPEG XL.
I don’t think they actually said that about xslt at all. From what I saw they basically said usage is low enough that they do not care about it.
Can you point to somewhere that Google or anyone else indicated that they would support xslt once there’s a secure, supported version?
> Well, they said they would unkill xslt if someone would rewrite and maintain it so that it's not the abandonware horrorshow it was.
Who said this? I was never able to find any support among the browser devs for "keep XSLT with some more secure non-libxslt implementation".
VP8 is in all major browsers due to WebRTC, and webp uses little more code than the VP8 keyframe decoder, so it also has baseline support and is unlikely to be deprecated any time soon. https://caniuse.com/?search=vp8
Similarly, AVIF uses little more code than the AV1 keyframe decoder, so since every browser supports AV1, every browser also supports AVIF.
I don't know much about webp other than you get about 50% savings in compression vs png/jpeg, but it does have some hard limits on sizes of images. It doesn't do well with webtoon reading formats (long strip format).
Otherwise, I love webp and use it for all my comics/manga.
Even nowadays, webp seems to be good specifically for its lossless mode. It seems to create files that are substantially more efficient even when compared with advanced png encoders. For comics, png should probably be used over jpeg, so webp is likely indeed an upgrade, aside from compatibility.
For photographs, jpeg has really been optimized without reducing compatibility, and also in another less compatible way (incompatible viewers can display it without erroring out, but the colors are wrong) and there's such an encoder in the JPEG XL repo.
It was mostly about compatibility but looks like photoshop supports it now so I guess I can now officially say I don't really care one way or the other.
Having key browser implementers not involved in the standards processes is what lead us to the W3C wasting several years chasing XHTML 2.0.