Assuming I'm reading your snark correctly, is this really such a bad thing? People here seem to have a rose-tinted view of the internet's past, before Google, Apple et al. "abused" their browsers' position to push changes into the spec.
I can certainly see that apparently there are a lot of HN commenters who would like to go back to the days of IE and no real web technologies or much progress, but I think practically everyone outside this bubble prefers their browser experience to be at least somewhat feature-rich, and while the proposal under question may be strictly unnecessary, it should be weighed against alternatives: bundling a model viewer with every page view.
Maybe this proposal is bad and a waste of resources, but I don't like the knee-jerk response of digging one's heels in and decrying any and all browser APIs as bloat.
Not entirely directed at you, but your response just seems to echo something I see very often.
Agreed. There is another poster in this thread commenting about "privacy". There is a certain class of perfect privacy fetishist that is completely blind to the fact that that particular horse has long, long bolted out the stable.
All these arguments serve, when they are successful in hobbling the browser as an app platform, is too push developers into native apps in the app store. And then the developer doesn't need to fingerprint you, they get your identity just for asking.
Meanwhile, browsing habits (sites visited + time of day of visit) is enough to fingerprint the vast majority of people. And sites do collude on the backend to share this data with advertisers, long before the user ever gets a chance to block it in the client app.
If privacy fetishists see the browser as a sinking ship, they don't seem to realize they are trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon, or that there is no such thing as dry land. The only way to stay private is too stay off the network entirely.
Okay, if I misread that I apologise. I'm not following the rumors, so it seemed like "oh looks like Apple's coming out with another something something and needs to update the spec to handle it". I think my point remains, though.
I don't mind new capabilities, but I hate how many new browser features are "standards" invented by Google for their own products which everyone else have to implement to remain a competitive browser.
Not fan of the prospect of Apple doing the same. If I wanted to make what Apple is making, I would have to rely on webgl. Them inventing something for their own use case when other stuff exists feels just unnecessary. Their proposal also includes a 3d format no one uses (except them I guess), as an attempt to shoehorn it in or something.
While I do accept the point, I think part of this is just that Google and Apple are the companies doing a large amount of work in the browser space. Because of this, they are likely to be the companies who see the hole that should be filled, or the opportunity to improve something.
Who are the people that should be making browser spec proposals, if not the people building browsers?
Yes, it sucks if you want to write your own browser, and now have to play catch up with the big boys throwing their weight around. But I don't think this is points against Google or Apple. Our browser technology shouldn't be held back by some romantic dream of individuals being able to build one from scratch, despite what many HNers seem to think. Even the best mechanics and engineers will struggle to build a car comparable to whatever rolls off of the large production lines. (I understand maybe that's a poor analogy, since you don't need all the bells and whistles of a new Toyota to be road-legal, while you do kind of need to keep up with the spec in order to be internet-usable (although there still are some IE11 holdouts..)).
My point isn't from a "a single person should be able to build this" perspective. But from a "big players misuse this to grab market share" perspective. Like how youtube was slow in Firefox for years, since they used APIs only existing in Chrome. Others follow suit, and thus other browsers are forced to either implement the same thing (thus making it a "standard") or lose market share since stuff works better in other browsers.
Sure, this sucks. I guess the counterargument is that then, given that the new API in Chrome is an improvement over the standard, waiting for this API to be actually accepted and written into the spec is a long, arduous process during which Chrome is unable to implement an objective improvement to their user experience.
My concern is basically that if we force browsers to be spec-compliant and wait for the due process concerning new features, we pump the brakes on everything, and we risk stalling genuinely beneficial updates.
I can certainly see that apparently there are a lot of HN commenters who would like to go back to the days of IE and no real web technologies or much progress, but I think practically everyone outside this bubble prefers their browser experience to be at least somewhat feature-rich, and while the proposal under question may be strictly unnecessary, it should be weighed against alternatives: bundling a model viewer with every page view.
Maybe this proposal is bad and a waste of resources, but I don't like the knee-jerk response of digging one's heels in and decrying any and all browser APIs as bloat.
Not entirely directed at you, but your response just seems to echo something I see very often.