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Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification

(vivaldi.com)
756 points dagurp | 4 comments | 26 Jul 23 11:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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thyrox ◴[26 Jul 23 18:10 UTC] No.36882250[source]▶
It's the insane power that companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple hold over the tech world. It's like they can just dictate everything to suit their own interests, and it's the users who end up losing out.

Remember when Apple killed Flash? I heard it was because they wanted people to use their app store more instead of us playing games in the browser, so they could make more money. And Microsoft installing IE and setting it as the default browser? And now, Google is making changes to how we browse the web and adding things like Manifest v3, to boost their ad business.

The most irritating part is it is always gets packaged as being for our safety. The sad thing is I've often seen people even drink this user safety kool-aid, especially with Apple (like restricting browser choices on mobile - not sure if it's changed now).

I really think there should be some laws in place to prevent this kind of behavior. It's not fair to us, the users and we can't just rely on the EU to do it all the time.

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baby_souffle ◴[26 Jul 23 18:17 UTC] No.36882375[source]▶
> Remember when Apple killed Flash?

Yes. Every SECOPS person let out a collective sigh of relief when the weekly p0 patches for flash stopped coming. Apple may have been trying to push towards 'native' apps but that was almost certainly secondary; safari was leading the way on html5 APIs.

Let's not pretend that the death of Flash was a tragedy.

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1. raspyberr ◴[26 Jul 23 18:29 UTC] No.36882568[source]▶
It was a tragedy for creativity. But that's often the last item on peoples' lists.
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2. downWidOutaFite ◴[26 Jul 23 18:40 UTC] No.36882766[source]▶
Security people hate features and creativity. There is never any tradeoff allowed. It's always more lockdown, more power for them over you.
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3. baby_souffle ◴[26 Jul 23 19:11 UTC] No.36883278[source]▶
> Security people hate features and creativity.

Not all of us. _This_ security guy just didn't like having to patch an entire fleet against a new critical exploit in the flash VM every week.

4. rollcat ◴[26 Jul 23 19:24 UTC] No.36883467[source]▶
At the time (2013ish), I was working with a company that used to make a lot of very cool stuff in Flash; we were already starting most new projects in HTML5, and (coincidentally) the company was also growing like crazy (also in terms of new hires).

With that, at one point we actually started running low on physical space in the office. We've had a running joke (started by a Flash dev of course) that we'll just move all of the remaining Flash guys to the toilet...

But in all honesty, Flash was a terrible, absolutely horrible technology. I was lucky enough that I've only had to work with it from the backend, but I still remember the dread.

I think Adobe missed a huge opportunity where they could have built new tooling and a framework to target HTML5.