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Google is killing the open web, part 2

(wok.oblomov.eu)
418 points akagusu | 6 comments | 17 Nov 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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nwellnhof ◴[17 Nov 25 16:33 UTC] No.45955183[source]▶
Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue and I'm saying that as ex-maintainer of libxslt who probably triggered (not caused) this removal. What's more interesting is that Chromium plans to switch to a Rust-based XML parser. Currently, they seem to favor xml-rs which only implements a subset of XML. So apparently, Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well. This is a lot more concerning.
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svieira ◴[17 Nov 25 16:54 UTC] No.45955425[source]▶
> Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue

> Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well.

> They're the same picture.

To spell it out, "if it's inconvenient, it goes", is something that the _owner_ does. The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)". This kind of "well, it's dashed inconvenient to maintain a WASM layer for a dependency that is not safe to vendor any more as a C dependency" is not the kind of servant-oriented mentality that made the web great, not just as a platform to build on, but as a platform to emulate.

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akerl_ ◴[17 Nov 25 17:05 UTC] No.45955543[source]▶
Can you cite where this "servant-oriented" mentality is from? I don't recall a part of the web where browser developers were viewed as not having agency about what code they ship in their software.
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1. etchalon ◴[17 Nov 25 17:09 UTC] No.45955591[source]▶
I cannot imagine a time when browsers were "servant-oriented".

Every browser I can think of was/is subservient to some big-big-company's big-big-strategy.

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2. akerl_ ◴[17 Nov 25 17:15 UTC] No.45955652[source]▶
There have been plenty of browsers that were not part of a big company, either for part or all of their history. They don't tend to have massive market share, in part because browsers are amazingly complex and when they break, users get pissed because their browsing is affected.

Even the browsers created by individuals or small groups don't have, as far as I've ever seen, a "servant-oriented mindset": like all software projects, they are ultimately developed and supported at the discretion of their developer(s).

This is how you get interesting quirks like Opera including torrent support natively, or Brave bundling its own advertising/cryptocurrency thing.

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3. etchalon ◴[17 Nov 25 17:58 UTC] No.45956095[source]▶
Both of those are strategies aimed at capturing a niche market segment in hopes of attracting them away from the big browsers.
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4. akerl_ ◴[17 Nov 25 18:29 UTC] No.45956400{3}[source]▶
I guess? I don't get the sense that when the Opera devs added torrents a couple decades ago, they were necessarily doing it to steal users so much as because the developers thought it was a useful feature.

But it doesn't really make a difference to my broader point that browser devs have never had "servant-mindset"

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5. etchalon ◴[17 Nov 25 19:26 UTC] No.45957165{4}[source]▶
I agree. They've never had that mindset.
6. trinsic2 ◴[17 Nov 25 20:58 UTC] No.45958201[source]▶
I don't remember it this way. It was my understanding that browsers were designed to browse servers and that servers, or websites designed themselves around web standards that were initiated by specs made part of browsing experience that web browsers created.