> <i>People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what's happening, people start talking about how it's their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway".</i><p>What if <i>every</i> business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?<p>The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).<p>Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).<p>"Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way.<p>This resonates with me. Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. I think that evolves way down the line. Initially it's just about getting stuff done.
I am the glen briefly referenced here - I miss working with Evan, and I could write chapters about the magical alignment he talks about that we swam in, and how I yearn to feel that sense of directionality and purpose again - one of the many reasons I left Google last week.<p>I am so thankful I got to take part in the Chrome adventure with so many people I still call my friends.<p>Also the close button was only not funny for a stomach churning 5 minutes after I saw the techcrunch article; at all other times: hilarious.
I remember how exciting it was to be in my college dorm and having people be like "Man, this new browser is amazing!"<p>It's kind of surreal because I'm not sure desktop software really does that anymore; maybe apps, but they seem to fizzle out really weirdly. It's very crazy to consider Chrome's influence on the Internet, and how most browsers are just skinned Chromium now.
> Apple cares about making a browser that renders web pages just adequately enough to be acceptable<p>I think this is biased. It's closer to "Apple cares about rendering currently existing web pages superbly" while "Google also cares about rendering future web pages".<p>Once upon a time, V8 won benchmarks and ran demos faster but JavaScriptCore rendered the web faster. This was mainly due to JavaScriptCore having an optimized interpreter and V8 lacking one, and actually existing web at the time didn't execute JavaScript long enough on average to compensate for JIT overhead.
He didn't make it that obvious but the author is also the creator of Ninja [0]. One of the, if not the, fastest ways to build C/C++ software on a single machine.<p>0 - <a href="https://ninja-build.org/" rel="nofollow">https://ninja-build.org/</a>
Chrome used to be so much better than others browsers that I mostly didn’t even think about using an alternative.<p>Now I feel that it is just an other bloated beast, and only use it when forced to access online Google tools (drive etc.) for work.
> There was a second subplot about how Microsoft was increasingly turning to nasty practices to get back at Google, and fears about using IE to pull some anti-Google shenanigans.<p>And then Google started doing the same, against Mozilla (and probably Apple, too): <a href="https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20&t=38pEa15ljkThR5mBM8Gg6g" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20&...</a><p>Quote from that thread: "The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional."
> In retrospect I think of this as a failure of leadership on my part. Many years later when Chrome eventually inevitably switched to using Git only, I think it was a multi-year project to dig out from SVN. Had I spent a little bit of time advocating for something that was pretty obvious to me I would've saved those people a lot of time.<p>I really appreciate this attitude - definitely something I can learn from. It's easy to look back on something and say, "I knew X was the right idea, if only everyone listened to me". It takes maturity to say, "It was a failure on my part for not advocating more for X". It's not applicable to every team or situation, but in general I think it's a much better attitude to have.
I actually really like Chrome, well Chromium, despite the negative perception about Manifest v3. I truly hope that they work out the kinks quickly enough to resolve some of the concerns. I do get that the new API in some ways is safer for the average user, but there are power users that should be able to do what they want. Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith, it has only harmed their public perception and they may never recover from that unless they try to address and resolve the concerns publicly.
"Everybody hates ads"<p>Wrong.<p>I don't remember being disturbed by advertisements in the magazines are read, and even in some of the books I read, nor in the print newspapers.<p>What I hate are advertisements that attack me: vectors for viruses, assault me with noises when I am reading, suddenly block the page I am viewing.<p>If Web advertisers treated their audience better, I suspect there would be a lot fewer installations of uBlock origin
> In retrospect I enjoyed this a lot, for two reasons. One is that getting code review from experienced engineers is one of the best ways to grow as a programmer, and the Apple engineers came from a totally foreign engineering culture — no unit tests! no comments! — that also was clearly producing a high-quality product.<p>Anyone know if this still applies to Apple’s SW engineering culture? Or if it’s just some urban myth? Hard to believe.
It's sort of funny the paragraph about a custom title bar, that is always the first feature I disable whenever I deal with a new install of Chrom(ium|e). Don't really know why it tries to do it, but a right click and "Use system window title bar" and back to normalcy.
I will always support Chrome over Firefox because they are not politicizing their project, they just serve you and leave the politics to politicians. They earned their market dominance for being great and supporting things that Firefox did not at the time. I am OK with monopolies of good products, I don't really care about using an inferior product for the sake of lack of monopolies.
> save newspapers<p>I don't think newspapers (here standing for media organizations in general) need saving. Newspapers have great influence, and they will be funded for that. Let's say, ads go to zero and all newspapers are bankrupt, except BBC, NHK, NPR, and Al Jazeera. Is that a problem? I don't see a problem.
Nothing personal against the author, I'm sure hes a great guy and all, but I got a chuckle out of someone working at a company deploying the largest world-wide spying apparatus complaining about Microsoft's practices.