> It's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions.
I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? It's okay for a user to override their user-agent string, and fine for browsers to mention other browsers for compatibility, but uncool for a browser to not identify itself at all and steal another browser's user-agent string.
The OpenGL API includes vendor strings for a reason. Chrome isn't doing `strings` on the library or anything.
I get the predicament that caused Chromium to blacklist Nouveau. Nothing against the incredible work done in Nouveau, it's just reality: given a thousand eyes, apparently not all bugs are shallow (see also: Heartbleed and Shellshock). That being said:
>I'm curious why you hold this position.
Agreed. There are countless AAA titles (games) that do vendor checks on the GPU. Game developers are a bunch of people who have been working with GPUs for more than a decade, possibly approaching two decades. For some reason, GPUs are the one thing that the OS HAL isn't able to sort out. Windows (and Mac?) drivers are always proprietary, so different hardware vendors are all Windows developers have to worry about. I can't imagine the headache of dealing with differing hardware vendors (and families), on top of differing driver vendors.
Reality fucking sucks and I guess this is just Chromium acknowledging it. I doubt there's a grand conspiracy here.
I think Chrome is empirically quite user friendly - it's not installed by default anywhere and people choose to use it. It is true that Chrome isn't particularly power-user friendly for certain use cases, but that's different.
Also, if you look at the bug report, it's quite clear they spent a lot of time trying to make nouveau work.
Well, people have always used bad software; popularity has never been a good metric of quality. Nothing about Chrome protects users from Google. This is a fundamental role of the browser.
That may be true but I'm not sure how that is relevant. Why would a browser not protecting users from Google be positively correlated with a browser not wanting to successfully render pages?
There's more to being user friendly than having a dumbed down UI and being technically correct.
Helping corporations spy on users is definitely not user friendly, and Chrome is by far the worst offender there. Saying, "nobody cares," because they're ignorant that it's going on is no excuse, either.
That may all be true but I'm really unsure what that has to do with user-friendliness in the way described. The argument was an attempt to rebut my claim that Chrome is trying to do the best job possible of rendering pages isn't true because Chrome isn't user-friendly. If their goal is to spy on users and have a dumbed-down UI, isn't it all the more important that pages successfully render, so that the sheeple keep using it?
User-friendliness is usually understood as being about usability and interface design. Spyware-riddled software may be shitty, and that should be called out, but it's orthogonal to user-friendliness.
Edit: You seem to disagree. Google "user-friendly" and realize that I'm not defending Chrome.
Just because corporate language doesn’t include any way of expressing representing consumer and user interests outside of what can be represented in a transaction doesn’t mean it isn’t worth expressing.
There's plenty of ways to express it. Call it exploitative, dishonest, money-grubbing, soulless. If you instead call it "non-user-friendly," expect people to be confused, because that's not what "user-friendly" means.
As someone who has used IE (especially 5-9) far too many times because I had to, Chrome could impale my palms with stakes and I'd still probably call it more user friendly.
Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text.
>I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering.
So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible.
>It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs
They don't blacklist Windows because it spies on users, but they absolutely blacklist anything from AV to malware because it causes instability. https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes-ca... This seems like exactly the same thing. They're responsible for delivering a browser that renders webpages successfully. They're doing what needs to be done to make this happen.
> So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible.
If a Windows graphics acceleration component spied on its users, Chromium should absolutely blacklist that component, and use software rendering instead.
I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? It's okay for a user to override their user-agent string, and fine for browsers to mention other browsers for compatibility, but uncool for a browser to not identify itself at all and steal another browser's user-agent string.
The OpenGL API includes vendor strings for a reason. Chrome isn't doing `strings` on the library or anything.