This reminds me when my parents would have half their browser covered in random toolbars they'd get tricked into installing, whether by online ads or software bundled with them. The modern dark patterns are really nothing like the early 2000's windows days.
Oof, what? Toolbars were painfully visible, but spam extensions are just as common today. The difference is that today you can get them straight from the comfort of the top search result for any innocuous term.
The web today, without an ad blocker, is just as land-mined as it’s always been. And getting your spam code installed is super easy, barely an inconvenience.
> The web today, without an ad blocker, is just as land-mined as it’s always been.
No dude. From this comment I would say that you're either too young to have living the toolbars that parents is mentioning, or too in your own bubble to know the kind of people who would fall for it.
Anyone else remember having their mom's boyfriend getting you to remove the animated porn lady walking on top of the windows bar while explaining that he had no idea how that got there?
I made a good chunk of money in my small town being the computer repair guy (well, kid).
Just you referring to that blight brought up memories of my entire digital youth. Having my parents shepherd my and my PC to friends so we could LAN, Hamachi (virtual LAN), Kazaa, Limewire / Frostwire, Azareus / uTorrent, uHARC compressed games, jailbreaking iPhones, writing my own hooks for d3dx9.dll for cheating on games.. good times.
Specifically with Azareus vs. uTorrent I remember being amazed how a program that was a few hundred kilobytes could principally do the same thing as one that was a few hundred megabytes big, and with 1/10th of the RAM consumption to boot.
It’s given me a lifelong impression of Java being a sluggish crappy language, which isn’t factually correct.. but first impressions last.
Strangely enough I have a feeling we (‘90s kids) were the last generation where every kid had to learn at least some digital nimbleness. These days even the cracks and jailbreaks are one-click and work without a fault.
The cracks back then were packaged into almost a single click too, along with some great music. The site seems to be gone now, but keygenmusic.net had been a great archive.
I think azureus is a few years too new, but the earliest versions of java didn't include a jit and were only interpreted, so it really was rather slow.
So many blank discs to tape over and save things on in the mailbox. Then the unlimited supply of coasters following.
I knew a guy that had a free trial of AOL for 5 plus years because he's call and threaten to cancel his service - which eventually turned into "listen, Ive been with you folks for 3 plus years now, and I'd really hate to cancel my service now but..."
Bam, another free 6 month window. I still find it hilarious.
Who else rocked qlink ? We're getting there now...
I think it kinda evens out because while the web is better, more people are using it.
If I look at just the experience I've had these last 20 years I'd say nothing has changed overall.
Because my mom got her Samsung phone infected from official Google ads. And who do you report that to? They don't care. If she didn't have someone who could identify she had a malicious program and reset her phone she'd just live her life with constant ads popping up randomly.
This thread really needs pictures. https://www.wintips.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/image_thu... is what you'd come home from college to find on the family computer. Getting ads on individual pages is limited to that site. Those dual search bars are slurping up every web request and sending it on to its master.
the other thing to note is just how spoiled we are with monitors these days. $400 for a giant fat pile of screen real estate, on something the thickness of a book (adjust the kind of book for the kind of monitor you have). Back in days of yore, monitors were CRTs. Deep and heavy, and with poor resolution. it's only recently we've been able to get exquisite 4k (or higher!) monitors, which meant that losing any screen real estate hurt plenty.
It seems to me that few people today actually use extensions. They're hard to find in browsers (in Chrome you need to go through several clicks) and have warnings installing them. I'm always surprised to find that many non-technical people I know don't use any extensions at all. But that's probably intended, Google doesn't seem to like them anyway (esp Adblock).
Smartphones are the modern dark patterns and are far worse than IE era toolbars. The toolbars and other Windows crap were easy to notice and easy to get rid off. The modern smartphone is a fast, sleek and utterly locked down device which collects a firehose of your personal data without ever giving any indication that it is harming you. Out of sight, out of mind.
I remember Oracle sneaking the Ask toolbar into the JRE installer. Meanwhile the JDK installer (which also installs JRE) has no toolbar. Clearly preying on people who aren't developers. True scum.
Tragically, Microsoft has looked back and realized that people will put up with a lot of shit, so they decided to implement about 20% of it themselves.
Yeah they were obvious, and easy to clean up back in those days. Now it's happening, and it's just built into the software you use, including your OS... and most people have no way of knowing.
This was a brilliant strategy. It allowed Google time to build Chrome at the same time slowing down : (1) explorer (2) Got decent data on CAC for browsers and what channels work and what don't.
Its interesting to see new era of browser wars playing out with Chrome firmly in the lead, but Microsoft attacking with Edge where ChatGPT on bing only available on edge browser and no where else. Would be interesting to see how Google would respond.
Chrome vs. Edge is not a browser war, they are both Chrome.
Speaking more broadly, the browser war is all but decided until the Chromes fail of their own accords.
The only non-Chrome browsers still in existence today are Safari and the Firefoxes (Firefox and its various forks). Safari is only relevant in iOS by way of Apple gatekeeping, and Firefox hasn't been relevant for well over the past decade thanks to Mozilla's utter mismanagement and malice.
They aren't both Chrome; they're both Chromium-based and use Blink and V8 under the hood. And Blink is just a fork of WebKit, which is Safari, so by your logic it's all Safari (it's not).
These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search. The war isn't over how CSS is rendered; it's over how many opportunities they have for surfacing their other products (search, email, identity and payments).
If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.
Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.
>This is incredibly wrong. They aren't both Chrome; they're both Chromium-based and use Blink and V8 under the hood.
So they're both Chrome. You can't have a war with just one participant.
>These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search.
They absolutely care about the rendering engine, because that's how you secure a monopoly and subsequently get to foist your default search engine and whatever other monetization schemes on more customers. Did you not learn anything from Internet Explorer and its victory over Netscape? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
There are many sites that only function properly in Chrome today, and that is to Google's (and now also Microsoft's) commercial interests. You can't have a browser war with just one participant.
>If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.
As far as Google is concerned, it's cheaper to pay Firefox to stay irrelevant than to compete on the market. Mozilla's flush with cash thanks to Google, but that also means they have no incentives to develop or not mismanage their products.
>Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
History also shows Mozilla today are more concerned about checking the right political checkboxes than delivering a good product that users want.
>(Source: I'm ex Mozilla)
I'm not surprised that (ex-)Mozilla would play the "Am I out of touch? No, it's the people who are wrong." meme almost to the letter, but that is probably neither here nor there.
>History also shows Mozilla today are more concerned about checking the right political checkboxes than delivering a good product that users want.
As a trans person, I am happy that my browser developers are on my side and not the side of the people who'd rather see me be harassed or bullied into suicide.
If I were a trans person, I would be insulted by large corporations draping themselves in such superficial, low effort, utterly incongruous lip service to my cause, using past and present prejudice against me as a marketing opportunity to sell more web browsers. Corporations love to passively attach themselves to causes like this. Social responsibility has become the responsibility of the marketing department, plus whatever minimum corporate change is sufficient to sell the sizzle.
This story has played out countless times, whether it's world hunger in the 1980s, third-wave feminism in the 1990s, global warming in the 2000s, or generic environmentalism (i.e. "greenwashing") in the 2010s. If they wanted to, corporations can be a force for good. The treadmill of causes du jour gives them a convenient excuse to not try.
For the sake of the trans community I'd like to think that this time they're being sincere. This time it's authentic. But I find it hard to believe. Maybe I'm too cynical.
Observing from the outside, the lip service is successful because it offers the illusion of righteousness to the weak-minded and stupid. The extremely online crowd love feeling being a part of a "cause" and not thinking about what the "cause" actually means. Until they're left out in the cold when the corporation shifts to another newsworthy cause to trumpet.
Some of the rabble go quiet, the rest double-down. They try to convince themselves and everyone else they weren't fooled. They want to believe they're still a voice in a worthy social cause, and not a pawn in a game that they don't even know how to play.
The question isn't whether a company genuinely supports trans people or just does it for the money. The question is whether they support trans people or oppose them. They're a company. They're driven by profitability and ROI first.
It doesn't matter that they're not sincere. It doesn't matter that they're not authentic. It matters that they help normalize pro-trans messaging, rather than normalizing anti-trans messaging, or doing nothing. Yes, it'd be nice to live in a world where you get to choose between the company that sincerely supports trans people and the company that merely does so for optics but still fires those sincerely opposing them, but that's not the one we live in.
To be honest, I think most of the trans community would be perfectly happy to have companies simply not actively funnel money into politicians who want them to stop existing. Alas.
There’s a lot I could take issue with about what you’ve said, not least of which being the absolutist “with us or against us” mentality which toxifies US politics. If you want to have a single issue dictate every one of the hundreds of choices you make every day, have at it, but I’m not going to pick a web browser based on which one pays the most lip service to one particular social issue.
But really, I just can’t get past the idea of “it doesn’t matter if they’re not sincere” when in the same paragraph you spell out exactly why that’s an absurd thing to say.
And indifferent is the right attitude. It is wrong for corporations to be treated as a channel of political power. This is a point we should be consistent on, we shouldn’t make an exception for when it seems convenient to us… because we certainly don’t like it when it’s used against us.
As a reasonable person, I am not happy that a browser's developers are more concerned about tangential, arguably completely unrelated, issues to their product.
You're confusing "more concerned" with "also concerned". I guarantee you that they can care about both at the same time, and I would LOVE to see an example where they prioritize trans rights at the expense of web standards.
The silence from Gregory Koberger is typical. The idea that Mozilla has zero malice, that it didn't compromise web standards in favor of social activism, meets the reality that they fired the creator of Javascript and ran his name through the mud.
As usual, we tech workers prioritize group identity over personal integrity.
Not meant to be silent, there's just no notifications on HN.
Ironic you're bothered Eich's name was "ran through the mud", but had no problem going out of your way to dig up and use my full name.
Everyone at Mozilla knew about his donation before he was promoted to CEO. Lots of people had opinions (and shouldn't they be allowed to?), but Mozilla officially supported him (this was his boss: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/building-a-global...). He was not fired, he stepped down.
Donating money to prevent people from getting married feels more in line with "malice" to me than people reacting to his donation, but hey, that's just my opinion and I haven't worked at Mozilla for over a decade.
Most importantly, though, Eich just proves that a single person left the company. I'm not sure how that indicates web standards were hurt or Mozilla's mission of a free and open web was compromised – like I said before, you can both care about the people around you and also care about an open web.
Are those the only two sides? In public support and signalling, or wanting you dead? I think I'd prefer neither personally, and for companies to just do their jobs.
As any person, if we start caring about the political or moral affiliations of the makers of every single product we use there doesn't seem to be an efficient, reliable source of such information. I can barely avoid a single company let alone all those I dont agree with.
Beyond a limited number of companies who go against popular opinion (possibly bcos their target customers are too), most are going to publicly support all the same socially acceptable stands. This doesn't mean there are some vile people employed in those positive companies or some decent, well meaning pepole working in the bad companies just for a paycheck. it's hard to judge with a simple look.
As a consumer you are free to support or boycott a product on any criteria that you like but question is how much of a realworld difference their placit support for your cause makes.
I get that, as much as a non trans can I suppose. But the product objectively lags behind. If the only reason to use it is because of some social project or issue, and not on technical merits, it won't be around forever (and I firmly believe Firefox will not).
Seems best just to leave politics out of business.
As a cat, I'd prefer for Firefox to stop integrating a Pocket chumbox and pinning sponsored sites on the new tab page, advertising Firefox VPN in their browser, increasing padding in the Normal tab bar at the same time they hide the option for Compact size, adding time-limited colorways you can't sync onto new computers added after the color scheme expires...
> Seems best just to leave politics out of business.
You literally can't, though. Business is inherently political. And even if the corporation itself may attempt to remain neutral and refuse to participate in any donations or fundraisers, the C-level executives and the shareholders who derive most of the excess value produced by the company are still people with opinions who have a lot of disposable income they can throw one way or another.
If you truly think business can avoid politics you should ask yourself why all the companies priding themselves in not engaging in politics are run by people who lean right-libertarian. It's hard to see the water when you're a fish.
OP is presumably talking about stuff like dictating the future of web development, not about who gets money as a result of users having a browser installed. It's a different definition of "sameness" than you're using, but not necessarily a wrong one.
(Whether the companies themselves care about this seems immaterial.)
Chrome has sign in with Google and Google Passwords, Edge has Microsoft Sync. Both features intended to bring users into respective walled gardens. If Edge gets more popular, they will try to Embrace Extend Extinguish the web platform, but currently that won't work as they don't have enough users, so their devs are working on engine adjacent things like the Developer Tools panel.
Literally every browser anybody cares about has a passwords/setting sync function. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi. I don't think spinning a basic feature as a dirty ploy is terribly useful, or honest.
Sure feels like a new-age browser war, where instead of trying to take control of the W3C, browser vendors are just trying to take control of everything ELSE (Windows nags you to use Edge, YouTube and Gmail nag you to use Chrome)
> The only non-Chrome browsers still in existence today are Safari and the Firefoxes
DuckDuckGo’s browser on macOS¹ is WebKit, as is Orion². They may not be very popular but neither are the Firefox forks. They’re both still in beta and under development.
Explorer didn't need "slowing down". It was in maintenance mode and being developed it on a shoestring budget around the days of IE6-IE7. Microsoft apparently decided that the web browser circa 2006 was essentially a finished product because they had "won" - IE had no serious mass market competition on Windows.
Somewhere mid-2000s Microsoft recognised web applications were an existential threat to their Windows Applications monopoly. Presumably after IE5 when they first introduced XMLHttpRequest as an ActiveX control (or was that infighting? It was released for online mail AFAIK). Did that have anything to do with the slow down in development of IE?
I want to see a new era of wars where web admins fight for web freedom and start subtly penalizing BigCorp web browsers, e.g. by showing annoying popups or slightly delaying loading times.
Note that before Google had Chrome, they contributed quite a bit to Firefox. Some of the features and initiatives (like Safe Browsing) actually began as features for Firefox.
Yep. Google paid like $2 per download of Firefox. It cost like 5 cents a click, for the "download Firefox" keyword, on Google Ads to bring someone to my website. Profit.
Oh man... I am so nostalgic of the past web. Probalby because I became the person I am browsing that web (I was a teenager maturing).
The images of the old Google and the Google Toolbar (in the web.archive link) brought so many memories... Not only of internet, but what was happening with my life around it, the people I had, and more. Those were the happy times, weren't?
Chrome used to be bundled with Adobe's Flash Player installer. Chrome bundled the Flash Player, so the only people downloading Adobe's Flash Player installer would be Firefox users. So excellent user targeting on Google's behalf. But those Firefox users didn't want Chrome; they wanted the Flash Player for their Firefox.
What toolbars or speed boosters are you talking about?
I don't remember any of that and Chrome doesn't even support toolbars.
Or am I misunderstanding something?
Chrome on Windows had a malware checker built in. Which you can debate whether that belongs, but that's not really bundling, just a feature. Which arguably helps protect browser security.
Google only recently decided to retire the "cleanup tool" that was bundled with Chrome.
Back when it was clear that Google wanted users not to suffer from malware but they didn't want to draw the attention or ire of established antivirus companies.
For people talking about openness, walled gardens, etc.
If Google at the time could figure out how much their marketing assisted Firefox adoption, and saw that the marketing was a huge if not main driver, does it not make complete sense for them to just write their own browser and market that?
If I basically had a guarantee that some product would see huge adoption if it only existed, I would start working on that in a heartbeat.
Thing is: You can't easily donate to Firefox. One can send money to the Mozilla Foundation, which is a political organisation (where I share many of the goals, but still spend my "political" money elsewhere) not to Mozilla Corporation, who are the developers.
It's true that donations to Mozilla Foundation don't fund Firefox.
> Mozilla Corporation, who are the developers
Mozilla Corporation is a corporation. If you want to send money to developers who work on Firefox, you can. Better if you do it for the ones who are not Mozilla Corporation employees—although this is more difficult than it would have been in the past, owing to Mozilla Corporation's successful play to accumulate most development and decisionmaking power while alienating volunteers.
As an individual, looking to spend a handful of bucks from Europe all I can do is buy Mozilla VPN or donate to the foundation. For larger sums they might send me a sales rep and figure something out, but not for the sums I'd consider.
And finding relevant individuals isn't easy either.
So for now I am happy Firefox is being worked on continuously for so many years for free. It's my default browser from back when the predecessor was Netscape Navigator 3 Gold via opensourcing and renaming.
No, as you acknowledge, you can also send money to another individual who already did or is currently working on something that you like and that you want to incentivize them to keep doing.
Alternatively, there's almost certainly some way to get Igalia (or someone in it) to accept your money and make sure they know exactly what it's for.
> And finding relevant individuals isn't easy either.
Since they're right out in the open, records of who contributed what is pretty easy to parse for a developer looking at a bugtracker or a commit log. GitHub Sponsors seems straightforward enough (or conspicuous enough, at least; I don't even really use GitHub and I'm well aware of its existence).
Google donates something like 350 million every year to Mozilla Corporation. Some would say it's the only way they can stay in the expensive area of norcal, and maintain their competitive salaries there.
There comes a time in every company's evolution when they switch from supporting openness (an opportunity) to protecting the walled garden from openness (now a threat)
Google's suport of Firefox wasn't a benevolent action on their side to support openness but to erode IE's monopoly for their own benefit till they could launch their own browser.
