Tag: Chrome

Contra Chrome

Found via Kottke, Leah Elliott has an excellent comic up called Contra Chrome, which is an “update” on Scott McCloud’s comic that was done back in 2008 to introduce Chrome. It’s pretty well researched, and calls out a lot of the bad behavior around privacy and surveillance that Chrome does right now (and is planning to do in the future).

I’ve talked before about how Chrome’s market dominance is a bad thing, so consider this yet another reminder: use something else. If you’ve not tried Firefox in a few years, you’ll likely be quite surprised at how responsive it’s become.

Link: Careful Now

Chris Coyler over at CSS-Tricks has a worthwhile response to the “Chrome is the new IE6” article I linked to earlier.

Even more concerning than browser-specific websites is seeing browsers ship non-standardized features just because they want them, not behind any vendor prefix or flag. There was a time when web developers would have got out the pitchforks if a browser was doing this, but I sense some complacency seeping in.

These days, the vibe is more centered around complaining about other browsers lack of support for things. For example, one browser ships something, we see one green dot in caniuse, and we lambast the other browsers to catch up. Instead, we might ask, was it a good idea to ship that feature yet?

Link: Chrome-Only Sites are a Problem

Via the Verge, Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6. I’ve been saying this for a while, and often get poo-pooed by folks who really like Chrome. Let me expand on that a bit and explain what I mean. (First, go read the article, it lays some good groundwork.)

The big response I hear is “Chrome is standards compliant, so if only Chrome is supported then the others need to catch up!” There are several browsers that claim to be standards-compliant. This is fine, and a good aspiration, but is also a bit of a half-truth: in reality browsers are partially compliant. This is because standards continue to evolve, and it takes time to implement those standards, and literally no browser is actually 100% compliant with current standards. Further, different developers are going to prioritize different parts of the standard, so while Chrome might have one feature implemented, Firefox implemented one Chrome doesn’t have, and Safari might have a different feature than either of them. Each of those features are standards compliant.

Part of the issue, and why articles like the one linked above are starting to crop up, is developers look at the new shiny in Chrome specifically, and develop around that, ignoring all other users and browsers. While there’s room for experimentation and trying out new features, putting sites into production without considering the impact on users that don’t have the features Chrome chose to implement first is bad for the web (and frankly bad for business). This isn’t specifically Chrome’s fault, mind you — the same could be said for sites using features only Firefox or Edge or Safari support, without including a fallback. However, since Chrome has the marketshare, the issue becomes much more prevalent with Chrome.

The other response that comes up is “if it works in Chrome then it’s the others that are broken.” Sometimes that’s the case, I’ll happily concede, but frankly not as often as people make it out to be. There are no shortage of bugs in all browsers, and Chrome is no exception (just in the Chromium public bug tracker, bug IDs are about to crest 800k, of which 57k are still open and active). This means you are going to work around quirks and issues in their implementation of a particular feature, even longstanding parts of CSS or HTML. This is an unfortunate but unavoidable part of web development. The issue (again) is when you only fix the issues around Chrome, or assume Chrome’s incorrect behavior is what should be expected, and leave a broken experience for all other users.

This all leads to a result of sites saying “Best used in Chrome!” or having broken functionality in other browsers without even a note, or even just blocking use with other browsers. That is what people are talking about with Chrome becoming the new IE6. It isn’t really Chrome’s fault it’s turning into IE6, but it doesn’t change the fact that as long as developers treat it as the gold standard and ignore other browsers, that’s what it will become.

(This, of course, isn’t even getting into the shift at Google to start making their newer services Chrome-ONLY, which is the next phase of IE6-ification. Some have received claims of eventual compatibility with other browsers, but others have not. While as a company they’re entitled to make those sorts of decisions, there’s nothing “standards compliant” about that sort of behavior, and earns them every bit of IE6-comparisons they receive.)