Like 18 months ago Safari launched a "look at us we are so great, we don't support these longist of web apis; isn't chrome evil" and Moz joined in like two days latter repeating the exact same claims in an obviously coordinated negativity-campaign. Web USB, web Bluetooth, web midi, ambient light sensor, bunch of other sensors.

I'm sorry I really want to find the links & show this off more. It was the most boldfaced & honest admission that basic useful interesting things were not welcome, profiteering off suspicion & hostiling while telling users that the anti-feature was undecidedly the only acceptable way.

One can also review moz's standards positions. It'd a great effort & I applaud Moz for their transparency & don't want to hurt the effort. But there's such a long sordid history of Moz saying no absolutely not this is awful, then eventually having to circle back around & at least make some effort to not be a huge stick in the mud, to at least help figure out at some degree what would fit if this was a goal. https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

They just don't seem to have any ability to differentiate between what a privileged/permission-Ed site should be granted versus what the baseline security model should be. Any potential information leak anywhere seems like cause to terminate effort.

I completely agree. The amount of FUD Mozilla spread about Web MIDI was truly distasteful. People say that Google is the enemy, and perhaps they are. But at least Google does not write off entire groups of users (like musicians) because of a swivel-eyed security paranoia.

If I wanted a paternalistic entity telling me what I can and can’t do with my device, I’d use an iPad.

> The amount of FUD Mozilla spread about Web MIDI was truly distasteful.

As in: everything they said is true, and the moment they launched it they found it's used for fingerprinting (and Google doesn't even hide it behind a permission prompt)

Anything can be used for fingerprinting. Your GPU can be used for fingerprinting. Your fonts can be used for fingerprinting. MIDI is so far down the list of fingerprinting threats.

If Mozilla are really serious about fingerprinting then they need to remove <canvas> right now and make every website render in Times New Roman.

Fingerprinting cannot be solved by disabling browser features in a standard browser. It can be mitigated by using content blockers such that the fingerprinting code never runs, or by using a specialist browser like the Tor browser.

> Anything can be used for fingerprinting.

Yes and that's a major issue

> If Mozilla are really serious about fingerprinting then they need to remove <canvas> right now

Ad absurdum is not as great an argument as you think it is

> Fingerprinting cannot be solved by disabling browser features in a standard browser.

It also shouldn't be facilitated by just blindly turning them on without propert mitigation. And proper mitigation is complex

> It can be mitigated by using content blockers

So now you're shifting the responsibility onto the user. Even though it's been shown time and again that users can't really understand all the complexities of modern systems, their capabilities and the far-reaching results of what these systems can and do.

Pretty sure canvas is blocked by setting resistFingerprinting to true.

But putting capabilities behind permission isn't what Apple or Moz considered.

> Finally, if we find that features and web APIs increase fingerprintability and offer no safe way to protect our users, we will not implement them

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/07/apple-fingerprinting-priv...

Strangling the web platform to keep users safe, forcing them onto much less secure much more invasive apps is not justified nor reasonable. Watching Mozilla adopt the same condescending paternalistic platform murdering "protect the children" absolutist authoritarianism with no possible consideration or affordances was a sad sad sad week. It's extremely reckless & hostile behavior, at deep deep deep injury to making so many great futures possible.

That's a lot of demagoguery mascarading as fact.

What really happens is that Mozilla brings multiple well-argued objections (Safari, too) that span both technical and non-technical reasons, but Chrome just releases its half-baked non-standards and calls it a day.

Basically the ultimate goal is that Chrome turns into a kernel agnostic version of ChromeOS.

I see the demagoguery going the other way.

Fear Uncertainty & Doubt are being used again and again to obstruct basic sensible user asks like being able to use Arduino Web Editor or work with their midi keyboard. Fear is the worst demagoguery of all.

Put it behind a permission! Only turn it on if the user installs a PWA! The idea that Moz/Safari know better than to give users what they want, to deny the web basic possibilities: that is demagoguery. It was never based in sound perspective.

Prior to app store creation, Apple and Google were the same regarding the web as a legitimate platform. After it was released, only really Google was pushing for it. Hence the creation of Progressive Web Apps, thanks to Alex Russell et al at Google.

PWAs failed in the marketplace and are essentially dead. Google pushed them because they were already on track for web dominance, and the shift toward native apps was a threat to that. These days Google still wants to control the web (and more or less does), but they also have a healthy app ecosystem, albeit only for Android.

I'm sure it still bugs them to no end that they have zero control over the app experience on iOS, which they possibly could have had more input on had webapps ended up being the dominant way of doing things on mobile.

"PWAs are essentially dead"?!? They haven't replaced native apps for sure but I think it's a pretty major stretch to call them done and dusted

From a engineer mind share pov they are. Users don't use them. Engineers do not build them.

They are stillborn and i don't see a way out.

Engineers build them for big corps and ecommerce sites.

The respective users, specially the corporate ones, have no alternative other than using them.

I think the expectation that tech wins & is everywhere in 5 years is murdering useful progress. It's not the climate we are in any more. Success is slow boiling, especially for web standards.

The lack of empathy for how long change takes keeps letting doom & gloomers send good things to the graveyard.

On the contrary, for forms over data they are more than alive.

At work we only target mobile devices via the Web.

WebUSB: You can argue their resistance was justified in that specific instance, but it's a prototypical example of their general stance

So the prototypical example of their stance is: their resistance was justified.

No, the prototypical example of their stance is: you can argue their resistance was justified.

If you believe in a big web it was not justified, otherwise it was, as the original comment was asking for an example of.

Their stance has nothing to do with a "belief in a big web", whatever "big web" is.

You don't even understand the term but you're being so dismissive. Maybe read the full thread and then comment.

By definition their stance is 100% about "a big web". It's an ideology that the browser shouldn't become another OS competing vs one that it should.

And while one side of the conversation tends to see their approach as 100% correct, the history was people downloading random exes with 0 sandboxing to do 99% of what SPAs offer today, so there's merit to both trains of thought.

> You don't even understand the term

"Big web" isn't a term. It's some vague unspecified idea that you may have.

> By definition their stance is 100% about "a big web".

By what definition?

> It's an ideology that the browser shouldn't become another OS competing vs one that it should.

Of course this is not Firefox's stance.

I replied to a comment that states:

> There's no real debate because 2/3 players actively believe & push for a small web. It's a miserable rock & hard place situation, trying to figure out what to do when there's only one ayer who believes in a web platform at all.

And dozens of replies have all managed to understand what they meant. They didn't need to define small vs big web because for those familiar with the subject matter it's a pretty intuitive way to describe the two opposing ideologies

Not every comment can be written for every reader. Which is why I recommended you read more of the thread to gain some understanding before replying.

-

> Of course this is not Firefox's stance.

The "of course" is unnecessarily condescending and simply doesn't follow. Firefox OS was code named "Boot to Gecko"... as in boot into Mozilla's browser engine. Mozilla openly stated they'd push for new Web APIs to enable it.

https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/dmip1GpD5...

For a long time all the major players were for a "big web", it's no coincidence that the only one left pushing is the only one that didn't abandon their personal web based platform.