You're wrong about a few things. (1) A browser isn't an OS at all, it's a Javascript runtime and a constraint solver (to put all of the boxes in the right places per the CSS inputs). (2) Google doesn't constantly churn the web world anymore, they still do try, but it hasn't been effective for quite some time. (3) Microsoft was keeping up with web standards just fine, but they were falling behind in performance, and that's why they switched to Chromium.
You are picking the least important detail of the story. The deal is, Google found a simple way to kill the performance of a rival browser... so they exploited it and immediately started advertising how slow the rival was. By the time the rival fixed the performance issue, the damage was done. If true, that's pretty dirty, and it directly contributed to the growing browser monoculture.
This is a wild conjecture. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? The fact they jumped on it means that someone was paying attention to these metrics, but assuming chrome has any influence on YouTube is laughable.
That's just a trite saying, that doesn't logically follow. "Driven by" is not the opposite of "innocent". If you want to blindly believe what random people say on the internet, simply because said thing was said about a corporation you dislike, that's fine by me. But don't get frustrated when people prefer to look at the available evidence first, and the available evidence is an (alleged) div breaking Edge around the same time as an (alleged) announcement that Chrome was faster. Also the original poster admits that they aren't 100% sure it was related. But you are, I guess?
I agree, that's why I didn't say driven until proven innocent. I'm just pointing out that the concept of innocent until proven guilty does not apply, as we have no moral imperative to treat corporations fairly. We're not claiming that any person at Google did something immoral, but that the structure of the corporation resulted in an immoral act. An 'unjust conviction' (so to speak) would not result in a person being imprisoned without cause, so we are free to make the most reasonable decision without the burden of "beyond a shadow of a doubt".
For the record, I'm still not claiming that it was 100% done intentionally, I'm just explaining why I'm inclined to believe something based on circumstantial evidence. Courtroom procedure is designed to protect people (in a perfect world), so I'll only adhere to it if there's someone to protect. I don't think Google is deserving of my, or anyone's, protection.
Well, you'll find it hard to argue with people if you let your philosophical beliefs get in the way of finding common ground. Many people don't agree that "innocent until proven guilty" does not (philosophically) apply to corporations.
I would be skeptical too if it was just a one time thing, but it wasn't. Around the same time as that HN comment, YouTube rolled out a redesign of their frontend that used the Polymer framework. At the time, Polymer depended on a deprecated web standard that was implemented in Blink and WebKit and used a polyfill elsewhere. This completely killed performance on Firefox and Edge. That isn't unsourced or anonymous information like the invisible div. You can search back and find people complaining on multiple forums that YouTube started running at a crawl out of nowhere and ID'ing Polymer as the culprit [1, 2, 3].
I have no idea if the story is true or not, hence the "if true" clause in my post. I was just pointing out that focusing on the technical aspect is missing the point of the story... the degradation could have been triggered by any number of things, the point of the story was the allegation that Google purposely triggered it and disingenuously used that degradation to claim their browser was faster.
At least make your own argument, don't ask ChatGPT to do it for you. ChatGPT is really stretching to make your point though, as you can see from the laughable use of the phrase "Another striking resemblance between browsers and operating systems" after just listing a bunch of web APIs that no one cares about. (WebVR? Get out of here...)
Ok. Sorry. I do find comments that are obviously AI-generated to be annoying also. I know you are busy, and please don't take this as some kind of back talk. I just think it is worth a moment of your time if you can get a little bit more detail on this issue from this "incident".
But just to clarify, this is the first time I have generated a comment, and it was a collaborative effort between me and GPT-4 that lasted like fifteen minutes. It wasn't just a lazy "here is the comment, reply to it".
I was trying to make a better comment. In particular the point I was trying to make was about the sheer scope of web platform functionality and APIs. Which there are so many web APIs that I was using ChatGPT as a research tool. Even GPT-4 said "wow, I can't list _all_ of the APIs, there are too many of them".
Also, I don't see anything on that guidelines page that says anything about AI-generated content being disallowed, so you might consider updating it.
Also, how do you determine if a comment is AI-generated or not? Because the previous version which I had asked it to refine to be in my voice was closer to my writing voice but actually less substantive.
So I had a slightly worse comment ready to go (didn't make the point as well) but I decided to reply with the comment that was better even though it was easier to detect as AI-generated.
I don't think you would have threatened me if you really wanted me on the site. I make a lot of comments on HN, probably spending too much time on here. And I can be fairly, lets say, bold about the content of the comments.
I do remember a recent incident where someone was advertising that they would spend two weeks to build out a basic chatbot for a minimum of $10,000. I can guarantee that person was hoping to spend a half-day or less if they found a customer for a truly simple bot. So the advertisement and business model was dishonest and borderlining on a scam because it misrepresented the time and effort involved and deliberately overcharged for a simple project. That's why I commented on that post.
But I understand that you don't have time to try to parse out how some comments that are obviously on shaky ground might be warranted in some cases.
If you do ban me then I will miss HN. But also, if I am investing a lot of time into this and the comments or submissions aren't appreciated overall, then even for myself, I should reevaluate the use. Maybe socializing just isn't for me, even on a web forum.
