Thread

Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP

1180 points · 723 comments · theanonymousone

wps · 1789760710 · focus · HN ↗
The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.
1. godelski · 1789763541 · focus · HN ↗
  I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
  > Google simply regrets android being open source.
  Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.
  But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
  1. StilesCrisis · 1789766362 · focus · HN ↗
    Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.
    If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
    floxy · 1789781514 · focus · HN ↗
    >wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
    It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
    kjs3 · 1789782869 · focus · HN ↗
    Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.
    mapontosevenths · 1789794788 · focus · HN ↗
    The biggest mistake the web ever made was leaving it up to to the website to choose how content renders.
    It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it.
    The modern web is user hostile by design.
    Xirdus · 1789807197 · focus · HN ↗
    If a web browser allows images, then the website always has full control over how content renders. It's the default. HTML and related standards are trying to persuade developers to cede some of that control in the name of accessibility, user choice, searchability, device compatibility etc. that all-image websites lack. But this can only succeed if the developers still can do everything they want to. If they can't, then they'll fall back to images and everyone loses.
    Sophira · 1789820552 · focus · HN ↗
    This is true.
    A lot of websites back in the 90s were just made up of images that were clickable using image maps. It was not a fun time.
    I get what they're saying, though, and it's why I use Gemini (the protocol[0], not the AI). It doesn't align with corporate interests, but for now I consider that a good thing.
    [0] <a href="https://geminiprotocol.net/" rel="nofollow">https://geminiprotocol.net/
    microtonal · 1789820613 · focus · HN ↗
    Yep, in the old days, a lot of websites used image maps (so that clicking a part of the image would go to another page).
    miki123211 · 1789814580 · focus · HN ↗
    Users want an app platform that 1) works on every device, 2) is 1-click (no app installation / management, click a link and go), and 3) has advanced capabilities which let them easily do the task at hand.
    Think "an interactive visualisation for choosing a seat when buying a concert ticket." That's not a "traditional" webpage, should work on whatever device the user is currently on (so native is unsuitable), and shouldn't require the user to install anything.
    People clearly want web pages to be exactly this; we're on iteration #3 of the idea now. Iterations 1 and 2 were Java Applets and Flash, not necessarily in that order, and they were massively popular despite their shortcomings. Clearly, if we somehow deprecated the web as it is now (which is an utterly ridiculous idea, which makes me really curious what comments like yours are exactly trying to achieve here), as long as we keep it an open standard, users will choose browsers which offer this capability in some form. We should appreciate that the current iteration is an open standard which anybody is free to implement, instead of some proprietary blob that you need to license from Oracle or Adobe.
    za_creature · 1789822727 · focus · HN ↗
    > Users want an app platform that...
    So do hackers. A big chunk of the open standards revolve around sandboxing malicious code, and given the amount of tracking happening anyway, fail at it.
    kjs3 · 1790464783 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't disagree with you, but I can't help but think "If that's what users want, why didn't you folks figure out how to do that well, instead of ruthlessly molesting HTTP to shove ever more crap it wasn't really designed to do into port 80/433".
    AnthonyMouse · 1789788797 · focus · HN ↗
    > Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).
    The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.
    floxy · 1789794817 · focus · HN ↗
    Apple can create a clone for their wall-garden.
    NetMageSCW · 1789804710 · focus · HN ↗
    Those times will never happen.
    nottorp · 1789812496 · focus · HN ↗
    Pretty sure wasm works on Safari since I've ran my own code like that...
    AnthonyMouse · 1789961810 · focus · HN ↗
    The premise is that you want to make something that competes with Safari, e.g. you want to provide a graphics API to third party developers.
    Doing that in Safari doesn't work twice. First, if Safari doesn't already expose whatever GPU primitives you need to do things efficiently, you can't get them. And second, your API implementation (which is likely to be large) would then have to be distributed by anyone using it instead of being part of the browser they use for all sites, creating a >100MB dependency for a <50kB web page.
    sp332 · 1789818120 · focus · HN ↗
    This kills accessibility. You wouldn't even be able to select text unless the page implemented that feature itself. Screen readers would have nothing to work with. No high-contrast mode, no translation, no changing the font size, no reader mode........
    TeMPOraL · 1789822464 · focus · HN ↗
    Unfortunately none of the things you listed are what page vendors want you to have. They'd very much prefer you didn't. On the web, they're just too hard to prevent, so most don't bother.
    sp332 · 1789823453 · focus · HN ↗
    I think that must be false. Serving the page as a static image was possible from the early days of the web, but vendors (mostly!) moved away from that as features like web fonts became available. I guess Flash was the big remaining exception. And remember Java applets? But even now as rendering to a canvas is possible, enabling animation and interactivity without necessarily including accessibility, websites are mostly not doing that. Accessibility is good for business. And sometimes it's legally required.
    TeMPOraL · 1789823922 · focus · HN ↗
    Software accessibility is bad for business - that's why it has to be legally mandated. There's no firm difference between "accessible", particularly to screen readers, and "amenable to end-user automation", and the latter is anathema to businesses.
    As for the styling and fonts - it's all a bunch of low-key trade-offs here. The businesses want to exercise total control over the end-user experience, for sales/marketing and branding reasons. At the same time, going off the beaten path quickly makes development costs skyrocket.
    Flash was a good choice back when all visitors were using a PC and there were like 3 different screen resolutions to choose from. Once laptops gained popularity, this started to shift, then pre-iPhone mobile briefly became consideration, and Flash stopped being sufficient; then iPhone came out, killed Flash, and started an era where every visitor has a different screen than the previous one. "Responsible web" became the cheapest option, and you can see its evolution as a trajectory towards giving more and more control over experience to developers, and less and less to the users.
    sp332 · 1789825453 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm fine with it being legally enforced. The point is, web site owners mostly wouldn't move to "a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm".
    TeMPOraL · 1789826333 · focus · HN ↗
    Not until it's convenient enough, then yes.
    Otherwise, explain Flutter.
    tancop · 1789836190 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.