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Comment by esprehn | Hacker News Reader

This story is a fun read, but the "Chrome could ruin us at any moment" angle is more story telling hyperbole than reality.

At that time on Chrome we were just figuring out a process to remove features and were pretty conservative. We debated a lot about the right way to remove things without causing damage to the web ecosystem. In an early attempt we had failed trying to remove a legacy feature and needed to revert it. It had broken a big company who had then contacted Google directly about the business impact and it taught us a lesson about being careful.

IIRC WebSQL had very high usage and we didn't seriously considering removing it. It's also pretty self contained so the cost on the engine isn't that high.

Chrome still supports WebSQL today because the usage remains quite high at 1%: https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/popularity#V8SQLTra...

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> It had broken a big company who had then contacted Google directly about the business impact and it taught us a lesson about being careful.

How can normal users accomplish this same task?

No.

.. and even if Chrome had removed WebSQL back then, couldn't that have just kept using whatever version of Chrom e they were already using?

My understanding is that clients would have to use an outdated version of Chrome, which is probably an untenable ask.

I suspect a lot of FB customers are using a browser in a business setting where IT manages the Chrome updates. FB could have used a polyfill though, or used Safari, or shipped a desktop wapper around an older Chrome temporarily. Electron was brand new at the time so it probably wasn't a great option, but FB certainly had a lot of emergency options.

[author] There were some contingency plans, but we had no time to get them ready in advance. If Google had actually pulled the plug, we wouldn't been down for everyone for many weeks, and given that the vast majority of our large customers are non-tech-savvy (low paid employees at ad agencies), a large percentage would have remained with a broken experience forever. They'd have just given up and moved their money to Google.

Sounds like the South African government approach, except they released their own browser with the last Flash version: https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-african-government-relea...

I don‘t know if this is better or worse than the whole South Korea ActiveX thing, which became so ridiculously drawn out it was an election promise in 2017 and finally killed in 2020. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/12/10/south_korea_activ...

However, things have still been shitty even since ActiveX was duped, if you're doing any kind of banking or printing out documents from the government now we're forced to run some dubious exe install files, which will spawn startup processes always running in the background taking up CPU and memory (regardless you're using the banking service or not!).

At least now online payment is much more convenient now (for most sites it even works on Linux, given that you're using a mobile app for authentication...)

You have to have mysterious software running to use a bank website? That sounds terrible, I would just go in person.

I hope AMP is also killed off like ActiveX, Silverlight and Flash.

[author here] Unfortunately no - we had many thousands of customers, most of whom had no control over their machines (low level employees at ad agencies). As a company, Facebook has no control over what browsers their customers use. The product would simply have broken overnight

Isn't that a slightly different argument?

Title: "Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch"

Reality: that seems to have been true.

Your take: yes, but we wouldn't have done so because we're not in the business of breaking backwards compatibility on a whim.

Although it's good to hear reconfirmation of that fact, it's not technically a rebuttal nor showing that the story is hyperbole.

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