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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

.. 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?

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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.

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.

[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

My understanding is that clients would have to use an outdated version of Chrome, which is probably an untenable ask.

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