Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shadonototra | Hacker News Reader

Web devs?

Who exactly? they just created 6 tweets in 1 hour and now they are "web devs"? they shounds like PR people, probably mozilla?

This is fishy af

View on HN

Mozilla doesn’t seem like it’d resort to tactics like this.

This site screams Google astroturfing at every angle. I would be shook if Googlers have no hand in it.

EDIT: The Register lists two specific developers who I don't think work at Google "plus others" so if it's Google they have gotten better at astroturfing since the Open Handset Alliance days of yore. It looks like they're lobbying the UK, and I don't think Google admits which lobbyists they pay outside of the US.

We’re just web developers, not affiliated with or funded by any major company. In fact Google pays Apple 15b usd a year for search engine placement on iOS which is presumably why they haven’t been fighting it.

It’s been a huge amount of unpaid work, but the entire industry had been held back for so long we felt we had to do something.

Are you affiliated with this site? If so, please make a post introducing yourself.

Hi! I’m @mtomweb on Twitter. I and everyone one else doesn’t work or get paid by any of the browser vendors (or anyone else for that matter). I run a small business doing POS systems that’d you’d have never heard off.

People just assume that we’re funded because we’ve stuck a lot of effort in trying to fight anticompetitive behavior. If you read our content though you’ll see it’s not legal/PR nonsense.

Available on Twitter or discord for chat anytime!

I would advise you that if you are trying to fight anticompetitive behavior, you are backing the wrong horse. Apple is not good, but it is useful in fighting what's truly bad: Google's attempt to turn the web into a walled garden. Read a bit about "Project NERA" online.

Google's constant stream of web "standards" only they've implemented, AMP (which thankfully is starting to die), and Privacy Sandbox all fold into a plan to control the web.

You might not be paid by them, but please don't take on the "useful idiot" role of helping them control the web because you didn't understand the impact of what you were promoting.

I'm well aware of your long held opinions but really we are advocating on behalf of people who believe the web is the future. Additionally we believe in competition and browser choice. There will always be others who think that other platforms are a better option, but as long as there is open competition, the best platform will win.

Our aim is to remove barriers and we will fight any anti-competitive behaviour by any operating system or browser vendor but in a priority order.

I believe in competition and browser choice. But if your position was to win, we would immediately have neither. You are advocating solely for Chrome, whether you understand why and how or not.

Priorities are great to have, but yours are wrong and harmful. If you win, we all lose, and I fear you will come to understand it too late.

I'm not advocating solely for chrome. Safari/webkit was severely underfunded and neglected by Apple and was slipping further behind every year in addition to being unsuitable / unstable as an application platform. By restoring competition to iOS it will push Apple to fund them properly or they risk losing 150m for each 1% of users per year that move to another browser.

Safari only competes on one platform and that is MacOS.

If you read through our regulatory submission at https://open-web-advocacy.org/#where we run through this argument in detail.

It should also be important to note that blink is a fork of webkit which is a fork of khtml. There is nothing stoping competition within the chromium browsers as outlined in section 8 of the document.

We want Safari/webkit to succeed.

Choosing not to implement insecure and poorly thought out features isn't "underfunding" or "neglecting" Safari. It's a choice to put users, not Google, first.

Google has used a litany of underhanded tactics to obliterate every single browser in an open space. Claiming opening up iOS to competing browsers would be helping Safari succeed is just ignoring history.

I’d have been very impressed if PR could have written a document with that much technical detail.

All of us are web devs, none of us writers or legal/policy people or are paid or affiliated with by any major company. We’re the opposite of paid, it’s taken a lot of time and effort, but no company was fighting this so unless we tried nothing would happen.

See the section added to the website to clear things up: https://open-web-advocacy.org/#really

This is not funded by any company, it's a volunteer community effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com