Chris Zacharias

Which, if you haven't read it before, the story of how they did that is worth the read. https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

I tend to find DDH's takes as innovatively great, but in this case I totally agree that your first quote is not true - Chrome won because Google was behind it. Source: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 )

Here's my favorite example of that: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters YouTube increased the efficiency of their site which ended up increasing average page load time - more people across the globe could now use the site when before it was too slow to bother with.

Personally I think frameworks like Electron lead to huge bloat in terms of download size, disk space, and system ram. However there is no doubt that it increases the accessibility of developing applications for multiple platforms. I think the following is a great narrative on why it can matter though: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

I'm increasingly convinced all statistical analysis performed by non-PhDs is no better than a coin flip. Maybe even worse. My favorite example is still the quite popular Page Weight Matter posts. I wonder how close they were to abandoning a 90% reduction in size. I wonder how many improvements the world at large has thrown away due to faulty analysis. http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Corporate priorities can be absolutely 100% nefarious as the wage-fixing antitrust investigation and subsequent settlement shows: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-steve-jobs-… https://pando.com/tag/techtopus In May of this year (2019), https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 . I take this last event as an example of "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing": these sorts of events that further corporate priorities without corporate knowledge or corporate sanction clearly can and do happen. --- Widely speculative thought experiment follows 1. Let's hypothetically assume there was a rogue team at Google trying to kill of Mozilla Firefox. 2. Let's further suppose like the YouTube IE6 story they flipped some switch to start the process yesterday. 3. Let's further suppose they were discovered by any one or more of their managers / their directors / Google's legal and compliance / C-level executives today. 4. In my opinion, what we should be asking ourselves is: what actions the last group of people (3.) can take at and with what would be corresponding probability of that action being carried out. --- tl;dr Do we trust Google to not "be evil"?

I've wanted to play around with some similar ideas for a while too, actually. I have a few loose high-level ideas - I know I want it to feel like an app, but I want to use plain JS; I want to leverage everything modern browsers can support, while remaining backward-compatible (!); I want to try odd things like using Lua inside nginx for everything (or even writing my own web server), or programmatically reorganizing my CSS and JS so runs of similar characters are grouped together and gzipping has the best effect. I also have a hazy idea of what I want the site to be about (not a content site, some sort of interactive thing) but I haven't resolved all the "but if you make it about X, it doesn't really nail all those bits about Y you wanted" stuff yet. Anyway. Thanks for the note that AppCache is now out of the picture. I actually think I remember reading something vaguely about it being not the greatest, but I didn't know it was actively harmful. Do you mean in a security sense or it just being bad for performance? I wasn't sure what to say about the content structure thing at first, but then I thought: take the pragmatic approach. Gather piles and piles and piles of actual content and dump it either on the site itself or your dev version. Notions about structure, presentation and content will likely occur in the process of accumulating (or writing) what's on the site. As for what kind of content to put up, I would suggest focusing heavily on links to (and/or articles…

The founder of the startup I'm at now, imgix, had this to say about it: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/cruise-ships Google is a cruise ship. You're young and agile in a way that you'll likely never be again. As a result, you're more risk-tolerant as well. Risk accordingly. Despite that, don't confuse commitment and risk. The bay is a big place. It's expensive to live in, and full of unlikely opportunities in equally unlikely places. Find a month to month lease if you can, or crash with somebody you know. Don't lock yourself down with a long lease, the environment moves too fast and your priorities will evolve even faster once you hit the ground here. I think you'll appreciate the agility. It's a mistake I made, and would probably change given a do-over. Another miscellaneous thought: there are so many startups and things like this going on in the bay that it's actually a bit of a blur, and while it's easy to meet many people doing what you describe, they're all very much wrapped up in their own version of the story. A job at google actually gives you proximity to bigger names, for longer, and with more purpose. From a networking standpoint, that has value. I don't think it negates the sole-suckingness of a giant org for someone with your personality, but it's at least worth noting.

> In our world we might have 10,000 people sitting in a room pulling our mobile app over a crappy wifi connection. Just to reinforce this point to folks who are skeptical, there's this great writeup called "Page Weight Matters" by Chris Zacharias where he talks about how smaller page size for a YouTube video literally lit up African, South American, and Southeast Asian smartphone traffic. By minimizing page size through switching to html5, the page load times dropped to a sufficient level where people who previously did not have access to youtube could finally get access. Key quotes: > Further investigation revealed that, in these places, the average page load time under Feather was over TWO MINUTES! This meant that a regular video page, at over a megabyte, was taking more than TWENTY MINUTES to load! > This was the penalty incurred before the video stream even had a chance to show the first frame. Correspondingly, entire populations of people simply could not use YouTube because it took too long to see anything. Link: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

I'd like to think this conspiracy at least contributed: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 Unless it's all fud in which case I shall archive this under headcanon.

This reminds me of the story of the "Feather" project at YouTube where they improved a lot the page weight and the average page latency went higher just because they were actually seeing a lot more traffic from places with slow Internet. https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

> This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.” Please read Mozilla's story on how Google sabotaged them: https://archive.is/tgIH9 Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 Oh. And Google's mobile apps always conveniently forget the setting of "always use system browser and never ask me", and will keep asking you to open with "chrome", "google", or "system browser". Oh and...

ugh... so much pain and time trying to get pages to look nice on that decaying pile of bits. I was overjoyed when those sneaky veternan engineers at YouTube put up their banner: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

There is this post about a experiment on google where they reduced the page weight and the traffic went up instead of down. That was because it open the site to countries with low internet bandwidth https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

OP: the YT loading paradox you are thinking of is https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

It was actually YouTube: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Or they could be ignored so that the users drag their IT kicking and screaming into the 21st century once an important enough site necessitates it. Corporate users usually have more direct influence on their IT than ISP customers. https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

> Just like when YouTube nailed the lid into the coffin of ie6. That was the work of a few people on the YouTube team, not the company itself taking a stand: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Found it, https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

I wouldn't say it's a literal bug but maybe they were talking about this: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Details matter, as they learned when making things faster made their metrics slower - https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

old tech blog about improving youtube page weight -- it paradoxically worsened their long tail stats once they sliced it geographically, they found that the increase was all in places like siberia where previously the site was unusable https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Found it! https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

That reminds me of a story where in 2009 some rouge youtube employees put up a warning that IE6 would be deprecated: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Within the past week, I wanted to check out how YouTube handles graceful degradation when browsed with something like NetSurf. Spoiler alert: it just doesn't. It wasn't that long ago that such a cavalier attitude would have been unacceptable, if not unthinkable. See https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6.

> IE6 will hang around for a few years, but may die very rapidly in workplaces when some killer enterprise web application stops supporting it. Turns out the “killer enterprise web application” was YouTube :) https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Only sort of related, but one time some of the YouTube engineering team made a code change to kill off usage of Internet Explorer 6 by bypassing the usual code screening process to circumvent management. Their boss reprimanded them but eventually got in on it, without going through the appropriate channels. Then the Docs team saw the banner they showed YouTube users, thought they had actually received approval from management and used it as evidence to convince their managers to implement their own banner (who would have normally refused). All they received was a small rebuke. In fact, management praised the team for the end result of decimating IE6 usage, as intended. Then one of the architects of the scheme blogged about it in retrospect years later. https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Took over an hour of search (before ur request) - both Google and Bing were useless. Just crossed my mind that I may have upvoted it here on HN and voila! http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Good point - I missed that. Your comment reminds me of a story [1] about how a Google engineer once significantly reduced the size of the YouTube video page but average load times got worse. Turns out they were getting lots of new users from third world countries with much worse connection speeds. I also wonder to what degree this effect counters the argument that average incomes in Australia and US have not risen for decades [2]. Perhaps native-born people see their incomes rise, but the average is dragged down by immigrants who typically have lower incomes. [1] http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters [2] http://www.rossgittins.com/2017/09/sorry-but-using-migration-to-boost.…

I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters