[asdfasgasdgasdg]

What's insane about the timeline? They started talking about this a year and a half ago, approved it winter this year, and had it out in beta in May. How much longer should they take?

What's insane about the opt-out process? It seems very easy to me. I was able to generate an opt-out token in about three minutes for example.com. I'm a backend developer so I don't know too much about web servers, but I imagine it would take another ten minutes for an experienced person to make a commit that adds the reverse origin trial header to the default headers for their servers, possibly as a cherry pick to their existing release.

What's weird about the TOS? It's just the Google standard TOS, which you have to abide by using google.com or any other Google web property. 99.99% of possible interested developers are already covered by it, right? There is no way Google could offer you a service like this, or even documentation for it, without some kind of terms of service.

R.e. switching to Firefox, sure, browser diversity is great, but that won't affect anyone who uses your web site. They'll still be on Chrome or Safari, so this type of thing is still going to be something you have to handle. And anyway I guess that Mozilla will probably remove this option before too long as well.

[sambeau]

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

This is the noticeboard for upcoming proposed changes for Blink. You may not have known about its location before, but that does not mean it was hidden away or intentionally obscure.

[dzaima]

And now everyone who has ever made a website needs to carefully track that location, just because it might otherwise quietly break their production site? There are plenty of better ways for people to spend their time than searching through every website of everything you have ever made code for.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Software changes. It's an unfortunate reality of the profession. If you're someone who relies on the web platform for your living, you, at a minimum, need testing on the beta and dev versions of all major browsers your users use, so you'll get early notice of these types of issues. There's not any alternative approach besides never changing any installed feature, which is a possible approach, but not the one we as a species are taking.

[dzaima]

Ideally, people would. But for most, a browser breaking such a basic feature is just not on the radar. I would imagine there is a good number of extremely simple sites (or parts of sites that you'd easily assume wouldn't ever need maintaining) that this breaks. IMO, breaking a feature requires it to either be pretty much never used, have a very good reason, or be heavily publicized. This change has none.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Reasoning seems fine to me. This is reflective of different priorities, I suppose, but my view is that the primary use of alerts are scams and new JS users on sites like codepen. Removing the feature would prevent the abuses, which do far more harm than the few legit use cases do good. Especially since, for the legit uses, there are mostly straightforward fixes. A tiny handful out of the billions of users of the web platform were affected negatively. It's not an optimal tradeoff, but it's pretty close.

[_jal]

> which you have to abide by using google.com or any other Google web property

When did my web site become a Google property?

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> When did my web site become a Google property?

It isn't. Not sure that's relevant to the discussion though. We're talking about Google's TOS, which presumably the person at the start of this thread is concerned about having to accept to get an origin trial token.

[danShumway]

Seems relevant to me. Requiring a website owner who may have no relationship with Google to enter into a contract with Google in order for their website not to be broken for their users -- I think that's antithetical to the idea of an Open web.

Google is not offering any kind of service for that contract, other than that they won't break exiting functionality for your website, a thing that they have no ownership over. I feel it's problematic for a user to visit a website and essentially get told "the site will no longer work for you because the owner wouldn't sign our TOS."

TLDR, I don't like the philosophy that a website operator needs to get Google's permission for their site to work in Chrome.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

There will always be things about browsers that are different from vendor to vendor. It seems impractical to expect that you would be able to access all the relevant resources without going to the vendor's website.

[danShumway]

> It seems impractical to expect that you would be able to access all the relevant resources without going to the vendor's website.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. Going to Google's website or looking at Chrome documentation is a lot different than signing a TOS with them.

And Chromium is Open Source, so I don't need to sign a TOS to test V8 changes or get access to Chromium features.

The only reason a TOS is coming into this is because Google artificially inserted one in front of an origin trial that realistically should be handled based on some kind of request header or at most as a signup form with a DNS check for owner verification. None of that should require a legal contract or Google account.

[userbinator]

TLDR, I don't like the philosophy that a website operator needs to get Google's permission for their site to work in Chrome.

I absolutely agree with you and think that we need a term for (the opposition to) this: browser neutrality.

[alasdair_]

> What's weird about the TOS?

My website has nothing to do with Google. Why should I have to agree to a contract with Google just so people can use my site?

Would you be fine with Facebook also forcing agreement with a contract just to view a completely third party website in a web browser?