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This.

Chromium alone puts them in the plus column standard-wise. Usually apps are judged on merit, yet in Google's case there is the misconception that they have to defend every engineering decision they make.

I don't see how this is a hot topic seeing as every other IM is an island, and quite frankly if it means directing more resources towards projects like Google Fiber, personally I think it's more than worth it to sunset GReader or move away from a limiting standard.




Sorry but NONE of what you said is true or frankly makes any sense.

Chromium will likely be less standards based now that they don't have the tow of the other WebKit companies keeping them in check. Case in point: SPDY.

Google is not the only company who has to defend every engineering decision. The reason it is being discussed is that it is fitting into this new narrative of Google being less interested in standards and more interested in their advertising centric walled garden.

And finally Google can do multiple things at once. It isn't an either-or scenario.


SPDY is an open protocol, and Google is working towards standardization of it. Plus, many other browsers have implementations of it based on Google's protocol specification, so it's not true that SPDY is an example of Google becoming less standards based.


Exactly my point.

Google develops a proprietary protocol without ANY consultation. They then leverage the fact that they own the world's biggest website and popular browser to force it by stealth into popularity. And then afterwards decide to work to standardising it despite it not necessarily being the optimum choice for everyone.

The core protocols of the internet are fundamental. And they should be designed deliberately with as many parties as possible involved. This is not the way standards should come into existence.


Yes. Standards should be designed by committee, ensuring as many cooks are helping the broth as possible. Much like UNIX and C came out of large standards consortia composed of many industry leaders, and like the HTML5 standards evolved incredibly quickly until those darn browser manufacturers slowed them down by going off and implementing things. A single engineer or group of engineers trying to solve a real world problem have never done anything good for the world.

(DISCLAIMER: I work for Google. All of my opinions are my own and not Google's.)


Yes. Standards must either come from a single absolute dictator, or from a mess of gigantic pointless committees. Those are absolutely the only two options available, and there is no middle ground of any sort whatsoever.


Calling Google a single absolute dictator seems like a huge stretch. I'd put Google somewhere between there and a mess of committees myself.


History does indicate that the middle ground is fairly sparse.


I don't think you know what "proprietary" means, you don't pay Google to use SPDY.

They solved a problem and made something better, case in point Facebook and Twitter among others have already deployed it.

If you do some research you'll find that most standards started as projects that came out of a single company or lab that were later adopted by industry.


No. You don't understand what proprietary means. SPDY is a trademarked technology owned by a private corporation.

The only reason companies are adopting SPDY is because it is an improvement than HTTP. SPDY is far from perfect. The issue is that with core internet protocols this is not the way it should happen.


>The only reason companies are adopting SPDY is because it is an improvement than HTTP.

I don't see the problem.

>The issue is that with core internet protocols this is not the way it should happen.

This is exactly how it does happen. Someone creates something, people like it, the creators don't enforce patents on it or try to keep it a secret, someone writes it up into an RFC. That's how internet standards are created. That's how they've been created as long as there has been an internet.

Look at a counterexample. Microsoft with OOXML. Here we have a so-called standard which says things like "do this the way X version of Microsoft Word does it" without actually specifying how to do it. It's not an open standard, it's a document claiming to be an open standard on paper so that Microsoft can claim their proprietary file format is an open standard. No one else is expected to use it for any purpose other than attempting interoperability with Microsoft Office and Microsoft has no particular interest in having anyone even succeed in doing that.

SPDY is not that. Google has published a reference implementation with source code. People other than Google use it for reasons having nothing to do with interoperability and Google services continue to be available to browsers without SPDY. "They didn't ask permission first" is just disingenuous griping -- who are they even supposed to have asked?

SPDY isn't a problem. Hangouts are. I don't see source code for a reference implementation. I don't see anyone but Google implementing the protocol. That's how you know something is wrong.


The point you're missing is that people don't use it because they think its good.

They use it because they don't have a choice. If you don't help and/or follow Google you don't get to play, right now, because they own a large majority of most technologies being in use by the public today.

That's the same thing people criticized Microsoft for.

Hangout is just much more wrong tho, as you pointed out.


The point you're missing is that people don't use it because they think its good.

They use it because they don't have a choice. If you don't help and/or follow Google you don't get to play, right now, because they own a large majority of most technologies being in use by the public today.

That's the same thing people criticized Microsoft for.


SPDY isn't a trademarked technology, the name is trademarked (it should be), the protocol is not.

The way SPDY works is just like OAuth/OAuth2, HTTP, XMPP work: someone invent/improve a protocol, working on draft and get it open standard. I don't see any problem with that.


I don't see how you can jump to these false assumptions and then call my comment senseless.

Here is the "Blink manifesto" if you will: A proposal for un-prefixing https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/?fromgroups...

As for SPDY it's not proprietary and it's being baked into HTTP 2.0: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-00

And I'm not sure what you mean by "advertising walled garden" other that just throwing around some senseless hostile buzzwords.




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