Monday 5 September 2016

The day Google Chrome lost

Market dominance is never a good thing. It makes for sloppy. Careless. Arrogant. And so it is with Google Chrome. If I check my stats Chrome leads with 57%, followed by Firefox with 21% and the rest is under 10%, Safari at 7%, Qt and Internet Explorer at 6%. So you'd think they lead but they actually lost, in performance, from all others, even fucking Internet Explorer.
Because Google Chrome is the only one that doesn't correctly display the video I've embedded in my HTML5 Canvas. It makes things up. It changes dimensions.


I've put a great deal of thought into making everything independent from viewport size; I don't work in pixels, I work in percentages. So that the images and video always scale and align perfectly, on a big screen or on a tablet and even on a phone. And that works like a charm for every god damned browser, even Internet Explorer, apart from Google Chrome.
Now, obviously, you don't have to give a fuck about small independent developers like me when you're one of the biggest, richest companies on the planet. Totalitarian, monopolistic rulers don't have to give a shit about anything or anybody any more, apart from how to hide their money from the tax-man.
Yes, I'm infuriated. I've sent some tweets to the Google Chrome Devs but, sure enough, just silence is the result. I've searched my ass off to see if they had some obscure list of acceptable aspect ratios or something. Zip. Nada. So Google Chrome is fucking up my video, my display and none of the others do. THEY ARE FUCKING UP MY GAME!
It isn't me. If it was, it would happen in other browsers as well. It's them. And HTML5 is a standard, so is the video. Google Chrome fucks up standards. Big enough to get away with it.
And now I've got to spend tons of time to try and fix it. Fix Google Chrome's mistakes. Can I send them an invoice for the hours spent? Shall I just bill them? Well, they'll have many lawyers in their employ, and can afford them, to make sure nothing like that will ever be successful.
Once, long past, Google declared it didn't want to be Evil. Well, those days have passed. Google is Evil and Chrome is it's evidence. And it pisses me off to no extent that these arrogant bastards, again, rich as fuck, richer than many countries, with the smartest developers on the planet in their employ fuck over somebody like me with plain, pure, indifference, carelessly crushing ants. It's what giants do.

On a side note, Safari does change the colour depth of my video. I've got to look into that. Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and Chrome don't. But obviously, Apple is as Evil as Google. I think they have a secret competition. Who can be the biggest cunt on the planet? Get away with the most obvious atrocities? Microsoft, once contender, is out of that race for a decade now. And displays my embedded video as intended.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting post. Definitely the pain point of any web-developer and now HTML 5 game developer is the old browser inconsistencies. Chrome suffering from the same arrogance that led to IEs demise? Personally I have not had any issues with chrome though, but I will keep a look out.

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  2. I really thought it funny that in this respect *every other browser* outperforms Google Chrome. Even IE. That's hilarious.

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