this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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I suspect the websites that use this system won't be worth visiting anyway.
So you won't use your banks website?
Or your utilities (gas/water/electricity/internet)?
You won't let your kids use the portal at their school for submitting assignments?
Your government sites for renewing your drivers license or scheduling hard refuse pickup?
I can think of lots of reasons that will force me to have chrome installed if this goes ahead.
As a government programmer, let me assure you that we're so goddamn far behind modern tech we've only just stopped supporting IE6.
Comforting and Terrifying.
Comferrifying?
Terriforting?
In all seriousness we make sure things work with modern browsers, but you're never going to find a government agency requiring the latest and most advanced tech. For one thing, nothing in government moves fast enough to make that even remotely possible.
Also there's no way I'm gonna learn how to use some new piece of tech every few months. They don't pay us nearly enough for that kind of effort.
EDIT: Oh but I wasn't kidding about dropping support for IE6 recently. It was like a year or so ago, not last week, but still.
Comfifying
Terriforting in this case
Which government?
Yes
All of them
State of Nevada in my case, but I've worked with a lot of other state and federal agencies. Pretty much all of them are like that. At best their legislatures will get a wild hair and spend a bunch of money on some off-the-shelf "latest and greatest" product (not really, it's usually something like Salesforce) and they'll be top of the line for a few years, but when it comes to actually keeping it upgraded and cutting edge that never happens.
Lots of potential for accessibility lawsuits, too.
Good point. If it's just some random website though, fuck em.
I work on the website for a medium sized utility, and will definitely resist implementing this.
I have been trying to convince my manager to let me switch to an authentication solution that supports webauthn, though.
A manager only has so much power. Once the higher ups decide on things, nothing can be done. And we see too much examples of executive level people that are so out of touch.
I was just thinking about this more, and what if Google decides to implement this on Google maps? Am I going to have to put a message up saying something like, "sorry, you can't view our outage map unless you use a browser that supports web integrity"?
Because you're right, convincing the higher ups to let me switch to OpenStreetMap is probably going to be a losing battle.
it might even go as far as being chrome on a supported OS (win/mac/cros/android with google play services)
Sigh, too true.
I'll have a specific VLAN for people needing those things
Yeah, but if Chrome is only used for a couple of utility websites, it won't be a win for Google.
This whole episode is giving me flashbacks to the ActiveX days.
The tyranny of the default.
"Here mum, I've installed Firefox for you, it's better than Chrome in every way!"
"My knitting circle website doesn't work, I can't download patterns, it says I need Chrome"
Internet Explorer was effectively abandon-ware for a decade after Microsoft used their OS pseudo-monopoly to crush Netscape.
It took another tech giant abusing THEIR monopoly to relegate IE to the trash heap it should have already been on.