While WEI is thankfully cancelled, it’s not entirely cancelled… They’re planning on making it available still in WebViews with the intention that websites can check if a malicious Android app is trying to do a phishing scheme.
Seems like such a niche “security” feature… what are they really trying to accomplish here? Something seems fishy to me
this is not cancellation. This is Google taking a step back, and regroup to attack back.
Its a common practice to do exactly that. Just demand something very absurd and let people rage about it, then “step back” to “please the masses” while in reality your “step back” idea is the thing you actually wanted to do from the beginning on. But now people are happy about it.
They care about one thing only: Money.
Obviously this is more of a strategic retreat and nothing else. It’s also a very common tactic to push for something crass, pull back, wait a bit and repeat. Most commonly resistance gets weaker each time, because people are people.
Now if anyone thinks they made money with a retreat and won’t try again, because it’s obviously much more lucrative, which stone exactly are you living under?
You are 100% correct. Nothing is won till you make it impossible for Google to push forward or destroy their motivation for trying again later.
Ha, I didn’t know there’s a name for that, but it’s definitely what I assume they’re going to do. My initial reaction was to wonder what they’ll now present as the “reasonable” option to WEI.
Considering they’re rolling it out in Android, maybe they’ll just wait a moment and then integrate it into desktop Chrome as well, just without any of the fanfare?
They grew thanks to the open internet where everyone let them scrape their website’s content. They can’t let anyone do that again.
Sure it isn’t. * Wink wink nudge nudge*
It’ll be back. With a different name and modified messaging.
@macleod @dean @rysiek they already started, they want to put it in android now: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/11/increasing-trust-for-embedded-media.html?m=1
They want to put it on the default webview in android, which doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me. It would basically let apps that use webview for things like logging in beef up their security.
It’s not like the entire concept of this API was bad, it’s just that with Google’s proposed implementation companies would abuse the fuck out of it to do bad things. Not having it in browsers pretty much eliminates that while still letting things like banking apps enjoy some of the benefits.
