“Google: it is time to return to not being evil” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#201

Post by fbender » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:42 PM UTC

vram22 wrote: post #68

nostrademons wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I used to work on the webserver for Google Search. Left Google several years ago, have no more vested interest in them.) The reason for the browser-sniffing in search is a combination of ease of testing + latency reduction. By supporting a known set of browsers, you can write a test plan for each and shard it out among contractors (or ideally, automate it with a Selenium config). Manual tests run on every release (2…

I was just going to ask why search should be browser-specific, until I read your last paragraph.

Try progressive enhancement, or at least graceful degradation. Displaying a freakin' search field shouldn't be that hard.

And finally, why not load the necessary polyfills and fixes on demand? When the old/slow browsers need time to get ready, a few hundred milliseconds more or less don't matter.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#202

Post by lmm » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:46 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #51

"Seems to work" is not the same thing as "Working As Intended". I work on Gmail/Inbox (previously GWT). When we released Inbox, it started out as Chrome only, people discovered they could get it to load and seemingly work on Firefox by spoofing, but the reality was, it was still broken, and would eventually consume all memory, because Inbox relies on sparse Javascript array behavior for protobufs, and something like…

Blocking a specific browser is always wrong. Warn if you have to, but let the user use their own browser.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#203

Post by lmm » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:47 PM UTC

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #82

Steeeve wrote: post #67

Isn't vivaldi just another branded chromium? Seems a bit disingenuine for them to be complaining about the company that built their product.

Isn't Chromium just a repackaging of KHTML from the KDE project?

Yes, and if Google was bad-mouthing KDE then we should call them out for it. What was your point?

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#204

Post by taoufix » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:49 PM UTC

Jonnax wrote: post #12

Google are really shitty with their web browser especially on mobile. If you run Firefox you get a stripped down version of Google Search also with no infinite scrolling for images and low resolution. Use a user agent spoofer like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-... And it seems to work fine on Firefox. I'm sure their official excuse is that they only support WebKit based browsers on…

Thanks a lot for the add-on.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#205

Post by pyroinferno » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:28 PM UTC

golfer wrote: post #198

FreezerburnV wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that Microsoft publicly offered to work directly with Google to get the Youtube app working correctly according to what Google wanted, ads and all. The only reason it "stripped" ads originally was because Google didn't work with them to add them in the first place. Also keep in mind that there were, at the time, other Youtube apps that worked (to some extent) just fine, and Google didn't go after them. I…

Ahh, the public offer to help. Great PR move that ignores all Microsoft's other actions against Google throughout time. Competition is fair game. Consider: - the existence of Bing - Every version of IE and Windows starting from over a decade ago has made it more difficult to change the default search engine from Bing. Comically difficult, even - Microsoft's creation/funding of entities like Fairsearch.org, whose prim…

"the public offer to help"

Well Microsoft is a PUBLIC company. I'm sure their shareholders probably wanted to know what was going on.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#206

Post by fbender » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 2:13 PM UTC

prophesi wrote: post #73

Endy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike you, it's the open-source parts of Vivaldi I'm most afraid of. I trust them to support their users and I believe they desire to have users who trust & respect them. I don't trust people who are more code-savvy than I am (that's most people) not to insert or exploit weaknesses in open-source software or other open code. With closed-source software, I know the origin point of the software I install, I know the n…

Both open-source and closed-source have their problems. Closed Source: - Team behind it could add trackers, backdoors, etc that are difficult to detect. - Attackers could find an exploit that will go unnoticed and unfixed for an indeterminable length of time. Or perhaps use the team's own aforementioned exploits/backdoors. - Can't tell if their app is well-tested and well-written, which means it could be a buggy hot…

> - Attackers could add their own exploit that will go unnoticed or unfixed for an indeterminable length of time.

That's why not everyone has commit access* (for both open and closed source projects) and there's always* a code review performed by independent peers. This neither protects you from accidental security issues nor highly obfuscated malicious exploits (only sufficient skills of the reviewer does), but that holds true to both open and closed source projects. For the former, the "indeterminable length of time" until exploits are found may be much shorter than for closed source projects due to increased eyeballing for large projects.

* Let's ignore those who ignore common sense. If you care about the security of the software you use, you want the developer(s) to follow basic rules of software development. And you can even verify that in open source projects without needing to know how to code. For closed source projects you can't, you can only trust the company to do so. How's that different to trusting the skills of the open source developers?

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#207

Post by sol_remmy » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 2:19 PM UTC

> A monopoly both in search and advertising, Google, unfortunately, shows that they are not able to resist the misuse of power.

The ONLY thing that makes Google close to a monopoly is government power - hear me out:

Google has patented all of their search algorithms. This is akin to patenting all of the O(nlog) sorting algorithms. Competitors are left with using Bubble Sort.

The simple solution is to invalidate some of these patents. Then the "monopoly" problem will fix itself.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#208

Post by Endy » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 2:22 PM UTC

fbender wrote: post #196

Endy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strikes me as both a bad sign about Google's direction and Mozilla's willingness to accept that without publicly calling them out as Vivaldi just did.

Mozilla did multiple times and is doing it, sometimes even doing the work that Google is supposed to do (see e.g. the Webcompat project [1]). The point is, this problem is basically unsolvable without having the reach of Google and thus everone (incl. Microsoft!) is forced to spoof the UA. See also https://webcompat.com/

No company is "supposed" to do anything in my eyes; and I'd rather if they all did a lot less that wasn't defined as "produce this one very specific product that does one thing well". If anything, the agencies that are supposed to do anything for the infrastructure of the Internet are the various governments and the UN, to support an open Web. The problem is that at present the US, UK, Russia, China, North Korea, and several other key nations are trying to destroy the open Web, so it falls to companies, who are better off setting up their own walled gardens and forcing every user into the digital equivalent of the old mining company towns.

We need to stop bending to any of these groups just because they're "the big guy". If the largest Web company is building "free" and "open" stuff in an anti-competitive manner, then make sure that's painfully obvious to the end-user, make it public (i.e. an NYT article's a nice start) and then file federal lawsuits, calling on users as witnesses. The people of America beat the Robber Barons before, I don't understand the reason why we are so unwilling to do so now that they've moved to the Web. Stop spoofing, stop capitulating, stop compromising, and start fighting back.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#209

Post by LarryPage » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 2:23 PM UTC

Corristowolf wrote: post #177

breakingcups wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What search engine have you been using? I've tried others but none seem to come even close, unfortunately.

DuckDuckGo works well. Even has those info tiles that google has when you search a store etc.

Yeah I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#210

Post by ionised » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 2:24 PM UTC

bobsgame wrote: post #59

Google is not evil. They provide fantastic services and value and have made the world a much better place. Mistakes will be made and they will correct them.

Hi Larry.