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

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

#241

Post by gwenzek »

fyrstenberg wrote: post #22
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…

I discovered this as well. Not only, they're faking it with the new YouTube design as well. I had to set my user agent to Chrome to get the new dark theme (it may have changed later). I did try different user-agents using AgentX[1] and with Edge UA they said the new look wouldn't work (or in effect something along those lines), so there is not much actual feature check going on. Only setting Chrome would give me all…

Do you have a user-agent addon that works on mobile?

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

#242

Post by piyush_soni »

Besides Google being shitty here, the only thing that strikes me in this article is this irony: According to the article, Jon von Tetzchner is giving talks and raising concerns on "data gathering and ad targeting practices" from Google, but in turn, wants to use the same to advertise his product? Doesn't it show at least some level of hypocrisy? It's almost like "I don't like that Google tracks its users, so I made this shiny new browser, but I'll use Google's tracking services to advertise it nevertheless".

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

#243

Post by itsthejb »

kuschku wrote: post #186
sogen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the return of 90s "best viewed with IE" but for Chrome...

A list of sites affected by this: Google Translate ("You are using an outdated browser, Upgrade now to the safer Chrome with integrated translation!" (on Firefox 57...) Google Inbox (during the launch) YouTube (the new redesign) Allo (atm Chrome-Only) Hangouts (Chrome-Only) Earth (Chrome-Only)

Google Docs. Text selection, for one thing, is off on Safari

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

#244

Post by jchw »

lmm wrote: post #202
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.

That might make sense for some cases, but honest to God, it's usually not worth it.

First of all, you have to make a warning pretty ridiculously blatant before people actually will even read it. Most people skip right past red and yellow boxes, and nobody ignores browser support warnings better than IE users.

Secondly, then once users decide to ignore anyways, they clog up your support. At Google scale, that is probably a serious monetary difference. For most companies, it's just frustrating to the support staff and a general waste of limited time. Even if your warnings work, some users don't know enough and assume that the default web browser can't be wrong. You may even find someone who swears up and down they use Chrome (or perhaps just 'Google,') but actually they're on Edge, maybe even by accident.

A lot of web best-practices are focused on developers and not end users. Sometimes they're at odds with each-other. For example, the large portion of users on IE are a bigger concern than the almost unobservably small portion on browsers that would work but get UA blocked. For a web browser nowadays, as Microsoft has learned, it's better to pretend to be Webkit than to try to convince people to implement 'proper' checking for features.

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

#245

Post by emmelaich »

_pmf_ wrote: post #153
emmelaich wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a multihundred billion dollar web company because they carefully manage their resources.

Dozens of product duds speak a different language.

You mean discontinued duds? That reinforces my point rather than negates it.

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

#246

Post by rconti »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #213
rconti wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All one has to do is look at the abomination that Google turned Images Search into. Or the Print dialog in Chrome. or...

...Maps, which used to not suck. I suspect "Vice President Penis Syndrome" is in effect here, where a new VP comes on board and feels the need to piss on a product to make his mark and/or show everybody he's more of a man than his predecessor.

I like that term. I've always felt some new PM was coming in and changing things just to make it look like they were Doing Important Things.

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

#247

Post by Fnoord »

kuschku wrote: post #184
xerophyte12932 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. At some point they should stop considering FF users as "well they aren't OUR users" in the cost benefit equation. They have to acknowledge that FF has a big chunk of the market and it should be part of the "Browsers we test on" list. Considering the features work fine on FF, the actual costs for testing on FF should be minimal.

Well, they’re busy solving that with alternative solutions, by paying devs to secretly install Chrome with their software, and set it as default, and similar shady deals. This is helpfully decimating the marketshare of anything that isn’t Chrome. Even the VLC authors documented how Google tried paying them to ship Chrome as default with their installers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=48s Google even t…

> Even the VLC authors documented how Google tried paying them to ship Chrome as default with their installers:

It doesn't mention when though. If its around the time where MSIE was dominant, well, I (FWIW) got less of a problem with that. Because -even with its profiling- Google Chrome is objectively a far, far better browser than MSIE ever was. And the Google of 2005 or 2010 is a better Google than Microsoft was in 1998 or 2002. Check the Halloween documents on that one.

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

#248

Post by Fnoord »

dralley wrote: post #233
wilun wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web history repeats over and over. This might lead to an even more interesting browser UA string in the future. Like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36 MOZILLA IS FUCKING WRITTEN AT THE BEGINNING ANYWAY POOR SUCKERS!" 10 years latter, Firefox will take over the world again (when people will have enough of calling Google evil all day wit…

Unfortunately, I find this unlikely for one simple reason. Back when Firefox first took over during the worst days of Microsoft's complacency/fuckery with Internet Explorer, a significant proportion of web users were techies, or people who were in close proximity to techies. A browser like Firefox could win based on technical merits and word of mouth. Nowadays, not only do a significant portion of the population not…

> Nowadays, not only do a significant portion of the population not know or care what the difference is, they just use Chrome because "Google" and "the internet" are indistinguishable.

I hear the same is true about Facebook.

Yet both cannot be logically true, and Facebook doesn't make their own browser (though their app does use an embedded version of Chrome).

Imagine seeing "the internet" like a gigantic bubble bath. There's some very large bubbles, like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft till some extend. Many can overlap, touch each other. Some small ones get absorbed in larger ones. Some are more omnipresent than others. But right now, there's still other, smaller ones, and new internet-related startups exist every day (little bubbles). But not all of the small or medium bubbles become large ones.

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

#249

Post by WalterSear »

exikyut wrote: post #114
WalterSear wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. I've witnessed their adwords team plunder a startup marketing team's budget with false promises and bad advice.

Some extra detail (what's easy to share) could be very interesting.

Sorry, I've really tried to come up with anything it seems reasonable to share more than:

'Google's ostensible adword assistance team were no more than glorified inside sales and, over the protests of the rank and file, bamboozled management into throwing over a $1 million dollars of good money after bad which helped sink the company'

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

#250

Post by Nomentatus »

breakingcups wrote: post #169
LarryPage wrote: post #27

Google hasn't been my default search engine for 6+ months. In fact the only Google things I use frequently are Android and Chromium (through Opera). I feel better about my internet usage, and I've been having a much better experience. Obligatory "username checks out"

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

Also switched to DuckDuckGo about a month ago, because Google was ignoring words in my enquiries to show me what the AI hallucinated I might want to see. Works much better than it used to. It does have some AI hallucinations, but not nearly as many.
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