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Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

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Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#81

Post by josteink »

jaimeyap wrote: post #65
diggan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is indeed functional in Firefox, with some adjustments to their animations, it would be "running properly". And yes, they are going out of their way to make it run only in Chrome since all the rest of the browsers are blocked.

Going into your firefox flags and disabling content security policy does not count as "working in Firefox". Also the linked post reports performance problems. Never assume malice when there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. They shipped an awesome product as fast as they could. Firefox support is probably coming soon.

> Never assume malice when there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

A technical explanation? You mean like Google disabling security checks on their own domains, violating internet-standards?

Well yes certainly that would be a problem, unless they also controlled a majority-share browser.

Oh wait. Does this sounds like Microsoft of the 90s yet?

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#82

Post by alexbecker »

custardcream wrote: post #41
cognivore wrote: post #39

There's not really a good reason for Google to make applications they create work outside their own run-time environment - Chrome. Any technical reason they might offer (sparse array performance) is just facetious. They have the technical know-how to solve such problems, but business wise it makes little sense. I use three web browsers for just that reason. Chrome for Google products (YouTube, Gmail, now Inbox, etc.)…

Yes there is. It's the world wide web. An interoperable universal interaction standard. Or it was until Google started pulling an IE6 game. I use Firefox for everything because there is no central motivation to specialise. If a site doesn't work well, it doesn't get my business.

>an IE6 game

That's harsh.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#83

Post by danielweber »

phpnode wrote: post #54
diggan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for that information! Will include it in the post when I get a chance. The performance is kind of bad in Firefox but I'm not sure it justifies blocking the entire browser because of that. For a comparison, Google Photos is slow as hell in Firefox, but you could still use it if you want to.

If they'd supported Firefox from the start everyone would be slating them for "crippling" Firefox, or they would have had a poor user experience that would turn a non trivial percentage of early adopters off the entire product. They cannot win here, it was a bug in FF, it is now fixed, presumably they'll stop blocking when the fix is more widely available.

This is an ancient lesson in software development. IIRC back in the early 1990s there was a beta build of Microsoft Office sent out to early adopters with full debugging turned on, and one of them wrote a newspaper review about how slow the new version was, despite the adopter being explicitly told it was a debug build and would be slower. "It's just to show off new features, not new speed."

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#84

Post by josteink »

alexbecker wrote: post #82
custardcream wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there is. It's the world wide web. An interoperable universal interaction standard. Or it was until Google started pulling an IE6 game. I use Firefox for everything because there is no central motivation to specialise. If a site doesn't work well, it doesn't get my business.

>an IE6 game That's harsh.

It's accurate.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

custardcream wrote: post #69
cognivore wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, that'd be nice if we had a "interoperable universal interaction standard." But now the majority (and soon, almost everyone) will be using the internet on tiny personal computers (smartphones) that run native apps. Using a web browser will become less and less important or even relevant. In such a case the costs of optimizing for multiple run-times makes little sense. Really, abandoning the browser for nati…

As someone who is old enough to have written "programs" and sees the instant relationship to "apps", I vigorously disagree. Lets consider these points: 1. Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs. This means there is little common ground between the three major sectors of the market. You either have to pick one and lose market share or pick all and increase cost. Nothing (yet) has solved…

A small tangent.

> and doesn't give a fuck if the device works after you've sold

Which is even worse on the web, where most of the time that someone also doesn't give a fuck about you at all and will just pull the product the moment he gets enough users to make an exit.

There are good things about having a working binary on your device; the author can't just take it away from you just because he doesn't care about the product anymore.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#86

Post by microtonal »

cognivore wrote: post #39

There's not really a good reason for Google to make applications they create work outside their own run-time environment - Chrome. Any technical reason they might offer (sparse array performance) is just facetious. They have the technical know-how to solve such problems, but business wise it makes little sense. I use three web browsers for just that reason. Chrome for Google products (YouTube, Gmail, now Inbox, etc.)…

Any technical reason they might offer (sparse array performance) is just facetious. They have the technical know-how to solve such problems, but business wise it makes little sense.

Indeed. They cared about open standards when Microsoft was still dominating and the new categories were in their infancy. Later, they cared because Apple dominated smart phones and tables for some years. But now that Android has an ~85% worldwide marketshare, Google Mail is probably the most popular e-mail provider, and Chrome made serious inroads on the desktop, they feel confident enough to slowly start ignoring standards to lock other browsers and ecosystems out.

Of course, the historical difference compared to Microsofts rise is that hackers always had contempt for Microsoft, while Google is loved in large contingents.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#87

Post by jimktrains2 »

a3_nm wrote: post #64
jimktrains2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is with sending mail. Running my own mail server just feels like a loosing proposition as inevitably it'll be blocked because it's not a well known one.

Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you... (I have been my own SMTP server (hosted by OVH) for a few months now. I was blocked exactly once, by custom filtering from a small provider where the delivery status notification said to appeal to abuse@, I emailed them and they fixed it in minutes.)

> Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you...

What will happen? More people will block small providers because fewer exists? The issue is much larger than that. There need to be better ways to deal with email than just dropping it for arbitrary reasons.

> I was blocked exactly once

... that you know of

I've worked for companies where our internal mail servers just couldn't email some people; we presume their ISP black listed us and never published it on a shared list. (We only know this because people would call because they never got the email with the link to their purchased item.)

I do not have the time to worry about if every email I send will get delivered. Many systems don't send you a status notification; they just accept and then drop the message, meaning you may not see an error in the logs. You may not show up on public black lists for days. That's not something I want to be sinking my time into. I'd rather pay someone to run a well-known service that is very unlikely to have delivery issues.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#88

Post by freehunter »

diggan wrote: post #15
pilif wrote: post #9

On the HN thread accompanying the release of Google Inbox, a (supposed) engineer working on Inbox was saying that the reason for the exclusion of Firefox was a performance issue with accessing sparse arrays with huge indexes. Link to the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498 Link to the bugzilla entry: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963

Thanks a lot for that information! Will include it in the post when I get a chance. The performance is kind of bad in Firefox but I'm not sure it justifies blocking the entire browser because of that. For a comparison, Google Photos is slow as hell in Firefox, but you could still use it if you want to.

Google blocked Windows Phone from accessing Google Maps in the browser (both the desktop and mobile versions) with the claims that IE was unsupported, even though Google Maps UK worked just fine.

Google does have a history of blocking browsers they don't support, no matter how functional it may seem.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#89

Post by aroberge »

shadowmint wrote: post #68
phpnode wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they'd supported Firefox from the start everyone would be slating them for "crippling" Firefox, or they would have had a poor user experience that would turn a non trivial percentage of early adopters off the entire product. They cannot win here, it was a bug in FF, it is now fixed, presumably they'll stop blocking when the fix is more widely available.

They could have made the effort to make this work on firefox from the start, but someone decided the effort wasnt worth it. The 'would have been bad experience to new users' is a strawman arguement. Solution: dont release product until it works . Firefox is fast enough if you write code with it in mind. ...but hey, who cares about anything except chrome right? If someone visits play.google.com on an ipad and safari c…

If it had worked in Firefox and Chrome, but not on Internet Explorer, what should they have done? Think about that...

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#90

Post by freehunter »

custardcream wrote: post #57
silon3 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one can run Visual Studio on OSX/Linux...

That's not going to happen any time soon. Not because they don't want to but because the whole process would be monumentally complicated and expensive. I suspect we'll see a new 100% managed code IDE in the next 3-5 years that will fit this area nicely. It'll have bits of Visual Studio in it and it may even be called Visual Studio but it won't be what we have now.

They literally just said Visual Studio 2015 will run on Linux and Mac.

--As people pointed out, this isn't true. I was confused by Ars Technica's headline declaring VS to be "cross platform".

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/visual...

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