1. Develop app specifically for Chrome
2. Wonder why it doesn’t work well in Firefox
3. Block Firefox via UA sniffing
4. Disband web compat team and use money on NASA hangers, balloons and robots
5. Profit
Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
101–110 of 217 posts
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering Microsoft is now Open Sourcing dotnet and releasing it for OSX and Linux, at what point did Google and Microsoft crossed each other?
I would say on Microsoft's part it was when Ballmer was ousted and Nadella took the reins. Nadella seems to be genuinely open to working with instead of against other companies and open source projects. I think he realized the ship was sinking, and he's doing what he can to save it, throwing out old and dead business practices in the process. I actually like the "new" Microsoft and the direction it's heading, and I'm…
Ballmer was at the helm when this train started rolling. It has taken years to get here. When Hanselman said to Miguel, "We did it." on stage at dev connect, I took that to mean something much larger than open sourcing Core.net. There has been a push from within on open-sourcing and pivoting on their approach to many of their lines of business that has taken so many people so many small battles, that I would sya Satya's ascendancy was the coming out party for a movement vs. some catalytic event.
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Source?
AFAIK only .net will which is not visual studio.
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#104Earlier 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…
> The 'would have been bad experience to new users' is a strawman arguement. Solution: dont release product until it works.
Except that almost no one does it nowdays. MVPs, early launches, etc. Why Google should be held to one standard while every "innovative startup" is held to a completely opposite?
By the way, did no one read what Google itself has to say about Inbox? It's explicitly stated as not a replacement for GMail. They're playing around with UX idea. You can look at it as a very elaborate A/B test.
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Well considering most of these binaries are tied to app stores and talk to the web they're about as much use if the vendor pulls the plug.
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#106Any time you see a comment like "With some more man hours, it seems trivial for Google to get the application to run in Firefox", you know the author either doesn't know what they're talking about or just hasn't thought about it very much. Anyone who's done any serious web-app development in the past decade knows that cross browser compatibility at the bleeding edge (ie, past what the JS frameworks have worked out) can consume as much time as the rest of the application put together.
At the early fast-iteration stage of a limit-seeking webapp like Inbox, it makes sense to focus on the app itself and limit yourself to just one browser. For Google, obviously they will choose Chrome. Once the app reaches some stability, and major changes are coming far more slowly, then it makes sense to start working in cross-browser compatibility.
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#107Earlier 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…
I use gmail everyday on my phone and have not bothered with downloading its app. It is pointless as I get a good enough experience on the browser and I do not want to deal with updates. And native apps are good for things like Microsoft Office or things you expect to use offline and frequently. But if you make me download an app for Facebook or gmail and get me to update it every now and then, I will get pretty annoy…
Well, I do use GMail off-line all the time - this (+ less crappy UX) is the reason I keep the app. Being able to browse and send e-mails shouldn't require being constantly on-line.
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#108Earlier 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.
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…
>And web browsers absolutely suck at UI for applications.
I prefer web apps to native apps. Day to day, at work, our CRM, bug/issue/project tracker, document management, help-desk software, phone system management, knowledge base, email, document/spreadsheet software are all web-based. Historically, those were all native 'programs' (as late as mid 2000s) and they were all crap.
>All for something that could have been created as a native app much easier.
I don't know about that. Some things are easier with html/css/js than with a native framework, but it's not just about developer comfort. Web applications provide huge benefits to users over native apps - that's why we're willing to deal with the development stack (which is getting better every year).
>Imagine the man hours and effort that went into building Gmail.
It's probably not that bad. Writing maintainable web code isn't that hard these days.
>There's a lot of reasons that people have gravitated towards apps on phones
Yes. It all really boils down to performance. If you could get 60fps with a web-app on mobile (which in principle you should achieve), I don't think users would care. You'd also see an even bigger uptake of webview-based 'native' apps (a la phone gap).
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#109Any time you see a comment like "With some more man hours, it seems trivial for Google to get the application to run in Firefox", you know the author either doesn't know what they're talking about or just hasn't thought about it very much. Anyone who's done any serious web-app development in the past decade knows that cross browser compatibility at the bleeding edge (ie, past what the JS frameworks have worked out) c…
To build upon that, it's worth noting the context: a public beta that's only a few weeks old.
Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Pretending to accept an email and then dropping just seems wrong. Is this something that reputable email providers do?
(From my experience, I have never witnessed a situation where an email I had sent to someone had silently been ignored.)