Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 217 posts

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#121

Post by pritambaral »

freehunter wrote: post #90
custardcream wrote: post #57

Earlier 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...

Are you confusing "Visual Studio 2015 ... uilding applications that run on platforms including Windows, Linux, iOS and Android." with "Visual Studio 2015 will run on"?

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

ppereira wrote: post #117
skywhopper wrote: post #106

Any 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…

That is a great technical argument, however, the reason this has attracted so much attention is because this product is about email. Email plays such an important role in our modern lives that any announcement hinting that Google is moving towards vendor lock-in for email access is going to attract scrutiny -- regardless of whether it is by innovative features, enhanced performance, or browser lockout.

> any announcement hinting that Google is moving towards vendor lock-in for email access is going to attract scrutiny

I think that - like often is on the Internet - scrutiny can be attracted too soon. Google stated clearly that current Inbox is not a replacement for GMail. Such "vendor lock-in" can currently be completely explained with the fact that they're just playing around and testing if people like new UX.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#124

Post by Silhouette »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #85
custardcream wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

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.

Tragically, in the modern software world, that often isn't true either.

Buggy junk gets shipped routinely even when people are paying real money for it. Software developers assume you'd love to have their regular updates, even if those updates also change interfaces and modify or even outright break/remove functionality however they feel like. If you don't apply the updates, you don't get security fixes either, so for any software that is at all involved with sharing data or communicating on-line many users have little choice. The idea of long term support for any stable software that people actually rely on is a joke for many projects. And that's before we even get to all the DRM/activation junk.

Ironically, the worst offenders are probably Chrome and Firefox. IME, the next worst offenders are often the supposedly high-end professional software that comes with a thousands-of-dollars-per-seat price tag -- assuming you can even buy a copy instead of renting it these days.

I'm mildly optimistic that a new generation of software seems to be arriving where people are expected to pay for good work but the prices are much more reasonable: not App Store peanuts, not Enterprice Pricing (call for a quote, because hell will freeze over before we publish any useful information publicly). A lot of these tools are relatively small or specialised, but they do their jobs well, they get very favourable feedback from users, and they have real, commercially viable development organisations behind them. Also, they rarely incorporate the user-hostile junk. So good work can still be done commercially, and of course for some of the important geek-friendly software like development tools and OS/server/networking infrastructure there are Open Source projects that are usefully stable, reliable and comprehensive. I look forward hopefully to a day when these kinds of projects are the norm for software we rely on, and we can all get on with using our computers without constantly fighting with them.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#125

Post by jimktrains2 »

a3_nm wrote: post #110
jimktrains2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Yes, it is a practice that big players do.

http://serverfault.com/questions/364132/postfix-says-mail-se...

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#126

Post by userbinator »

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

performance issue with accessing sparse arrays with huge indexes

...what? Why would they need "sparse arrays with huge indexes" anyway? This sounds more like a problem with the developers doing something ridiculous, and not the browser. Maybe Chrome is faster at it, but that's like saying "compiler X has a performance issue with bubblesort."

More precisely, I'd like to see what exactly they're trying to do with this sort of code. Optimising "sparse arrays" sounds like matrix algebra and scientific computing, not an email client.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#127

Post by [deleted] »

skywhopper wrote: post #106

Any 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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#128

Post by msandford »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #111
skywhopper wrote: post #106

Any 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…

I think that most of those comments stem from Google-hating, which is currently a big fashion here. Were it Apple doing it, they'd be lauded for their attention to user experience. Was Inbox a product of a random startup, it'd be praised for good business approach and proper prioritizing of developer time. But it's Google, so it must be some evil plan.

I'm sure that there's a lot of that going on, yes.

But Google has the legacy of their "don't be evil" company motto to content with. Which is to say that people expect (foolishly) for them to at least try not to appear evil.

The difference between Google prioritizing Chrome vs anyone else is that Google owns Chrome whereas Apple doesn't, and some random startup certainly doesn't.

It smells of Microsoft's "we'll only make this work in IE and fuck everyone else" strategy and that doesn't bring other warm thoughts to mind.

So it's not JUST that it's fashionable to think the worst of Google these days.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#129

Post by a3_nm »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #125
a3_nm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yes, it is a practice that big players do. http://serverfault.com/questions/364132/postfix-says-mail-se...

My understanding of this answer is that the SMTP said it had accepted it, but the sender would have been notified afterwards that the message had not been delivered, had the return addresses correctly been set up. This seems OK to me; I would have received the bounce.

(Also, the mail was sent from www-data, which I think was an acceptable clue to classify the message as spam no matter from which server it came from.)

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#130

Post by msandford »

Touche wrote: post #113
freehunter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, they seem to use the whitelisting strategy for all of their properties. If something isn't QAed it doesn't get enabled. I suppose at that scale the support cost isn't worth the "let them use it in a degraded way" mantra most of the web community follows.

SUPPORT COST?! HA HA HA HA HA!

You can't get support out of Google at any price, unless you're an advertiser. But in that case, it's only help for your ads and nothing else.

You can't talk about "support cost" when it's zero.

Post reply on HN