161–170 of 217 posts
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"Sure, they collect a bunch of your data, but it's for the purpose of them being able to serve more relevant ads to you if I'm not mistaken, since that's where most of their money is made." You gloss over this as if its not a big deal.
Please cite examples in which Google has demonstrated that they could not be trusted with information that they use to deliver targeted ads to you. Did they ever pull a Facebook-esque social experiment by trying to limit what you saw in order to manipulate your feelings over the course of a day? Do they sell personal information about you for other companies to use however they please? Think about this a little bit b…
I'd also like to point out that the drama around Facebook's social experiment was totally overblown. People essentially mixed up what Facebook did (something not unlike an A/B test) with what some imagined Facebook in theory could do (silently but significantly influence emotional state of users), and after articles started calling this "manipulating your feelings" the Internet totally lost it. After all, the extent to which Facebook "manipulated your feelings over the course of a day" is much smaller than, say, 9gag's or that of a television ad.
This is the same problem as the one you're complaining about here - generic accusations about totally overblown things.
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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…
You might have an argument if Chrome wasn't open source. Being that is not the case...
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.
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…
> 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. Would you also agree that it would be OK for Microsoft to create…
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Adding innovative features is now considered vendor lock-in? Interesting.
The "innovative feature" in question here (that they're depending on in Chrome) is performance of sparse arrays with enormous indexes. That's not an "innovative feature" in my mind; in most languages that would be considered an abuse of the built-in array type.
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The "innovative feature" in question here (that they're depending on in Chrome) is performance of sparse arrays with enormous indexes. That's not an "innovative feature" in my mind; in most languages that would be considered an abuse of the built-in array type.
This doesn't seem to have any relevance to "vendor lock-in" though.
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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…
Google Chrome is the only browser running Google's own V8, a very bleeding edge piece of technology. Google is working on things like browser-based material design and persistent connections. Things which Inbox uses. Providing backwards and parallel compatibility is a secondary concern.
And this is exactly why people are worried about things like this. Google has, depending on who you ask, somewhere between a quarter and a half of all desktop browser usage share. They're the browser shipped by default with Android nowadays, and Android is a big part of the mobile and tablet market these days. By the same token, Google is a huge part of the Internet -- Google runs many of the most popular sites, and is also probably the single-largest source of referral traffic for the vast majority of websites.
And now, you're saying that Google views pushing the bleeding edge in the browser for its browser-based applications is more important to Google than being compatible with other browser implementations. And you wonder why people are starting to worry about Google?
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Just out of curiosity, what do people typically slam google for? I feel like I have a lot of trust in their services -- a hell of a lot more than facebook, and somewhere around on par with apple. Sure, they collect a bunch of your data, but it's for the purpose of them being able to serve more relevant ads to you if I'm not mistaken, since that's where most of their money is made, and their ads are fairly clean and n…
"Sure, they collect a bunch of your data, but it's for the purpose of them being able to serve more relevant ads to you if I'm not mistaken, since that's where most of their money is made." You gloss over this as if its not a big deal.
Personally, I am beginning to fear that the whole idea of privacy starts to block progress and in the end we'll have to choose between the two. Apart from the dystopian future everyone fears, there are also astoundingly huge amounts of good things that can happen thanks to data companies like Google or Facebook collect.
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.
If a random startup does it, they don't have the same conflict of interest as a maker of a major browser does, so there's no reason to expect the reaction to be the same.