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

A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 194 posts

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#111

Post by jhanschoo »

nindalf wrote: post #30

I thought the thread would have more substance to it. His claim is that Google products would have performance bugs or would explicitly block any non-Chrome browser. As a long time Firefox user, I’m with him so far. But he loses me on the next bit where he rules out incompetence and then jumps to org-level malice. I don’t think it’s either. A simpler explanation is that Google simply stopped caring about non-Chrome b…

I remember this "oops": http://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-c... use of a deprecated API was slowing YouTube. Others may remember other oopses.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#112

Post by lou1306 »

spiralganglion wrote: post #17
GrayShade wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use a Mac, but it's a known issue with the high-resolution ones. I believe it doesn't use the OS compositor, so it ends up redrawing too much. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965

I've used a few retina Macs to do various kinds of web dev. Firefox tends to do some things fastest (eg: re-layout when resizing the window), some things the slowest (eg: certain large, complex CSS animations). For most things, it's perceptually equivalent to Chrome or Safari. Some things that are fast/good in Chrome will be slow/bad in FF, and vice versa. The biggest shortcomings I currently face are (1) a lot of ba…

A big problem of early Quantum Firefox on HiDPI Macs was its high battery usage. I think it got slightly better with later releases, but I don't have data to support that.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#113

Post by kdtsh »

peex wrote: post #71
roenxi wrote: post #6

One of the 'mysteries' of corporations is that they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their corporate interests. People don't seem to expect that of companies with a public face and seem surprised when they turn out to be just like any other corporate group. It's a coordination thing - coordinating a large group of people is so challenging only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on…

Corporations or any other business exist solely on one purpose: to make profit. If you're not making any profit you're not doing business, you're running a charity. That's why you can't trust corporations when it comes to anything "open" and "free".

There is some nuance required here, since ‘corporation’ is such a vague term. Even Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, is a for-profit organisation (i.e. it aims to turn a profit and is taxed) which which reinvests its profit back into Mozilla’s projects and and other work which Mozilla considers to be in the public interest for a free and open Internet.

Everyone has to question the stated goals and desires of corporations, and ask things like e.g who is the corporation accountable to (shareholders? themselves?) and how open is the corporation about how it invests its profit. Attempting to turn a profit is in itself not necessarily an indication that everything they do is in the sole pursuit of profit for itself.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#114

Post by nindalf »

evmar wrote: post #48
nindalf wrote: post #30

I thought the thread would have more substance to it. His claim is that Google products would have performance bugs or would explicitly block any non-Chrome browser. As a long time Firefox user, I’m with him so far. But he loses me on the next bit where he rules out incompetence and then jumps to org-level malice. I don’t think it’s either. A simpler explanation is that Google simply stopped caring about non-Chrome b…

I was thinking about this comment and I thought of the perfect analogy: accessibility. Everyone in the abstract would like to make accessible websites. Some people at Google are really passionate about accessibility and advocate for it, while others don't know as much about it or overlook it when building their product. There's surely some organization-level guidelines like "make sure your product is accessible befor…

This is an excellent analogy.

Personally I'm surprised by Google's attitude to a11y/Firefox because all their products have millions of users. 10% doesn't sound like much, but 10% (Firefox market share) of 50 million is more than the population of many countries.

I guess they rationalise it by saying "our product is new, with 0 users right now. Let's focus on the largest segments of users (Chrome, non-a11y) and ship an MVP. If it sticks, let's expand to Firefox, do the a11y work etc." If I was in that PM's shoes, this makes sense to me. As a user ... it feels wrong.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#115

Post by dastx »

For the past 3 years I've noticed gmail being extra slow on Firefox. Every other site loads almost instantly, except gmail. Even when I used to use Facebook, it would load fairly quick. Chrome wasn't much quicker or slower. Except for gmail. Gmail loads almost instantly on Chrome. I've basically given up on using mail's web interface even though I much prefer it over all linux mail clients.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#116

Post by tim333 »

itronitron wrote: post #90
Angostura wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average. That was always the power of 'Don't be evil'. It gave employees official permission, perhaps even requirement to challenge decisions that could at least be thought of as being evil in some way. It was a shame it was deprecated.

a colleague of mine pointed out many years ago that the slogan is not in fact 'Do be good' but rather just 'don't be evil'.

Be good is much more grey - all actions probably have some good but are not perfectly good. Whereas evil stuff is hopefully unusual.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#117

Post by eythian »

jhasse wrote: post #85
GrayShade wrote: post #2

They didn't try to, they actually won. Microsoft switching to Blink was had news for Mozilla, and sites that are "optimized for Chrome" started to crop up all over the place. Yes, Firefox is slow on Macs, but you should consider switching to it. We know how it went with IE back then. On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition.

> On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition. Firefox doesn't open links handled by apps directly with the app, like almost every other Android browser does. This makes it unusable for me. Here's the bug report (7 years old) btw: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806385

I personally don't mind that. Also, it gives you a button to open the page in the app, so it's not like it makes it unusable.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#118

Post by lol768 »

bprasanna wrote: post #16

I don't know whats going wrong with Firefox. Im still an active firefox user. I intentionally avoid Chrome and use it rarely to see if the site which doesn't work in Firefox also doesn't work in Chrome. IMHO Firefox didn't make me feel slow anytime. The whole point of Google Chrome automatically logging-in as Gmail user throughout the browser should have sounded alarm for people who care about privacy. I do agree Goo…

>IMHO Firefox didn't make me feel slow anytime

Agreed, used it since version 2. Been happy with it for over a decade.

It's not been flawless, but I never felt the need to jump ship. Flash used to be pretty slow on Linux and fullscreen video was sometimes a bit unpredictable. Of course, who cares about that now? :P The WebExtension transition was a bit premature in my opinion, but I think we're slowly getting there with new APIs. Prior to that, Firefox had the most rich functionality available to extensions of all browsers - and on mobile it's still better than Chrome.

Recently, it's been getting better. We had Developer Edition (though dev tools were always done pretty well in Firefox - I've been able to take screenshots of DOM elements via GLCI for 7 years, Google only got around to copying this feature in 2017), then Quantum. I'm optimistic about the future of the browser.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#119

Post by seba_dos1 »

vezycash wrote: post #103
nindalf wrote: post #30

I thought the thread would have more substance to it. His claim is that Google products would have performance bugs or would explicitly block any non-Chrome browser. As a long time Firefox user, I’m with him so far. But he loses me on the next bit where he rules out incompetence and then jumps to org-level malice. I don’t think it’s either. A simpler explanation is that Google simply stopped caring about non-Chrome b…

>But he loses me on the next bit where he rules out incompetence and then jumps to org-level malice. Google deliberately blocked Windows Phone users from MAPs. They gave bullshit reason that the browser wouldn't work. But it worked for those who knew how to change their user agent to something else. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-admits-it-was-blockin...

It's stunning to me that in 2019 there are still people on Hacker News that don't believe in Google doing things like that intentionally.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#120

Post by goalieca »

cm2187 wrote: post #82
blihp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But likely few people, if anyone, in the organization have any serious incentives (i.e. bonus/promotion) to proactively prioritize that. On the other hand, they almost certainly have at least bonuses on the line to add X users to service/product Y or roll out feature Z (server or client side.) So people work toward what the company rewards[1] and everything else becomes a break/fix situation as it occurs and time per…

I get your point but actually it should go the other way round. If the owner of Google Doc is really focused on own user base only, the incentive would be to make it the most browser compatible. By making it run on chrome only, google docs is potentially sacrificing its user base for a greater purpose.

I don’t think this is true at all. From everything ive seen, large corporations favour shipping new products and new features. It seems rare to support existing customers unless there is a lot of money tied to it which is probably not the cases for Firefox users. This is doubly true since there is a known workaround to Firefox support: use chrome!

You can try and blame sales, you can try and blame “innovate or die” but also engineering always shares some blame too. Often it’s engineering who want to exploit shiny new tech or make new shiny thing and not do the inglorious work of maintenance and support.

Post reply on HN