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A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

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

#121

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

Why? Remember that at this point, Google Docs is "sticky". Its audience is to some degree captive, and won't switch just because the document lags a bit on Firefox. What would they switch to? Office365, for which they have to pay? It wouldn't even solve their problem, as the document in question is a link they got from a friend, already in Google Docs. It's just easier to switch to Chrome.

Most of SaaS applications operate in this regime - they own user data, so they become "sticky" and non-substitutable very quickly. On the other hand, standardization of browser features makes browsers not very "sticky". This way, when a SaaS - any SaaS, not just Google's - works much better on Chrome than on Firefox, this drives adoption of Chrome by that much.

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

#122

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

richjdsmith wrote: post #93
jhasse wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know whats going wrong with Firefox. Pocket integration, advertisement on New Tab page, the Mr. Robot debacle, Google Analytics on extension page, etc.

That's hardly worse than anything done against your privacy in Chrome...

Doesn't mean they deserve a free pass.

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

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #61
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…

> It's a coordination thing - coordinating a large group of people is so challenging only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average. Simple things with clear metrics. No, it's a self-interest thing. Also known as greed, or selfishness. Do you honestly believe that if "being a decent human being" came with a simple metric like money, then companies would deviate one iota from pure profit motive? Some…

Self-interest is rarely an issue by itself. It's the coordination problems that make greed dangerous. Coordinating means recognizing longer-term win-win solutions - cases where sacrificing immediate personal gains leads to bigger personal gains in the future. When coordination fails, people tend to pursue their immediate interests, to the detriment of many (and sometimes all) of them.

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

#124

Post by kibwen »

tim333 wrote: post #116
itronitron wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's the fallacy, then: there's no law that says that evil actions are inherently notable or eyebrow-raising. It's perfectly possible, and indeed common, to do evil by doing nothing at all.

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

#125

Post by jefftk »

nindalf wrote: post #114
evmar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 10% (Firefox market share)

Market share, across all platforms, is closer to:

* Chrome: 60%

* Safari 20%

* Firefox: 5%

* IE: 5%

* Edge: 2%

* Other: 8%

If you just mean desktop, though, then yes Firefox is about 10%. But mobile web is serious traffic these days.

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

#126

Post by TeMPOraL »

anhner wrote: post #92
jhasse wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 consider that a feature. If I go to youtube.com with firefox, it means that I intentionally want to avoid opening the app, so I don't want every video I click on in firefox to open with the youtube app. However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to.

+1. YouTube example is spot-on, as this is no.1 case where I actively avoid the app in favor of the browser. YoutTube's app and mobile website have some ridiculously stupid extra filtering that silently removes many videos - videos that are suddenly accessible if you check the "Request desktop version" box in the browsers. It's almost an universal occurrence that the video I'm searching for is one that gets silently filtered out in the app.

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

#127

Post by jefftk »

ahartmetz wrote: post #25
austincheney wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome generally outperforms Firefox. I don't agree. Chrome is pretty fast at executing JavaScript, but it is hundreds of times slower at executing DOM instructions compared to Firefox. It is also the slowest modern browser, by very far, at executing CSS animation.

It is ridiculous that JS benchmarks are accepted as "browser benchmarks". They are probably so popular with tech journalists because they are easy to run. How do you properly measure page load time (of real pages over the internet) anyway?

> How do you properly measure page load time (of real pages over the internet) anyway?

I usually use webpagetest.org, which lets you run page loads in instrumented browsers.

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

#128

Post by GrayShade »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #126
anhner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider that a feature. If I go to youtube.com with firefox, it means that I intentionally want to avoid opening the app, so I don't want every video I click on in firefox to open with the youtube app. However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to.

+1. YouTube example is spot-on, as this is no.1 case where I actively avoid the app in favor of the browser. YoutTube's app and mobile website have some ridiculously stupid extra filtering that silently removes many videos - videos that are suddenly accessible if you check the "Request desktop version" box in the browsers. It's almost an universal occurrence that the video I'm searching for is one that gets silently…

Nb. with extensions you can also get background play and even ad blocking on YouTube.

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

#129

Post by TeMPOraL »

GrayShade wrote: post #128
TeMPOraL wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. YouTube example is spot-on, as this is no.1 case where I actively avoid the app in favor of the browser. YoutTube's app and mobile website have some ridiculously stupid extra filtering that silently removes many videos - videos that are suddenly accessible if you check the "Request desktop version" box in the browsers. It's almost an universal occurrence that the video I'm searching for is one that gets silently…

Nb. with extensions you can also get background play and even ad blocking on YouTube.

> background play

Oooh, I so very much want that. Thanks, I'll check it out!

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

#130

Post by srouhaewaehy »

cm2187 wrote: post #55
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…

If you own Google docs, ensuring it doesn’t break or show an incompatible banner on competing browsers is not an abstract or metric-less concept, it is very tangible and measurable. In fact that’s the sort of thing I would expect any of their engineer to do as part of the development, unless they have been told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is OK.

The engineer doesn't decide the schedule though. Usually their activity is controlled by having to do X tasks in time(X)-time(Y)=available_time, with Y being any set of reasons, political, financial, organisational that the engineers will accept as true.

Then as engineer what can you do? Either assume toxic Management (and switch Jobs) or do a subset of what you would usually do, and that means optimize for your own browser first and only work on bugs known to your management for the other browsers.

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