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Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

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Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#121

They're probably just user agent sniffing for non-Chrome browsers. I see this plenty when using Firefox or Safari. That said I wonder if all the State and DoJ investigations about anti-competitive behavior will force Google to stop promoting their own browser on their properties.

The user agent is equal to Chrome with "Edg" (not a typo) appended: > mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/76.0.3800.0 safari/537.36 edg/76.0.167.1 Certainly not an accident, unless they tried to save one byte by not checking on the full "Edge" token.

Very well could be an internal project/component name in MS.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#122
post #46
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why promoting your product would be an anti-competitive behavior. Anti-competitive behavior would be not letting Edge users use google or gmail.

It's anti competitive for the same reason auditing companies are not allowed to have consulting arms or if they do, they should not both work for the same customer at the same time. Channel 1 (auditing) vs channel 2 (consulting). At least in theory. There's a conflict of interest at the heart of the issue. Google offers a service which is supposed to be neutral (search) and then on top of that it also sells another (…

That's a conflict of interest, not anti-competitive.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#123
A comparable behaviour can be seen for years now on iOS. Chrome for iOS is advertised where possible, even if you would like to open a hyperlink from the show notes of a YouTube movie: You are offered to open this link with Chrome ("download"), Google App ("download"), or even with Safari ("open"). There's no real use for the user having Chrome on iOS as long as it has to use WebKit as a rendering engine, the same engine Safari uses. But there is surely a usage for Google, monetizing the user's browsing profiles.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#124
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its still not great though :( (relatively speaking)

I had been a hardcore Chrome user since the comic book days and switched back to Firefox last year. Imported my passwords and bookmarks and the transition couldn't have been smoother. I still have Chrome installed but haven't opened it more than a handful of times since. What about your experience hasn't been great?

Why do you choose to use the built-in web browser password manager?

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "oops" have begun... Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I'm not even going to get into the whole endless captcha on firefox 'feature'.

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice" -Hacker News

I remember when it was Microsoft's browser that everyone feared. They, too, had a remarkable run of incompetence that only ever seemed to flow one way.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#127

They're probably just user agent sniffing for non-Chrome browsers. I see this plenty when using Firefox or Safari. That said I wonder if all the State and DoJ investigations about anti-competitive behavior will force Google to stop promoting their own browser on their properties.

The user agent is equal to Chrome with "Edg" (not a typo) appended: > mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/76.0.3800.0 safari/537.36 edg/76.0.167.1 Certainly not an accident, unless they tried to save one byte by not checking on the full "Edge" token.

[deleted]

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#128
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "oops" have begun... Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I'm not even going to get into the whole endless captcha on firefox 'feature'.

I have been using gmail for quite long time. It is getting ridiculously terrible these days (in the past couple of years I guess!) My old laptop fans go crazy when I launch chrome. It’s too much heavy for a mail client. It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years.

IMAP still works, you could use a local client

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#129
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice" -Hacker News

This is a systematic issue with many of Google's services. They have the money and manpower to test their interface on Firefox. We're talking about a modern, generally standard-compliant browser here, not IE6. Getting those websites to perform decently on Firefox shouldn't be a problem for Google. I can believe that they don't purposefully break Firefox for the sake of it, but it's clear that they make no effort to m…

It's an artifact of how they develop and test software. And ultimately Firefox suffered these bugs because their product wasn't compelling.

Googlers push new code to production regularly, with the cycles getting faster all the time. It used to be biweekly (as the article alludes). Then it was weekly. Then it was daily. Then it was "push on every green build".

If you push to production literally the moment your test suite passes, then your browser compatibility is a function of two things:

1. What the engineers developing a feature use.

2. What is easiest to build automatic test suites with.

In both cases the answer was Chrome and Chrome. Firefox has never had good support for API driven embedding. Embedded Gecko never took off. The automated GUI test drivers that became popular were mostly WebKit/Chrome based, with some support for IE and using it via RDP to a VM. Nobody forces Googlers to use any particular browser but Chrome was the best so that's what they used.

Also, Google culturally is always on the bleeding/cutting edge of HTML stuff. So it's more likely to hit edge cases than others.

Result: occasional glitches where Firefox bugs or Google app bugs intersected. They always got fixed quickly when reported. Only crazy people would think this was some conspiracy involving tens of thousands of developers who mysteriously never leaked their evil plan.

Mozilla would have done themselves a world of benefit if they'd been pushing hard their own CI/integrated Gecko based test suite and made it the best.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#130
post #34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms Why don't webdevs fight back and put "best viewed on Firefox" pop-ups on their pages (whenever the user is using Chrome).

I’ve started doing this. In the case of CCPA, GDPR disclosures and “do not track” requirements I suggest uninstalling Chrome and all Google software and switching to Firefox with proper as locking software enabled. I think Google is compliant with neither, and if a user is actually concerned about their privacy they definitely shouldn’t be using Chrome.

It would be great to understand the downvotes on this.

Chrome/Chromium phones home, period. Last time I've personally checked this [1] was still true.

It's hard to argue that Google doesn't have an interest on collecting as much data it can. Especially, since their heavy focus on ML, where the algorithms are very data-hungry.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Chromium/comments/3fgabt/privacy_is...

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