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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

#151

Post by tinus_hn »

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…

A simpler explanation is Google took a page from the Microsoft monopoly ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’ playbook. It is illegal behavior designed to promote one part of your business by using the monopoly power of another part.

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

#152

Post by brainwad »

sgift wrote: post #50
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. I think he has a reasonable justification for his position (two even): - Google would have to be very incompetent for it to be incompetence (stated in the article) - If Mozilla comes around every few weeks "hey guys, you broke it again" it's hard to argue they "don't care" or "don't prioritize" in the sense of "oh, w…

It's not malice against another browser to build for where the users are. When the users were on IE and Firefox, Google built for those platforms, ignoring e.g. Konqueror or Opera. Now that the users are on Chrome, Google can ignore Firefox. Each product team can independently decide that the best thing to help the most people is to work on more features for 1 browser rather than fewer features for several browsers.

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

#153

Post by brainwad »

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…

I think the incentives to not support accessibility/minority platforms grows as the number of users grow, since the potential benefit of the features you would not implement because you have to work on a11y or Firefox support is multiplied by your number of users.

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

#154

Post by l1k »

oblio wrote: post #136
l1k wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth mentioning that the Firefox team did the same kind of "oopses" to browsers embedding Gecko. See this interview with Mike Pinkerton, who later went to Google to work on the Chrome Mac team: "People will make changes to do something good for Firefox and because Firefox is the only really blessed project by the Mozilla Corporation and the Foundation, that’s their only focus. So they’ll make changes that…

Did they actually offer/promote Gecko for embedding? I kind of doubt that.

Read the full interview. Netscape was owned by AOL back then and the motivation for Gecko was to have an HTML engine that could be embedded in AOL's software. Firefox was just one browser based on that engine, but became the primary focus once its popularity rose.

Camino was another browser based on Gecko, but died in 2011 when Mozilla killed off support for embedding: http://caminobrowser.org/blog/#mozembedding

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

#156

Post by lordlimecat »

gnomewascool wrote: post #86
mastrsushi wrote: post #4

All I got out of that link of tweets was a series of "Look at all the ways big evil Google steered us off the internet". I'm not doubting any if those claims are true. At the same time, I don't think any of those malicious motives were strong enough. That post came off as more of a whistle blowing speech from an oppressed developer. Nothing written was solid enough to make me think "Ohhh that's how Google killed Mozi…

> The GUI features Google introduced were very important. I don't trust my memory, so I'm checking with Firefox 3.0.1[0], released in July 16, 2008[1], definitely before the first release of Chrome. I can't be bothered to also test early Chrome and multiple old versions of Firefox, so the fact that a feature isn't in Firefox 3.0.1 doesn't mean that it came first in Chrome. > Draggable, swappable tabs Firefox 3.0.1 ha…

Chrome's rip / tear tab support was unmatched when it came out. IIRC Firefox would reload the page, and was generally quite slow.

The search features were brand spanking new too. Firefox had a search bar, but the behavior of Chrome is what later prompted Mozilla to create the omnibar function.

The PDF and Flash built in were major features at the time because they avoided needing to install awful and exploitable third party components.

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

#157

Post by lordlimecat »

rayiner wrote: post #89
mastrsushi wrote: post #4

All I got out of that link of tweets was a series of "Look at all the ways big evil Google steered us off the internet". I'm not doubting any if those claims are true. At the same time, I don't think any of those malicious motives were strong enough. That post came off as more of a whistle blowing speech from an oppressed developer. Nothing written was solid enough to make me think "Ohhh that's how Google killed Mozi…

We had built in PDF viewers in IE long before Chrome. In fact, it was even better because it was an OLE component, so IE could embed Adobe PDF, not the cut-rate alternative Chrome has. (Edge is even worse, it’s PDF viewer can’t even search large documents properly.) We have massively regressed on that front over the last 20 years.

Embedding Adobe PDF was possible in Chrome and Firefox too. It was a terrible idea because generally you do not want full-blown Acrobat handling untrusted files from the web; for many years PDF + Flash were by far the top exploit vectors for malware.

Chrome's embedded PDF reader didnt support all of the extraneous crap Adobe did, but that's a feature. It was also sandboxed, which IE's implementation was not for many years.

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

#158

Post by QuercusMax »

Angostura wrote: post #76
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…

> 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.

It's still there in the Code of Conduct: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Scroll all the way to the bottom. It's the closing thought, one of the key places to emphasize something.

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

#159

Post by Scrantonicity »

jhasse wrote: post #104
richjdsmith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With all the other benefits Chrome has over Firefox (e.g. advertisement on google.com), you'll need to be more than only "not as bad as Chrome".

How about extensions on the Android app, container tabs, better ui, no google integration, built in tracking protection etc

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

#160

Post by rayiner »

lordlimecat wrote: post #157
rayiner wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had built in PDF viewers in IE long before Chrome. In fact, it was even better because it was an OLE component, so IE could embed Adobe PDF, not the cut-rate alternative Chrome has. (Edge is even worse, it’s PDF viewer can’t even search large documents properly.) We have massively regressed on that front over the last 20 years.

Embedding Adobe PDF was possible in Chrome and Firefox too. It was a terrible idea because generally you do not want full-blown Acrobat handling untrusted files from the web; for many years PDF + Flash were by far the top exploit vectors for malware. Chrome's embedded PDF reader didnt support all of the extraneous crap Adobe did, but that's a feature . It was also sandboxed, which IE's implementation was not for many…

> Chrome's embedded PDF reader didnt support all of the extraneous crap Adobe did, but that's a feature. It was also sandboxed, which IE's implementation was not for many years.

It also doesn’t work very well. There are many PDF files, particularly those with OCR text, where search doesn’t work in Chrome but works fine in Acrobat. (It’s also slow to index files for searching, and lacks the UI to distinguish between a search failing because the file hasn’t been indexed and search failing because the text doesn’t exist.)

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