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

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

laptopmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 289 posts

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

#161

Post by wkey »

enitihas wrote: post #16
jmisavage wrote: post #3

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.

To be fair, even Microsoft does UA sniffing for their own products. I remember there being a post on HN about onedrive website not working in Firefox, but working with a different user agent.

What is UA sniffing mean in this context? :)

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

#163

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

callmeal wrote: post #49
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #7

It was incredible to me how aggressively Microsoft came out supportive of the Chrome team and how loudly they discussed the wonderful amount of collaboration the two companies had been up to since starting work on the new Edge. I've seen Googlers responding to Edge developers about how they'll get some mishandling of Edge fixed internally at Google. But really, this is just the same story as before: The "oops" have b…

>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'.

On the plus side, I keep a Chrome instance just for gmail and now I'm never logged into Google on my primary browser. You will see additional dark patterns from Google properties trying to steer you to log in but this is a battle where I'm the winner.

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

#164

Post by thedance »

callmeal wrote: post #49
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #7

It was incredible to me how aggressively Microsoft came out supportive of the Chrome team and how loudly they discussed the wonderful amount of collaboration the two companies had been up to since starting work on the new Edge. I've seen Googlers responding to Edge developers about how they'll get some mishandling of Edge fixed internally at Google. But really, this is just the same story as before: The "oops" have b…

>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 don't why people bother with claims like these are are trivially disproven. Anybody reading this can open up Firefox and go to Gmail and see for themselves that it works perfectly well (FF 73, Gmail frontend gmail_fe_200213.13_p5). So whatever your problem is with gmail is either imaginary or caused by some other software you've inflicted on yourself.

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

#165

Post by unlinked_dll »

fergie wrote: post #38

PSA: if you are not already using it, and you care about the future of humanity, then give Firefox a(nother) go. Its actually quite good these days.

There have been some recent updates where my manual settings in about:config seem to be ignored (I have all the dark theme/gtk theming options set to false or otherwise disabled) and it still uses this trash dark theme on some sites, like DDG and GitHub.

As well file and custom URIs are completely broken when installed as a snap. I cannot view any file on my system by manually typing in file://path/to/file whereas the uri functions fine in chrome. Custom application URIs require manually setting Firefox to open them in the given application, which is actually non trivial since it can't seem to find any application in the default browser, and it doesn't respect any system configuration.

Meanwhile chrome just works. These are issues I have only with Firefox on some installations, I can't seem to recreate them all the time.

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

#166

Post by thu2111 »

bzbarsky wrote: post #146
thu2111 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> They always got fixed quickly when reported. Having been involved in a number of these reports, this is flat-out false. Basic "fix your CSS to not rely on this Chrome bug; here's the exact diff you want to make it work both in browsers that follow the CSS spec and in Chrome" things regularly take 2-3 months to apply on the Google side. Basic "your browser user-agent sniffing is broken _again_ in the same way as thr…

The article where the Mozilla guy complained said two weeks, but, yes. Months is possible. Maybe we have a different definition of quickly.

Disclosure: former Google employee, I did many pushes and fixed browser compatibility bugs whilst I was there.

In the timeframe we're talking about most products were on a biweekly push cycle. In the ideal case where there was no delay at all between you reporting a bug and it reaching the right person inside the company who could fix it, if that day happened to be on a branch cut day then that's a minimum of a two week delay to reach production unless the bug was so severe that the entire product was hosed for all Firefox users. Minor glitches in rarely used screens wouldn't count for a rollback or emergency push, for instance.

But sometimes pushes fail. There's a severe bug, attempts to fix it are too slow and the push window closes so the servers are rolled back. Now the latency is a month.

That's only software bugs. Now include the time taken for the bug report to be triaged, mis-directed, pinged, rerouted to the right person. Now include delays incurred if that person goes on holiday, gets sick or has other higher priority tasks, as bug handoff works about as well there as anyone else. That can easily add more time.

Finally, regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated. If they weren't testing Firefox well enough before they weren't testing it well enough after either. If Google had a central rule about which browsers had to be supported then I didn't know about it. There was just an assumption you'd try to support the browsers people used as best you could.

I'm not saying it was awesome or right, just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific and there were plenty of IE or Safari compatibility bugs too.

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

#167

Post by dehrmann »

user8391 wrote: post #21
kapsteur wrote: post #8

Microsoft do the same tricks to push users to switch back from Firefox/Chrome to Edge : https://twitter.com/WindowsLatest/status/1226184938552098817

We kind of expect this from Microsoft. But we're still in denial about Google

They reinstated "don't be evil," so we're all good.

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

#168

Post by _jal »

username90 wrote: post #132
_jal wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with IE was that Microsoft intentionally coupled IE versions with Windows versions so you had a lot of ancient versions in use. So you had to ensure that all web apps you wrote were compatible with IE6-IE10 at the same time which was a huge pain. That wont happen with chrome since it is not coupled to any OS, people can just update whenever they want for free getting all the latest features. Microsoft bei…

> The problem with IE was that Microsoft intentionally coupled IE versions with Windows versions

I was there. That was the headline cause of their legal troubles, but far from the only thing Microsoft got up to. They intentionally broke other sites, threw misleading messages and tried to play games with standards.

In other words, many actions that look familiar today with different actors.

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

#169

Post by thrower123 »

simias wrote: post #108
thrower123 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really, suspect that the Google search isn't even close to that smart, that active malice comes in. Pure statistics would put the Chrome version of something higher than the Firefox version due to sheer weight of user-base. Nor are user-agents in any way reliable.

I agree with you. Given the current browser market share it would make sense for Chrome extensions to be more popular than Firefox's without any special-case meddling.

It does surprise me how unpopular this sentiment is. Maybe people don't like the idea that most of the algorithms that they interact with a pretty stupid and just weight things by frequency? It does seem like people attribute considerably more intelligence to algorithms than there actually are there.

It's not uncommon that I'll have a customer try to tell me that some search or selection algorithm in our product that I wrote is making use of unknowable information to bias it's results.

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

#170

Post by vatueil »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #23
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #7

It was incredible to me how aggressively Microsoft came out supportive of the Chrome team and how loudly they discussed the wonderful amount of collaboration the two companies had been up to since starting work on the new Edge. I've seen Googlers responding to Edge developers about how they'll get some mishandling of Edge fixed internally at Google. But really, this is just the same story as before: The "oops" have b…

Pretty interesting article. > "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. > "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say,…

> "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome, and most folks we spoke with inside [Google] were Firefox fans," Nightingale recollected in a Twitter thread on Saturday.

> "When Chrome launched...

... many of those same folks started to use Chrome, making it easier to miss Firefox bugs?

Jonathan Nightingale is claiming a company-wide conspiracy ("coordinated plan" in Jonathan's words) across "hundreds" of different product teams could be executed without any Firefox users or other internal Mozilla sympathizers picking up on it.

We're talking Google here: they have a hard enough time coordinating internally when they're openly trying.

This seems like a very complicated theory when the natural consequences of everyone switching to a different product provide an obvious and ready explanation for what we're seeing.

Ideally developers ought to test everything across different browsers, I agree, but we know in practice developers are only human and humans are lazy. And testing is still no substitute for using a browser day in and day out.

I want better support for Firefox and other browsers, but blaming lack of support on a conspiracy is an easy cop-out that doesn't help us address the real issues at stake.

Post reply on HN