Google's attempt to take over email does not sit with me well. We need better email. But email is too important to be proprietary. We need open standards here. And we need open source developers to kick it in high gear to create better email clients.
There are couple of problems with the open source clients, one is the front end the other is anti-spam. Many of them are hideous and look like 10 years old. Some of them are functional and look nice, but you still have to deal with bad anti-spam filters.
Animations are not important enough to justify. Not wanting to serve all your content from a single domain is not enough to justify. These are excuses, not technical reasons.
I disagree. They're short cuts you might take to get a product out and get early feedback, the same sort of shortcuts most of us have taken when pushed to release something sooner. This is a product in Beta, not the finish article. Even if everything work in theory just dropping multi-browser testing would save time. If their aim is a beta product for early user testing, I really don't think what they've done is unre…
Getting a product out in the web development world includes getting it out for other browsers than the browser you develop in house. Otherwise, you won't get the early feedback you wanted. Especially when your application is working, with some minor glitches.
It's not like the application is completely broken in Firefox with the fixes mentioned. Bypassing CSP for your own domains feels like a hack that you shouldn't be able to do.
Animations are not important enough to justify. Not wanting to serve all your content from a single domain is not enough to justify. These are excuses, not technical reasons.
I disagree. They're short cuts you might take to get a product out and get early feedback, the same sort of shortcuts most of us have taken when pushed to release something sooner. This is a product in Beta, not the finish article. Even if everything work in theory just dropping multi-browser testing would save time. If their aim is a beta product for early user testing, I really don't think what they've done is unre…
You have to admit it seems a little shady when it comes from the browser vendor. It would be fine if the message said, "we haven't tested this, it might not work, YMMV". Instead, the message says, "click here to download our product", the implication being they'd like you to convert to only ever using their product.
Google have produced a product which offers a great experience on one browser. They are happy with the performance of the application on that browser. They have no doubt tested it on other browsers and found the performance to be sub par. That application is clearly still in 'beta' mode (The app is still invitation only). I am sure that they will 'un-block' the browsers that Inbox doesn't perform well on once they've resolved the performance issues - I'm sure it's also not a slight against Firefox or any other browser. The alternative of course is that instead of this discussion thread we'd have a thread about how poorly Inbox performs on firefox which would damage the products overall reputation.
The last paragraph: "However, we still haven't figured out exactly why Google is blocking Inbox on Firefox. That the application is not working, seems to not be fully true. With some more man hours, it seems trivial for Google to get the application to run in Firefox to. Maybe too much Chrome specific technologies or just a try to limit the usage of Firefox on the web?" Is odd as he's spent the rest of the article po…
What I know, given the right vendor prefixes, transitions works mostly the same way on both platforms. I don't think it makes sense to only have transitions for one browser when it's trivial to support other browsers as well. The CSP issue I honestly don't know why that's so but I'm fairly sure they should be able to follow CSP on their own domains, just like the rest of the applications on the web have to do. To me,…
To me, it feels like Google has an unfair advantage on doing web applications when they can do stuff on their own domains that no one else can, unless they also develop their own browser with unique features.
And legally dangerous, too. It's as if they forgot entirely about the half a billion Euros Microsoft shelled out for doing precisely the same thing.
Google have produced a product which offers a great experience on one browser. They are happy with the performance of the application on that browser. They have no doubt tested it on other browsers and found the performance to be sub par. That application is clearly still in 'beta' mode (The app is still invitation only). I am sure that they will 'un-block' the browsers that Inbox doesn't perform well on once they've…
Or, you know, a third option. They could always do what every other web developer must and make their software progressively enhance so it works at the very least on a few major browsers.
On the HN thread accompanying the release of Google Inbox, a (supposed) engineer working on Inbox was saying that the reason for the exclusion of Firefox was a performance issue with accessing sparse arrays with huge indexes. Link to the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498 Link to the bugzilla entry: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963
FWIW, Safari (webkit) is mostly working. IE is, unsurprisingly, a train wreck.
Google have produced a product which offers a great experience on one browser. They are happy with the performance of the application on that browser. They have no doubt tested it on other browsers and found the performance to be sub par. That application is clearly still in 'beta' mode (The app is still invitation only). I am sure that they will 'un-block' the browsers that Inbox doesn't perform well on once they've…
They also produced a product that leaks user data (mostly to them).
In their book, 'How Google works' they claim to settle with more what's best the user than their customer. That's such a bold claim when you are a monopoly.