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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

#211

Post by KorematsuFred »

AaronFriel wrote: post #191

This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Google is behaving, if anything, worse, and using its massive reach and user base to stifle competition. This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should have adopted Chro…

> Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era.

Could you please give some examples ? Did windows ever blocked a competitors product ?

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

#212

Post by msla »

AaronFriel wrote: post #191

This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Google is behaving, if anything, worse, and using its massive reach and user base to stifle competition. This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should have adopted Chro…

https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i...

> "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'"

Microsoft isn't the gorilla it used to be, but never forget it is a gorilla, and knows how to play the gorilla game.

If Google becomes sufficiently annoying, Microsoft can say "Well, sure, Google's Chrome isn't very fast on Windows, and crashes every so often. Google must be slipping. Here, Edge is just as good, being practically the same technology, and it's from us, your friend, so you know it won't crap out at the worst possible moment."

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

#213

Post by msla »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #211
AaronFriel wrote: post #191

This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Google is behaving, if anything, worse, and using its massive reach and user base to stifle competition. This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should have adopted Chro…

> Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Could you please give some examples ? Did windows ever blocked a competitors product ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

> The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would determine whether Windows was running on MS-DOS or PC DOS, rather than a competing workalike such as DR-DOS, and would result in a cryptic error message in the latter case. This XOR-encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated machine code used a variety of undocumented DOS structures and functions to perform its work, and appeared in the installer, WIN.COM, and several other executables in the OS.[1]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i...

> Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. The AARD code trickery is well-known, but Caldera is now pursuing four other deliberate incompatibilities. One of them was a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows."

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

#214

Post by nonbirithm »

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.

The rewrite of Firefox on Android is just not there yet. Yesterday it updated and now it crashes frequently at random intervals, when you open a new page it scrolls down to the center automatically, you can't copy the text of links, the text editing cursor can suddenly jump around when typing after moving it, the highlight search action is hidden behind a context menu because Wikipedia is given priority, you can't copy links that don't use the http/s protocol, you can't use sites like MEGA because it doesn't support the downloading APIs necessary, and there are many other features I wish were there but aren't like full WebExtension support.

On desktop it isn't compatible with physical smartcards, so it is impossible to do my job using Firefox or a browser with an engine besides Blink.

I was wanting to contribute code but haven't found time for it yet.

However, what I can stand even less is a Blink monoculture and the web's standards being controlled by a single entity.

The real reason I switched to Firefox was because Google intends to make API deprecations to WebExtensions to make uBlock Origin incompatible, probably in order to retain more revenue in their ad business. At that point I would be forced to switch in the future anyway, so I decided to get used to Firefox's warts early on.

The exposes about Chrome automatically signing you in in the browser if you sign in with YouTube happened afterward, and I only felt more justified in switching. As a side note, I can no longer find the "identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" toggle that allows disabling this anymore.

My usage of Firefox is for political, not technical, reasons.

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

#215

Post by _5659 »

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,…

> You can do a lot more damage as a trusted friend than you can as a known enemy.

Reminds me of the Young Pope's first episode.

"Friendly relationships are dangerous. They lend themselves to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and conflicts, and they always end badly. Formal relationships, on the other hand, are as clear as spring water."

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

#216

Post by bzbarsky »

thedance wrote: post #204
bzbarsky wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 idea that google web apps are frequently released, and the fact that there is high latency between identification of a defect and it being fixed 100% in production, are not conflicting facts. Disclosure: xoogler with my name carved in stone outside Mozilla HQ.

Sure, I didn't say web apps are not frequently released. I just said that the claim that bug reports "always got fixed quickly" is false...

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

#217

Post by wayneftw »

AaronFriel wrote: post #191

This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Google is behaving, if anything, worse, and using its massive reach and user base to stifle competition. This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should have adopted Chro…

This strategy would have been worse for Microsoft and furthermore it would have been ineffective at achieving your own desire.

Old Edge was already getting the same treatment from web developers as Firefox. If they picked up Gecko they might as well have just stayed with old Edge for even less effort.

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

#218

Post by nikofeyn »

drewg123 wrote: post #103
thaumasiotes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox As a firefox user, the thing that annoys the hell out of me is the inability to use the mouse menu for cut and paste in Google Docs unless you're using chrome. I don't understand why it forces you to use the keyboard shortcut. I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and p…

> I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and prefer just using the right-click mouse menu.

it's a little surprising to me that you can't remember cut, copy, and paste that works on any computer in the last two decades but can remember all of the esoteric emacs shortcuts, which include references to a key that doesn't even exist.

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

#219

Post by nikofeyn »

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'.

well g-mail still barely works in chrome after the update they did, so i am not sure it's malice in this case.

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

#220

Post by bzbarsky »

thu2111 wrote: post #166
bzbarsky wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

I think we might in fact have a different definition of "quickly", yes. I think we may also have different definitions of "entire product is hosed". If gmail is significantly worse to use (not "doesn't load", just "loads with obvious visual artefacts"), that's obviously enough to get people to change browsers, all else being equal.

And just to be clear, there are certainly cases when things got fixed quickly. But "always" is really stretching it; this was the exception, not the norm.

> regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated

Sure. The problem is the environment and corporate policy, not individual engineers. They're just responding to incentives as best they can, and in my experience are generally quite helpful within the constraints of the system.

> just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific

Indeed, I don't think it was. It was not-Chrome specific.

Here's a thought experiment. Say someone at Google who did _not_ test in Chrome committed a change that degraded the visual experience of gmail in Chrome and it got shipped. How would fixing that be prioritized vs a similar visual degradation in Firefox or some other non-Chrome browser? Assuming there is no emergency push involved, if the fix was not ready by the next push cycle, would it just slide, or would the original commit get rolled back?

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