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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

#51

Post by eitland »

flukus wrote: post #47
eitland wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original mozilla suite had this, no idea why it was separated in Firefox. Privacy. Mozilla thought it was a good idea to avoid sending every keystroke you type to Google. Turns out people don't care or complain loudly that it doesn't work like in Chrome so now it is combined by default AFAIK, but there is a fallback for people like me (and many other HNers). As for why consider what happens when you type .com U…

> Mozilla thought it was a good idea to avoid sending every keystroke you type to Google. It's not like that's the only choice. They could have local auto complete and only send the search request to google when you hit enter.

> It's not like that's the only choice. They could have local auto complete and only send the search request to google when you hit enter.

... and that's what it used to do IIRC.

Today you'll also have to turn off "Show search suggestions in address bar results" to get back to that behaviour it seems.

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

#52

Post by a_imho »

ahartmetz wrote: post #25
austincheney wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome generally outperforms Firefox. I don't agree. Chrome is pretty fast at executing JavaScript, but it is hundreds of times slower at executing DOM instructions compared to Firefox. It is also the slowest modern browser, by very far, at executing CSS animation.

It is ridiculous that JS benchmarks are accepted as "browser benchmarks". They are probably so popular with tech journalists because they are easy to run. How do you properly measure page load time (of real pages over the internet) anyway?

I found benchmarks to be a red herring. For me, the most significant factor seems to be an adblocker. Without one, most sites are barely usable.

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

#53

Post by myfonj »

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…

I'm using Firefox since version circa 1.5 and I think some of your arguments regarding "very important features Google introduced." are slightly off:

> Draggable, swappable tabs

I cannot recall Firefox lacked such feature. You can even swap tabs without mouse (ctrl+shift+pgUp/Down) what is not possible in Chrome AFAIK. And you have slightly greater control over order and appearance of tabs in Firefox.

> [..] that can be pulled out into separate windows,

Pulling tabs from / to Chrome windows is FMPoW UX disaster against proven patterns, at least in Windows platform [1]

> [..] address bars with integrated search engines,

AFaIR Mozilla experimented with "Awesomebar" way before Google Chrome Omnibar appeared. Things like accelerator searches and keyword bookmarks were there since its dawn. It was just "ease of use and lack of control" that Chrome introduced. [2]

> [..] built in PDF viewer[s].

Frankly, I don't have data who had integrated plugin-less PDF viewer first. Yes, it might have been considerable advantage.

[1] usually you can dragNdrop anything between any two windows using the "delayed hover on taskbar" mechanism: e.g. with Firefox you 1) drag the item (tab) from the source window (dragging cursor / icon appears), 2) hover on taskbar item of target window (window appears), and 3) drop the tab among other tabs in target window.

In Chrome you must 1) choose (focus) the target window first, 2) switch to source window, 3) drag the tab (source window disappears completely, revealing target window under some weird temporal tab/window that sticks to target or could be dropped to create own new window) and 4) drop tab among other tabs in the target window.

[2] as expressed in other comments, some users preferes adress bar to primarily consume just URLS and for search use isolated input. Vanilla Firefox Quantum can be set like this today, and you can have your search bar hidden in overflow menu but still one keyboard shortcut away.

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

#54

Post by amelius »

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…

> It's a coordination thing - coordinating a large group of people is so challenging only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average.

How are NGOs and non-profit organizations coordinated then?

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

#55

Post by cm2187 »

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…

If you own Google docs, ensuring it doesn’t break or show an incompatible banner on competing browsers is not an abstract or metric-less concept, it is very tangible and measurable. In fact that’s the sort of thing I would expect any of their engineer to do as part of the development, unless they have been told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is OK.

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

#56

Post by cm2187 »

evmar wrote: post #48
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…

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…

Even for smaller websites, I don’t think any web developper doesn’t test how the website renders on Firefox and Safari. Not doing so during the development process seems like a deliberate decision rather than an omission from engineers that do not know better.

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

#57

Post by kruczek »

the_duke wrote: post #41
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…

Have you tried using the new Gmail interface on Firefox? It's ridiculously slow, to the point of being completely unusable. A Google engineer claimed here on HN the reason was that the UI framework uses some deprecated API that is polyfilled in Firefox but available on Chrome. Something like that should never have launched, but may have been a somewhat acceptable reason months ago. Now, after being in production for…

For me it works fine. Whole page reloads in maybe 3 seconds, while browsing mails is pretty much instant.

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

#58

Post by Vinnl »

the_duke wrote: post #41
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…

Have you tried using the new Gmail interface on Firefox? It's ridiculously slow, to the point of being completely unusable. A Google engineer claimed here on HN the reason was that the UI framework uses some deprecated API that is polyfilled in Firefox but available on Chrome. Something like that should never have launched, but may have been a somewhat acceptable reason months ago. Now, after being in production for…

You're both saying the same thing, but drawing different conclusions:

> Google simply stopped caring about non-Chrome browsers

> we don't care about those Except that GP attributed that to incompetence and you to malice. I guess it's still hard to guess intent :)

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

#59

Post by dblohm7 »

acqq wrote: post #46
ludston wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice story, but Firefox about:preferences has an option like, "Use a background service to install updates". I never checked it, so I guess it is on by default.

> about:preferences has an option like, "Use a background service to install updates". But even if it's checked, it seems the Firefox managers/decision makers still think that it improves the users awareness on the Firefox brand that they spend your time on these (quoted from jasonkester's post): "wait. Before we get to what you wanted to do, I'm going to spend a minute downloading a new version. OK, now I'm going to…

Good news: Full background update functionality is in the works.

(I work on the team that owns install/update at Mozilla, though I don’t work on it myself.)

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

#60

Post by jasonvorhe »

bprasanna wrote: post #16

I don't know whats going wrong with Firefox. Im still an active firefox user. I intentionally avoid Chrome and use it rarely to see if the site which doesn't work in Firefox also doesn't work in Chrome. IMHO Firefox didn't make me feel slow anytime. The whole point of Google Chrome automatically logging-in as Gmail user throughout the browser should have sounded alarm for people who care about privacy. I do agree Goo…

It doesn't log you into your Google account, it doesn't enable syncing - it just displays your avatar and account name in the browser as soon as there's a Google Login cookie.
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