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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

#61

Post by TelmoMenezes »

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. Simple things with clear metrics.

No, it's a self-interest thing. Also known as greed, or selfishness. Do you honestly believe that if "being a decent human being" came with a simple metric like money, then companies would deviate one iota from pure profit motive?

Sometimes I wonder if people here are really this naive or if it's a case of "it's very hard to convince a man of something when his salary depends on him no believing it."

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

#62

Post by Causality1 »

I feel like Mozilla had definitely had a culture change during this whole time period, and I'm not a huge fan of where it's ended up. It seemed to start like a ray of light from the heavens, proclaiming to all how much better a browser could be than Internet Explorer. After that, it entered what I would call the Firefox golden age, from 2006-2011. In that time Firefox built an identity around browser customization and user choice. The shift to copycat Chrome with rapid versioning at Firefox 5 in 2011 was the start of the end for the power user culture at Mozilla. Ever since then, Firefox features have been trimmed with every release, seemingly in lock-step with its shrinking market share. Functions that used to be accessed with a button press were relegated to the about:config menu, and then to extensions, and then support for those extensions gradually rotted away.

Mozilla's respect for their users has shrunk so much that something as simple as putting the tabs below the address bar and bookmarks bar is virtually impossible on Firefox 66, when it used to be as simple as clicking the customize button and dragging things where you wanted them.

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

#63

Post by sterlind »

blub wrote: post #35
TeMPOraL wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do agree Google brings latest of web tech to Chrome fast, but that makes other browsers falling behind in terms of features. Fire and Motion. By being first to add stuff that users (web developers) immediately start expecting from everyone, they ensure everyone else is too busy catching up with them to actually compete. Thus, they secure their leadership position. See: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fi…

Yes, Google's using all sorts of these tactics against Firefox. I don't think Ff will survive, too many useful idiots out there to have any hope left.

It's pretty grim for Ff, but our real doom starts when they pull an Android and bundle lots of non-redistributable components to cut off their real competition, the Chromium clones. It'll be like Play Services in the aftermath of the Kindle Fire all over again, probably under the guise of Flutter and AMP.

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

#64

Post by Sylos »

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…

In my opinion, that is not really separate.

Pretty much all companies constantly whip their employees to get things done as fast as possible. And if that definition of "done" does not explicitly contain interoperability, then even the most well-intending employees will drop that sooner rather than later.

Which is the case for any side-goal. Security, code quality, documentation, tooling, test coverage etc. If you only prioritize one thing, other things will be neglected, unless you put explicit checks in place.

Which is why we have people whose job it is to manage these things. And if those managers failed to put checks in place, then we are back at either incompetence or malice of those managers.

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

#65

Post by llaqb »

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…

That's like saying "I don't know what's wrong with Windows XP, I intentionally avoid Windows 10 and XP works fine with me".

Right now Firefox has caught up a lot in terms of performance and security, but even now they are still not there.

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

#66

Post by esrauch »

cm2187 wrote: post #55
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.

The thing that happens in practice is the site is expected to be rebuilt on short timelines and at the end you find that it isn't trivial to make it work on other browsers. And the engineers don't even have machines that can reach their development servers that can also run IE, and the version of Edge that can run automated tests is so old that it doesn't support flexbox.

So now some VP has to make a decision whether to launch the thing to 85% of the users that also are on the companies own browser and support other browsers in the future, or delay everything on that. It tends to go the way that locally makes sense.

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

#67

Post by taneq »

sterlind wrote: post #63
blub wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Google's using all sorts of these tactics against Firefox. I don't think Ff will survive, too many useful idiots out there to have any hope left.

It's pretty grim for Ff, but our real doom starts when they pull an Android and bundle lots of non-redistributable components to cut off their real competition, the Chromium clones. It'll be like Play Services in the aftermath of the Kindle Fire all over again, probably under the guise of Flutter and AMP.

Isn't there already something of this sort happening with DRM components? There was a story on here recently about someone whose Chromium-based browser was locked out of the video streaming addons. To be fair, that was more by the video streaming plugin developer than by Google, but it was still an example of undermining the open source portion of the product.

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

#68

Post by llaqb »

pjmlp wrote: post #42
TeMPOraL wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's just insulting. How did we get there?

Yep, https://twitter.com/acdlite/status/1089273195281080335

"The browsers are working to standardise new lower level APIs that frameworks need"

Highlighting "standardise". They are NOT private APIs.

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

#69

Post by j16sdiz »

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…

This is "Shadow DOM v0" API and have been removed in latest Chrome:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701765

https://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdom

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

#70

Post by HenryBemis »

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…

I don't buy the "oops we dropped the ball on UAT". I was working in a bank once and we were making sure that our web-banking would work properly with EVERY POSSIBLE browser. And I don't mean IE, FF, Opera, Chrome.. I mean some end-of-corridor browsers that you could get from tucows. I don't buy that Google made mistakes like that with one of the top5 browsers. Did they ever pull a trick like that with Microsoft's IE?
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