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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

#71

Post by peex »

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…

Corporations or any other business exist solely on one purpose: to make profit. If you're not making any profit you're not doing business, you're running a charity.

That's why you can't trust corporations when it comes to anything "open" and "free".

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

#72

Post by blihp »

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.

But likely few people, if anyone, in the organization have any serious incentives (i.e. bonus/promotion) to proactively prioritize that. On the other hand, they almost certainly have at least bonuses on the line to add X users to service/product Y or roll out feature Z (server or client side.) So people work toward what the company rewards[1] and everything else becomes a break/fix situation as it occurs and time permits.

[1] There are also almost certainly individuals/teams in the company who also try to take the path of least resistance and attempt to hobble the competition to help get there. These types exist in every company to varying degrees.

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

#73

Post by pluma »

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…

The distinction between accidentally building software that performs badly in any browser other than your own and intentionally doing so to deliver a degraded performance to people not using your browser is very small and hard if not impossible to determine from outside.

There is no good case that Google intentionally built the software in such a way that it would be slow in Firefox. But e.g. by not testing the app in Firefox or by explicitly using Chrome-specific optimisations or having the Chrome team create specific optimisations for those web apps (i.e. "good cross-team communication") you can effectively accomplish the same without ever having to spell it out as an intentional strategy.

If you build a browser with a significant marketshare and you also build widely used web apps, not spending any resources on fixing cross-browser compatibility or performance issues is effectively anti-competitive. Deciding not to correct "happy accidents" like "forgetting to test your apps in other browsers" leading to a competitive advantage is as bad as intentionally doing the same from the get-go.

We're talking about an international megacorp that is worth more than half a trillion dollars at this point. There are no accidents, especially not many identical accidents that remain consistent over years.

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

#74

Post by pritambaral »

taneq wrote: post #67
sterlind wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> To be fair, that was more by the video streaming plugin developer than by Google

The video streaming plugin was Google Widevine.

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

#75

Post by pjmlp »

llaqb wrote: post #68
pjmlp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean like they have standardized LE Bluetooth, Local Files, Houdinini, PNaCL, Permissions manifests, WebGL Compute ?

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

#76

Post by Angostura »

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…

> only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average.

That was always the power of 'Don't be evil'. It gave employees official permission, perhaps even requirement to challenge decisions that could at least be thought of as being evil in some way.

It was a shame it was deprecated.

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

#78

Post by josteink »

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.

> unless they have been told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is a requirement.

Fixed that for you.

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

#79

Post by amelius »

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…

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

But since Google's engineers are far from stupid, you may have a point.

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

#80

Post by josteink »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #60
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.

And why is tat a natural thing for a browser to do?
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