Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 194 posts

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

#81

Post by nullc »

amelius wrote: post #54
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?

"Keep the organization going" (which is really the even simpler message under 'make a profit').

The fundamental purpose of any large organization is to preserve itself. Any organization that arises which doesn't have that purpose is eventually replaced by others that do.

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

#82

Post by cm2187 »

blihp wrote: post #72
cm2187 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

I get your point but actually it should go the other way round. If the owner of Google Doc is really focused on own user base only, the incentive would be to make it the most browser compatible. By making it run on chrome only, google docs is potentially sacrificing its user base for a greater purpose.

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

#83

Post by jhasse »

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…

> I don't know whats going wrong with Firefox.

Pocket integration, advertisement on New Tab page, the Mr. Robot debacle, Google Analytics on extension page, etc.

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

#84

Post by jhasse »

myfonj wrote: post #53
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…

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

Also Firefox's PDF viewer was slow and buggy, while Chrome's (I think based on Foxit Reader) was awesome from the start.

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

#85

Post by jhasse »

GrayShade wrote: post #2

They didn't try to, they actually won. Microsoft switching to Blink was had news for Mozilla, and sites that are "optimized for Chrome" started to crop up all over the place. Yes, Firefox is slow on Macs, but you should consider switching to it. We know how it went with IE back then. On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition.

> On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition.

Firefox doesn't open links handled by apps directly with the app, like almost every other Android browser does. This makes it unusable for me.

Here's the bug report (7 years old) btw: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806385

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

#86

Post by gnomewascool »

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…

> The GUI features Google introduced were very important.

I don't trust my memory, so I'm checking with Firefox 3.0.1[0], released in July 16, 2008[1], definitely before the first release of Chrome. I can't be bothered to also test early Chrome and multiple old versions of Firefox, so the fact that a feature isn't in Firefox 3.0.1 doesn't mean that it came first in Chrome.

> Draggable, swappable tabs

Firefox 3.0.1 had these.

> that can be pulled out into separate windows,

Not quite — you could drag tabs between existing windows, but apparently not out into a separate window.

> address bars with integrated search engines,

If you entered a keyword, rather than a URL into the URL bar, Firefox would search for it in Google. (In addition, there was obviously the dedicated search bar.)

> built in PDF viewers.

Firefox 3.0.1 didn't have one. According to Wikipedia[1], the PDF-viewer arrived officially only in Firefox 19 (February 19, 2013). It was installable as an add-on earlier, but almost certainly not before Chrome's in-built viewer. OTOH Konqueror (KDE's browser) had an embedded PDF-viewer before either — at least as early as August 2008[2] — not that that's relevant for mainstream use, or for a comparison of Firefox and Chrome.

Overall, only 1, possibly 1.5 of the 3 features came earlier in Chrome. 1.5 were definitely already in Firefox when Chrome launched.

[0] I couldn't find the binary for 3.0.0, which was my first choice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Konqueror&oldid=2...

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

#87

Post by Sylos »

neilv wrote: post #23

One way Mozilla could still differentiate is by doing privacy&security all-out. It currently seems that Firefox is only a little more privacy-respecting than the browser of one of the most invasive surveillance dotcoms. It's been that way for years, and every year is lost ground. I suspect that Mozilla's need for funding, and the sources of funding for so long, are what have them looking so similar to a dotcom. When…

It's definitely true that Mozilla needs funding beyond what users are willing to donate. Especially with other 'free' browsers available. But all scandals that I'm aware of were nonsense that journalists wanted to believe, in order to land the next big "the good guys are actually evil"-story.

A more privacy-friendly default search engine is clearly the elephant in the room, but their other financing strategies have been done to try to supersede that and to my knowledge did never infringe on privacy. If you feel different about one of them, please read up on it. There's been a lot of misinformation out there.

Mozilla would make themselves liable to prosecution, if they were to simply violate privacy without a very good reason, as privacy is an explicit goal of their legally-binding non-profit mission statement.

Having said that, there is a good reason why Mozilla has to compromise in terms of privacy. And that is webpage owners' interests.

Webpage owners want to track you. And they can opt to not support Firefox, if they can't track you. Which is kind of bad for Firefox and ultimately for Mozilla's mission, which is making the web a healthier place, for which they need Firefox even just as a second implementation of the web standards.

So, yes, they do have to balance out webpage owners' interests and yours. And yes, they cannot give you as privacy-friendly defaults as some of the browsers that don't have to care about webpage owners' interests. If you're a tiny Chromium fork, no one's going to block you, because mother Chrome is absolutely lovely to webpage owners.

But you should notice that Mozilla gives you the tools to fix the defaults and goes to great lengths to be privacy-friendly when webpage owners are not involved.

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

#88

Post by adam-a »

Vinnl wrote: post #58
the_duke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Even if it can be rationalised as them not caring, or even just not prioritising support for Firefox, the point of TFA is you have to treat it as malice if you are on the other end. Maybe it's better characterised as neglect, but you have to actively call it out and fight it if you don't want to lose out.

It may be like being crushed by an elephant that's rolling over in it's sleep, but you need to wake the elephant up and tell it to sleep somewhere else.

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

#89

Post by rayiner »

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…

We had built in PDF viewers in IE long before Chrome. In fact, it was even better because it was an OLE component, so IE could embed Adobe PDF, not the cut-rate alternative Chrome has. (Edge is even worse, it’s PDF viewer can’t even search large documents properly.) We have massively regressed on that front over the last 20 years.

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

#90

Post by itronitron »

Angostura wrote: post #76
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.

a colleague of mine pointed out many years ago that the slogan is not in fact 'Do be good' but rather just 'don't be evil'.
Post reply on HN