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Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

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Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#91

Post by microtonal »

couchand wrote: post #31
transfire wrote: post #4

Google's attempt to take over email does not sit with me well. We need better email. But email is too important to be proprietary. We need open standards here. And we need open source developers to kick it in high gear to create better email clients.

In case you haven't seen it, you might consider Fastmail [0]. They have a great webmail client, they just released native mobile apps (for both iOS and Android at the same time, wow!), and they are very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail. [0] https://fastmail.com

very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail.

Obligatory links:

https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail http://jmap.io/

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#92

Post by a3n »

couchand wrote: post #31
transfire wrote: post #4

Google's attempt to take over email does not sit with me well. We need better email. But email is too important to be proprietary. We need open standards here. And we need open source developers to kick it in high gear to create better email clients.

In case you haven't seen it, you might consider Fastmail [0]. They have a great webmail client, they just released native mobile apps (for both iOS and Android at the same time, wow!), and they are very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail. [0] https://fastmail.com

Happy fastmail user.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#93

Post by andybak »

shadowmint wrote: post #68
phpnode wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they'd supported Firefox from the start everyone would be slating them for "crippling" Firefox, or they would have had a poor user experience that would turn a non trivial percentage of early adopters off the entire product. They cannot win here, it was a bug in FF, it is now fixed, presumably they'll stop blocking when the fix is more widely available.

They could have made the effort to make this work on firefox from the start, but someone decided the effort wasnt worth it. The 'would have been bad experience to new users' is a strawman arguement. Solution: dont release product until it works . Firefox is fast enough if you write code with it in mind. ...but hey, who cares about anything except chrome right? If someone visits play.google.com on an ipad and safari c…

> Its Business Politics at play

Or alternatively it's economics. Maybe someone, somewhere had to make a decision similar to "If we want a good experience that includes Firefox users from day 1 it will cost $x and delay launch by y weeks". And he had to sell that to his boss.

Even in a company as awash with money as Google, someone has to justify budget choices.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#94

Post by whizzkid »

skrebbel wrote: post #74
whizzkid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this slide explains everything about how Google has changed the way of handling their business. http://www.slideshare.net/ericschmidt/how-google-works-final... They are more focusing on managing their business which is limiting their contributions to open standards.

Which of the 54 slides?

Sorry for typo, I meant "slides", but especially second and third slide.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#95

Post by Tehnix »

shadowmint wrote: post #68
phpnode wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they'd supported Firefox from the start everyone would be slating them for "crippling" Firefox, or they would have had a poor user experience that would turn a non trivial percentage of early adopters off the entire product. They cannot win here, it was a bug in FF, it is now fixed, presumably they'll stop blocking when the fix is more widely available.

They could have made the effort to make this work on firefox from the start, but someone decided the effort wasnt worth it. The 'would have been bad experience to new users' is a strawman arguement. Solution: dont release product until it works . Firefox is fast enough if you write code with it in mind. ...but hey, who cares about anything except chrome right? If someone visits play.google.com on an ipad and safari c…

>The 'would have been bad experience to new users' is a strawman arguement. Solution: dont release product until it works

Not really. And here's a list of arguments why it's okay to focus on one browser (at least at first):

1) It's in beta, so you want to get it right before focusing on making it work everywhere

2) Developing for multiple browsers adds overhead to developers. I imagine they like to utilise some experimental webkit features, which are either not available in Firefox/gecko

3) Related to 2), they would add a lot of overhead making sure the UI and UX is the same, using multiple vendor prefixes and workarounds for other things.

And just to point out,

>dont release product until it works

is probably the worst advice ever to give to people. You want people to actually test your application. You can never catch all the edge cases that can/will happen, in your mind, and sometimes your assumptions are wrong. This is a pretty basic concept or Lean UX etc.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#96

Post by virmundi »

cognivore wrote: post #61
custardcream wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there is. It's the world wide web. An interoperable universal interaction standard. Or it was until Google started pulling an IE6 game. I use Firefox for everything because there is no central motivation to specialise. If a site doesn't work well, it doesn't get my business.

Well, yes, that'd be nice if we had a "interoperable universal interaction standard." But now the majority (and soon, almost everyone) will be using the internet on tiny personal computers (smartphones) that run native apps. Using a web browser will become less and less important or even relevant. In such a case the costs of optimizing for multiple run-times makes little sense. Really, abandoning the browser for nati…

I've spent the last 8 months working on my own stuff. Before that I worked primarily as a backend engineer. My UI experience was limited. I did see the need for the skills.

I also believe that there should be at least a strong mobile offering with any web application now-a-days. That said, here's my thought on the matter.

UI sucks for everything. It really seems to have always sucked and probably will continue to suck. Swing is a pain to develop. WinForms too. I assume from looking at Cocoa code, so is Apple.

I've been working on a Pomodoro app during this whole time. Just getting lists to work efficiently in Android is a bitch. You have to serialize objects in and out of view items to make sure scrolling doesn't absolutely crap out when you've got a lot of items. Even with Swift, the same is fundamentally true in iOS.

Making a native app that looks 1) unique and 2) nice is terrible. You have to have a team with a designer and developer. Anything less and you're going to be out of the market longer. Making a native app that meets the two criteria above on multiple platforms is incredibly time consuming.

So I've now decided to use Ionic + Angularjs + Cordova. I've been on that platform for 2 weeks now. In that time, I've learned Web SQL, Angularjs, Ionic and enough Cordova to get plugins installed. I am also further along than I ever was in my Android development. It even looks pretty using the default Ionic styling (I got a free UI team by using their stuff).

So even if I accept your speculation that apps will dominate the world. I assume it will be developed on an HTML5 or HTML* stack. That does require "interoperable universal interaction standards".

I'll continue this speculation to say that I think the appearance of apps will merge. There is little reason to have a brand for Android and a brand for iOS and a brand for Tizen, etc. Ionic apps look like Ionic apps without having to spend a lot of GUI logic saying stupid things like, If Android, put the tabs on the top. Again, you need a common standard for this type of design and that is HTML.

P.S. I know that games will suck in JS in the browser view. I know that JS has some serious issues with performance that will probably not be overcome for sometime. I've seen that analysis blog post too. But for CRUD apps like the Pomodoro or Foursquare or LinkedIn, Ionic and its ilk are perfect. The reason is, to beat the horse, is because of advancing open, compliant standards. CSS animations can now be hardware accelerated. JS performance is constantly improving (even if it is a horrible, horrible language).HTML is being banged out to house newer features. This isn't a polemic about how native has no values. It's a polemic against the idea that CRUD apps should have gone native.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#98

Post by cognivore »

custardcream wrote: post #69
cognivore wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, that'd be nice if we had a "interoperable universal interaction standard." But now the majority (and soon, almost everyone) will be using the internet on tiny personal computers (smartphones) that run native apps. Using a web browser will become less and less important or even relevant. In such a case the costs of optimizing for multiple run-times makes little sense. Really, abandoning the browser for nati…

As someone who is old enough to have written "programs" and sees the instant relationship to "apps", I vigorously disagree. Lets consider these points: 1. Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs. This means there is little common ground between the three major sectors of the market. You either have to pick one and lose market share or pick all and increase cost. Nothing (yet) has solved…

You make some excellent and valid points, to which I don't necessarily disagree. I just think the inertia is towards the use of native apps over web browsers as delivery mechanisms for software - both mobile and PC.

A couple of points:

"Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs."

I see the major web browser as those competing platforms. The effort to make something work on different web browsers is huge, almost, or equal to, the difficultly of choosing a cross platform development tool and targeting multiple OSes.

"...the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook".

A native facebook application might be pretty cool. Really, do I do something much different when I use Thunderbird and eschew Gmail?

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#99

Post by manishsharan »

I subscribe to Google Apps for Business ( Gmail, Calendar etc.) The Google Admin console for my company is barely functional in Firefox. Switching menus causes the page to crash and Firefox prompts me to stop the scripts. On the other hand , the same console works fine on Chrome. One could argue that this is because FireFox "is not as fast as Chrome and I should use Chrome if I use Google Web applications". Hmm -- I do recall hearing a similar argument sometime in the 90s.

Re: Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

#100

Post by msabalau »

shadowmint wrote: post #68
phpnode wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they'd supported Firefox from the start everyone would be slating them for "crippling" Firefox, or they would have had a poor user experience that would turn a non trivial percentage of early adopters off the entire product. They cannot win here, it was a bug in FF, it is now fixed, presumably they'll stop blocking when the fix is more widely available.

They could have made the effort to make this work on firefox from the start, but someone decided the effort wasnt worth it. The 'would have been bad experience to new users' is a strawman arguement. Solution: dont release product until it works . Firefox is fast enough if you write code with it in mind. ...but hey, who cares about anything except chrome right? If someone visits play.google.com on an ipad and safari c…

I would have expected this sort of comment in most forums, but not necessarily in a community where many members actually deal and grapple with questions of "what platform gets supported when" and understand that "effort not worth it" is not the same thing as "business politics"

I believe many people know and understand that it's not unheard of for Google to release app updates on iOS a couple of weeks before the Android version comes out.

And while I've wanted to visit app stores cross platform to add items to a wish list while on the go, and been a little frustrated by not being able to do so, it does seem like a bit of an edge case. Although I suppose with both iTunes and Google Play edge cases can still be huge.

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