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In my opinion, the engineers that work on Chrome are the saddest about Alphabet products that are Chrome-only, because it makes it harder to cooperate with Fire
by cbhl 9y ago
In my opinion, the engineers that work on Chrome are the saddest about Alphabet products that are Chrome-only, because it makes it harder to cooperate with Firefox, Edge, and Safari engineers on open web standards.
I disagree with the idea that it is unprofitable to not support competing browsers. Just look at United States v. Microsoft Corp.
But, as you say, Google is first and foremost a business. As a business, it has a process where, if you don't have impact, you get fired. There are lots of people who, if forced to choose between "deferring work on Firefox bugs" and "getting fired", would choose the former. I would rather that they didn't have to make that choice in the first place.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoWhen I say profitable, I'm assuming someone factored in antitrust risk (an all-time low given our current policies here in the US, mind you), as well as the lost customer satisfaction, possibly revenue from users of those other browsers, etc. weighed across the cost of man-hours to support other browsers. Obviously, Google supports iOS quite well, because that platform brings with it a massive amount of users, and hence a massive amount of money. And FWIW, I recognize that the engineers are usually not the same as the businesspeople who make the business decisions. :)