15 ms·

A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

415 points by 8x8squares 7y ago

HunOL 7y ago
They did it to Opera. Why shouldn't do it for Firefox?
GrayShade 7y ago
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.
- jhasse 7y ago
  > 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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806385
  - anhner 7y ago
    I consider that a feature. If I go to youtube.com with firefox, it means that I intentionally want to avoid opening the app, so I don't want every video I click on in firefox to open with the youtube app. However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to.
    - jhasse 7y ago
      > However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to. No, otherwise that bug would have been marked as fixed.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      +1. YouTube example is spot-on, as this is no.1 case where I actively avoid the app in favor of the browser. YoutTube's app and mobile website have some ridiculously stupid extra filtering that silently removes many videos - videos that are suddenly accessible if you check the "Request desktop version" box in the browsers. It's almost an universal occurrence that the video I'm searching for is one that gets silently filtered out in the app.
      - GrayShade 7y ago
        Nb. with extensions you can also get background play and even ad blocking on YouTube.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        > background play Oooh, I so very much want that. Thanks, I'll check it out!
        GrayShade 7y ago
        https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Eh, that's interesting, I quite prefer that behavior over Chrome's, as it gives me more control with (what I feel is) minimal extra effort.
    - kkarakk 7y ago
      it slows down your workflow with minimum effort too. transforming/accessing data quickly is a big part of doing anything on mobile and i don't need a browser that stops the flow in between
  - eythian 7y ago
    I personally don't mind that. Also, it gives you a button to open the page in the app, so it's not like it makes it unusable.
- msla 7y ago
  When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs. Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out. I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - GrayShade 7y ago
    To be fair, they communicated that change. Did you miss the chance to export your RSS list? I think it was supposed to export an OPML so you could add them to another feed reader. Some of them are even available as Firefox extensions. > without even giving me a chance to opt-out It didn't flip a pref, the infrastructure behind that feature was removed because it was a maintenance nightmare, and not enough people were using it. You could have opted out (for a while) by switching to the ESR. I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support?
    - msla 7y ago
      > I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support? It has a userscript: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/misc/userscripts/rss https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/misc/... ... but extensions in qutebrowser are admittedly in a very early and immature state now, and the codebase for them is going to be changed.
  - headsoup 7y ago
    Didn't Firefox automatically export them to an OPML file on your desktop?
    - msla 7y ago
      No.
      - 7y ago
- irrational 7y ago
  Is Firefox slow on Mac for you? I haven't noticed slowness in a long time.
  - GrayShade 7y ago
    I don't use a Mac, but it's a known issue with the high-resolution ones. I believe it doesn't use the OS compositor, so it ends up redrawing too much. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965
    - spiralganglion 7y ago
      I've used a few retina Macs to do various kinds of web dev. Firefox tends to do some things fastest (eg: re-layout when resizing the window), some things the slowest (eg: certain large, complex CSS animations). For most things, it's perceptually equivalent to Chrome or Safari. Some things that are fast/good in Chrome will be slow/bad in FF, and vice versa. The biggest shortcomings I currently face are (1) a lot of banding when layering lots of complex gradients, due to a poor job of dithering and (2) weird handling of certain colors on my P3 display due to the assumption that colors are in the full display space rather than sRGB.
      - lou1306 7y ago
        A big problem of early Quantum Firefox on HiDPI Macs was its high battery usage. I think it got slightly better with later releases, but I don't have data to support that.
        acdha 7y ago
        For people running in non-default scaled resolutions. In the default configuration it's somewhere in between Safari (best) and Chrome (worst).
        7y ago
mastrsushi 7y ago
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 Mozilla" Just as Firefox destroyed IE, Chrome generally outperforms Firefox. If you dont believe me, read any benchmark out there. If you're too cynical, run them both yourself. The GUI features Google introduced were very important. Draggable, swappable tabs that can be pulled out into separate windows, address bars with integrated search engines, built in PDF viewers. 10 years later these features sound like ridiculous remarks, but they were prominent selling points for many average users. Not to mention, Google had an ever growing sense of brand identity. Especially during this time range of the YouTube aquisition, and rise of Android OS. Whether it's now or a decade ago, what is the first thing that comes to mind when the average user sees the name Mozilla? Does this demographic even know what Mozilla is? I stress average user because to us there is of course JavaScript and Netscapes heritage. Which is unfortunate to see Rome collapse this way, but so did IBM.
- gnomewascool 7y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Konqueror&oldid=235447802 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Konqueror&oldid=2...
roenxi 7y ago
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 average. Simple things with clear metrics. 'Support the open web' has no metrics and is realistically not a comprehensive shared vision a company can rally around. The message that a Chrome-first strategy doesn't support the open web is (1) contestable (2) requires a lot of assumptions. Anyone who believed or still believes that Google the Corporation is controlled by the engineers employed by Google is in for an eventual rude shock. Anyone who believes a corporation will support the open web for any reason other than it is in their interests to is likewise mistaken. This is why focusing on capability is more important than focusing on intent, despite what human instinct generally suggests (humans overweight intent). Google is a scary company. They have more power over people than most companies, with the exception of the banks - and look at how the banks are regulated!
- peex 7y ago
  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".
  - kdtsh 7y ago
    There is some nuance required here, since ‘corporation’ is such a vague term. Even Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, is a for-profit organisation (i.e. it aims to turn a profit and is taxed) which which reinvests its profit back into Mozilla’s projects and and other work which Mozilla considers to be in the public interest for a free and open Internet. Everyone has to question the stated goals and desires of corporations, and ask things like e.g who is the corporation accountable to (shareholders? themselves?) and how open is the corporation about how it invests its profit. Attempting to turn a profit is in itself not necessarily an indication that everything they do is in the sole pursuit of profit for itself.
Animats 7y ago
I see some of those "Oops" items. Recently, Codero's hosting dashboard stopped working with Firefox. They blame the Firefox configuration. They're trying to do something with cross-site cookies that Firefox doesn't like.
ronilan 7y ago
Related reading (2008) https://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/the-google-browser/ https://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/the-go... (That’s a year an a half before Chrome launched with a leaked comic book)
- l1k 7y ago
  It's also worth mentioning that the Firefox team did the same kind of "oopses" to browsers embedding Gecko. See this interview with Mike Pinkerton, who later went to Google to work on the Chrome Mac team: "People will make changes to do something good for Firefox and because Firefox is the only really blessed project by the Mozilla Corporation and the Foundation, that’s their only focus. So they’ll make changes that work great in Firefox and then they’ll do—they’ll either like, break Camino’s build just entirely, or things will stop working, or things will slow down, and nobody will really understand why. Because, you know, there was no communication about, you know, this change might have this effect. There’s also a lot of strife back and forth between features that are implemented in the core Gecko in a way that they will only work with Firefox. [...] So we’d run into situations where we try and implement a feature and we discover we just can’t do it. And we kind of raise our hands and say, “Ah, can we get this fixed?” And the answer would invariably be, “Well, it works in Firefox. Who cares?” [...] And that’s something that eventually made me sour greatly on the Foundation and the Corporation and why we kind of took our ball and went elsewhere, and stopped trying to work directly with the Foundation for the majority of problems." http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277 http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277
  - eridius 7y ago
    I don't see the two situations as comparable. Websites are supposed to work on all browsers. But while Gecko is open-source, it only really cared about being Firefox's engine. And it's perfectly fine for a project like that to only care about the browser that pays its development team. If you care about non-Firefox usage, you can roll up your sleeves and pitch in, implement your desired changes, and try to get them merged upstream. But it's not fine for a company like Google, building products for "the open web", to intentionally build sites that don't work in non-Chrome browsers (let alone explicitly manufacturing fake "incompatibilities"). Leveraging their dominance in web apps to force adoption of their browser is the exact sort of monopolistic tactic that's supposed to be illegal.
bprasanna 7y ago
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 Google brings latest of web tech to Chrome fast, but that makes other browsers falling behind in terms of features. Catching up wastes lots of time for the other browser makers. IMHO monopoly in browser is not a good idea. We know what a monopolistic attitude brings to plate. Also, when we see new extensions for Chrome with an explicit subject as "extension for Chrome", for Firefox users it feels like being sidestepped. Then it becomes the onus of the Firefox user to see if he/she needs to get in touch the extension developer to see the possibility of portability. A caring developer shouldn't sidestep Firefox or even other browsers per se. If every developer becomes selfish about developing tools/extensions for their own environment, they are blocking the goodness to others.
- llaqb 7y ago
  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.
- jhasse 7y ago
  > 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.
  - richjdsmith 7y ago
    That's hardly worse than anything done against your privacy in Chrome...
    - jhasse 7y ago
      With all the other benefits Chrome has over Firefox (e.g. advertisement on google.com), you'll need to be more than only "not as bad as Chrome".
fouc 7y ago
A tale of how Google won against end users - introduced aggressive auto-updates under the guise of "security & safety".
neil_s 7y ago
I didn't understand the parallel to Sidewalk Labs, can someone please share more context?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
neilv 7y ago
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 users won't pay money, Mozilla has seemed to focus on ways to sell its users to big companies. Maybe there's a viable combination of expense reductions, refined focus, and switching to solely charitable (hands-off) donations? (Maybe we'd see little sponsor logos for most of the FAANGs, for various motivations. And for some other Fortune 500s, for good PR. And for public-interest organizations and government units/programs.)
- Sylos 7y ago
  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.
nindalf 7y ago
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 browsers. People building say, Inbox were told it was acceptable to launch a product that is only accessible to one browser at launch. I hated that decision because it affected me directly but that’s not malice, simply prioritisation. Of course standard disclaimers apply. I don’t work for Google, never held Google stock etc.
- Sylos 7y ago
  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.
- pluma 7y ago
  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.
Causality1 7y ago
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.
deanclatworthy 7y ago
A better format for reading: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871231792455686.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871231792455686.html
boukestam 7y ago
I don't understand why nobody even thinks for a second that the reason why chrome is used more is just because it's better. If firefox would just stop complaining and look at chrome and what it does right they might actually learn something from it. Like microsoft who are now going to use chromium
decafbad 7y ago
Tried?
dastx 7y ago
For the past 3 years I've noticed gmail being extra slow on Firefox. Every other site loads almost instantly, except gmail. Even when I used to use Facebook, it would load fairly quick. Chrome wasn't much quicker or slower. Except for gmail. Gmail loads almost instantly on Chrome. I've basically given up on using mail's web interface even though I much prefer it over all linux mail clients.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
>gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.” >All of this is stuff you’re allowed to do to compete, of course. Of-course not, any country with decent enough anti-competitive laws would give a verdict in favour of Firefox. But I do understand why Firefox did not take legal route.
forgotAgain 7y ago
SSDD: Windows isn't done until Lotus doesn't work
AlexandrB 7y ago
Here's an article about the referenced "slow play" by Sidewalk Labs: https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/waterfront-toronto-chair-expects-sidewalk-labs-final-plan-to-be-a-few-months-late/?/ https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/waterfront-toronto-chair-... Unfortunately most of it is behind a paywall. Can anyone else provide additional context?
OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
if mistakes are the norm, they ain't mistakes
ksec 7y ago
I disagree about Firefox losing users due to Google's Opps incident. I forced the use of Firefox over 100s of computer and witness the growth of Chrome all by user installing it themselves. And when I ask them why, trying to talk them out of it, the number one reason was, Chrome was WAY faster than Firefox at the time. From Cold Start, Prefetch, rendering, first time to paint, actual UI etc. Every single god damn thing. And many users notice. At first I would not help them to install Chrome or told them Firefox was simply better. Over time one by one they just install it themselves. And that was the era when Mozilla thought Javascript speed would solve everything, and Memory bloat was the root of all evil and started MemShrink later. It wasn't about the Open Web, Standards etc. None of the users cares about any of these. It was the actual browser UX.
Dolores12 7y ago
How about we put all these 'oopses' in one place and keep updating?
loudtieblahblah 7y ago
With AMP, the fact MS Edge is joining the chromium ranks ensuring more and more sites are Chrome only, all the "oops" stuff. Google is worse than MS ever was
wanone 7y ago
reCaptcha on any other browser than Chrome is nightmare. Hate what Google is doing to web.
cromwellian 7y ago
Since Inbox is often brought up as a textbook example, I'll give my two cents and some history. This is my post-mortem perspective, and the opinion of my former team members may be different. I worked on Inbox from inception (as a former member of the GWT team), at the time Google was moving towards 'mobile first' (notice how there's no still Web version of the new Google Calendar), so the new generation of apps prioritized architecture and design for native-mobile and material design over desktop. Inbox was mostly written in a shared Java codebase transpiled with GWT (later J2CL) and J2ObjC (for iOS), so it could run natively on mobile from a single codebase. It obtained >75% code reuse between platforms, but a result of that however was a rather large SPA on the Web. Because of its design as an installable material-design mobile app, it forced bleeding edge technology on the Web version to maintain a shared codebase. So for example, because it includes an entire compiled datastore/synchronization engine that is too heavyweight to run on the browser UI thread, it made early use intensive of WebWorkers to simulate multithreading (at a time when there were lots of browser implementation bugs in Workers). For most of the time that I worked on it, Firefox Dev Tools couldn't even debug web workers well, and often Firefox dev tools would just fail with huge size of SPAs like Inbox. Getting material-design style animations compositing at 60fps cross browser was also fraught with peril because the different browser renderers had very different ways they scheduled GPU texture uploads for compositing, different hazards when they fall back to software rasterization, and very poor devtools visibility into what would cause anomalous painting problems (excessive repaints, layouts, or straight up freezes waiting for the GPU). Yes, today that is all much better, but in 2012 it wasn't, and short of getting ahold of browser engineers and asking them to hook up C++ debuggers or instrumentation to tell Web engineers why rendering was failing, debugging performance jank was hard. When we ran into a rendering problem with Chrome, we'd file bugs against Blink, and when we encountered problems with Firefox, we'd contact the engineers there. Perhaps because of heavy work on Firefox OS at the time, the Blink engineers would respond with help faster, so that obviously had an effect on performance differentials and delays, especially when the problems are mystifying to a Web Dev without browser internals knowledge. Even something as simple as Javascript arrays were fraught with peril. Inbox made heavy use of protobuffers. Protobuffers compiled to JS exist as sparse arrays in Javascript due to proto-number extensions having huge gaps. Well, on Firefox at the time, if you did something like var a = [], a[100000000]=1, and then Object.keys(a), it would return an array with 100 million elements IIRC, but Chrome/Safari/Edge would return an array of 1 element. When you tried to debug this, Firefox Dev Tools would just freeze. It took me a week of inserting console.logs and bisecting until I figured it out. (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1088189 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1088189) Now you could say argue one of the following: 1) Google could have held up shipping Inbox until Firefox and Edge fixed all of their bugs that were blocking it 2) They could have just shipped the Android/iOS versions and held up the Web versions 3) They could have chose a different architecture (no shared code with mobile, rewrite a custom 100% web version from scratch) 4) Avoided excessive use of WebWorkers or SPAs 5) Not required a UI design/DOM structure that would require complex layout and painting stressing rendering pipelines But no where in there was any active attempt to try and disadvantage other browsers. They sat out with an ambitious design for a Web app that they wanted to be 100% in parity with native mobile versions, and then found out that the Web platform itself wasn't up to handling it. Chrome could barely handle Inbox in 2012.

415 points by 8x8squares 7y ago

They did it to Opera. Why shouldn't do it for Firefox?

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.

jhasse 7y ago
> 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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806385
- anhner 7y ago
  I consider that a feature. If I go to youtube.com with firefox, it means that I intentionally want to avoid opening the app, so I don't want every video I click on in firefox to open with the youtube app. However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to.
  - jhasse 7y ago
    > However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to. No, otherwise that bug would have been marked as fixed.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    +1. YouTube example is spot-on, as this is no.1 case where I actively avoid the app in favor of the browser. YoutTube's app and mobile website have some ridiculously stupid extra filtering that silently removes many videos - videos that are suddenly accessible if you check the "Request desktop version" box in the browsers. It's almost an universal occurrence that the video I'm searching for is one that gets silently filtered out in the app.
    - GrayShade 7y ago
      Nb. with extensions you can also get background play and even ad blocking on YouTube.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        > background play Oooh, I so very much want that. Thanks, I'll check it out!
        GrayShade 7y ago
        https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
- icebraining 7y ago
  Eh, that's interesting, I quite prefer that behavior over Chrome's, as it gives me more control with (what I feel is) minimal extra effort.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    it slows down your workflow with minimum effort too. transforming/accessing data quickly is a big part of doing anything on mobile and i don't need a browser that stops the flow in between
- eythian 7y ago
  I personally don't mind that. Also, it gives you a button to open the page in the app, so it's not like it makes it unusable.
msla 7y ago
When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs. Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out. I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- GrayShade 7y ago
  To be fair, they communicated that change. Did you miss the chance to export your RSS list? I think it was supposed to export an OPML so you could add them to another feed reader. Some of them are even available as Firefox extensions. > without even giving me a chance to opt-out It didn't flip a pref, the infrastructure behind that feature was removed because it was a maintenance nightmare, and not enough people were using it. You could have opted out (for a while) by switching to the ESR. I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support?
  - msla 7y ago
    > I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support? It has a userscript: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/misc/userscripts/rss https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/misc/... ... but extensions in qutebrowser are admittedly in a very early and immature state now, and the codebase for them is going to be changed.
- headsoup 7y ago
  Didn't Firefox automatically export them to an OPML file on your desktop?
  - msla 7y ago
    No.
    - 7y ago
irrational 7y ago
Is Firefox slow on Mac for you? I haven't noticed slowness in a long time.
- GrayShade 7y ago
  I don't use a Mac, but it's a known issue with the high-resolution ones. I believe it doesn't use the OS compositor, so it ends up redrawing too much. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965
  - spiralganglion 7y ago
    I've used a few retina Macs to do various kinds of web dev. Firefox tends to do some things fastest (eg: re-layout when resizing the window), some things the slowest (eg: certain large, complex CSS animations). For most things, it's perceptually equivalent to Chrome or Safari. Some things that are fast/good in Chrome will be slow/bad in FF, and vice versa. The biggest shortcomings I currently face are (1) a lot of banding when layering lots of complex gradients, due to a poor job of dithering and (2) weird handling of certain colors on my P3 display due to the assumption that colors are in the full display space rather than sRGB.
    - lou1306 7y ago
      A big problem of early Quantum Firefox on HiDPI Macs was its high battery usage. I think it got slightly better with later releases, but I don't have data to support that.
      - acdha 7y ago
        For people running in non-default scaled resolutions. In the default configuration it's somewhere in between Safari (best) and Chrome (worst).
        7y ago

mastrsushi 7y ago

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 Mozilla" Just as Firefox destroyed IE, Chrome generally outperforms Firefox. If you dont believe me, read any benchmark out there. If you're too cynical, run them both yourself. The GUI features Google introduced were very important. Draggable, swappable tabs that can be pulled out into separate windows, address bars with integrated search engines, built in PDF viewers. 10 years later these features sound like ridiculous remarks, but they were prominent selling points for many average users. Not to mention, Google had an ever growing sense of brand identity. Especially during this time range of the YouTube aquisition, and rise of Android OS. Whether it's now or a decade ago, what is the first thing that comes to mind when the average user sees the name Mozilla? Does this demographic even know what Mozilla is? I stress average user because to us there is of course JavaScript and Netscapes heritage. Which is unfortunate to see Rome collapse this way, but so did IBM.

gnomewascool 7y ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Konqueror&oldid=235447802 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Konqueror&oldid=2...

roenxi 7y ago

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 average. Simple things with clear metrics. 'Support the open web' has no metrics and is realistically not a comprehensive shared vision a company can rally around. The message that a Chrome-first strategy doesn't support the open web is (1) contestable (2) requires a lot of assumptions. Anyone who believed or still believes that Google the Corporation is controlled by the engineers employed by Google is in for an eventual rude shock. Anyone who believes a corporation will support the open web for any reason other than it is in their interests to is likewise mistaken. This is why focusing on capability is more important than focusing on intent, despite what human instinct generally suggests (humans overweight intent). Google is a scary company. They have more power over people than most companies, with the exception of the banks - and look at how the banks are regulated!

peex 7y ago
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".
- kdtsh 7y ago
  There is some nuance required here, since ‘corporation’ is such a vague term. Even Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, is a for-profit organisation (i.e. it aims to turn a profit and is taxed) which which reinvests its profit back into Mozilla’s projects and and other work which Mozilla considers to be in the public interest for a free and open Internet. Everyone has to question the stated goals and desires of corporations, and ask things like e.g who is the corporation accountable to (shareholders? themselves?) and how open is the corporation about how it invests its profit. Attempting to turn a profit is in itself not necessarily an indication that everything they do is in the sole pursuit of profit for itself.

Animats 7y ago

I see some of those "Oops" items. Recently, Codero's hosting dashboard stopped working with Firefox. They blame the Firefox configuration. They're trying to do something with cross-site cookies that Firefox doesn't like.

ronilan 7y ago

Related reading (2008) https://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/the-google-browser/ https://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/the-go... (That’s a year an a half before Chrome launched with a leaked comic book)

l1k 7y ago
It's also worth mentioning that the Firefox team did the same kind of "oopses" to browsers embedding Gecko. See this interview with Mike Pinkerton, who later went to Google to work on the Chrome Mac team: "People will make changes to do something good for Firefox and because Firefox is the only really blessed project by the Mozilla Corporation and the Foundation, that’s their only focus. So they’ll make changes that work great in Firefox and then they’ll do—they’ll either like, break Camino’s build just entirely, or things will stop working, or things will slow down, and nobody will really understand why. Because, you know, there was no communication about, you know, this change might have this effect. There’s also a lot of strife back and forth between features that are implemented in the core Gecko in a way that they will only work with Firefox. [...] So we’d run into situations where we try and implement a feature and we discover we just can’t do it. And we kind of raise our hands and say, “Ah, can we get this fixed?” And the answer would invariably be, “Well, it works in Firefox. Who cares?” [...] And that’s something that eventually made me sour greatly on the Foundation and the Corporation and why we kind of took our ball and went elsewhere, and stopped trying to work directly with the Foundation for the majority of problems." http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277 http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277
- eridius 7y ago
  I don't see the two situations as comparable. Websites are supposed to work on all browsers. But while Gecko is open-source, it only really cared about being Firefox's engine. And it's perfectly fine for a project like that to only care about the browser that pays its development team. If you care about non-Firefox usage, you can roll up your sleeves and pitch in, implement your desired changes, and try to get them merged upstream. But it's not fine for a company like Google, building products for "the open web", to intentionally build sites that don't work in non-Chrome browsers (let alone explicitly manufacturing fake "incompatibilities"). Leveraging their dominance in web apps to force adoption of their browser is the exact sort of monopolistic tactic that's supposed to be illegal.

bprasanna 7y ago

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 Google brings latest of web tech to Chrome fast, but that makes other browsers falling behind in terms of features. Catching up wastes lots of time for the other browser makers. IMHO monopoly in browser is not a good idea. We know what a monopolistic attitude brings to plate. Also, when we see new extensions for Chrome with an explicit subject as "extension for Chrome", for Firefox users it feels like being sidestepped. Then it becomes the onus of the Firefox user to see if he/she needs to get in touch the extension developer to see the possibility of portability. A caring developer shouldn't sidestep Firefox or even other browsers per se. If every developer becomes selfish about developing tools/extensions for their own environment, they are blocking the goodness to others.

llaqb 7y ago
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.
jhasse 7y ago
> 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.
- richjdsmith 7y ago
  That's hardly worse than anything done against your privacy in Chrome...
  - jhasse 7y ago
    With all the other benefits Chrome has over Firefox (e.g. advertisement on google.com), you'll need to be more than only "not as bad as Chrome".

fouc 7y ago

A tale of how Google won against end users - introduced aggressive auto-updates under the guise of "security & safety".

neil_s 7y ago

I didn't understand the parallel to Sidewalk Labs, can someone please share more context?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

neilv 7y ago

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 users won't pay money, Mozilla has seemed to focus on ways to sell its users to big companies. Maybe there's a viable combination of expense reductions, refined focus, and switching to solely charitable (hands-off) donations? (Maybe we'd see little sponsor logos for most of the FAANGs, for various motivations. And for some other Fortune 500s, for good PR. And for public-interest organizations and government units/programs.)

Sylos 7y ago
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.

nindalf 7y ago

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 browsers. People building say, Inbox were told it was acceptable to launch a product that is only accessible to one browser at launch. I hated that decision because it affected me directly but that’s not malice, simply prioritisation. Of course standard disclaimers apply. I don’t work for Google, never held Google stock etc.

Sylos 7y ago
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.
pluma 7y ago
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.

Causality1 7y ago

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.

deanclatworthy 7y ago

A better format for reading: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871231792455686.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871231792455686.html

boukestam 7y ago

I don't understand why nobody even thinks for a second that the reason why chrome is used more is just because it's better. If firefox would just stop complaining and look at chrome and what it does right they might actually learn something from it. Like microsoft who are now going to use chromium

decafbad 7y ago

Tried?

dastx 7y ago

For the past 3 years I've noticed gmail being extra slow on Firefox. Every other site loads almost instantly, except gmail. Even when I used to use Facebook, it would load fairly quick. Chrome wasn't much quicker or slower. Except for gmail. Gmail loads almost instantly on Chrome. I've basically given up on using mail's web interface even though I much prefer it over all linux mail clients.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

>gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.” >All of this is stuff you’re allowed to do to compete, of course. Of-course not, any country with decent enough anti-competitive laws would give a verdict in favour of Firefox. But I do understand why Firefox did not take legal route.

forgotAgain 7y ago

SSDD: Windows isn't done until Lotus doesn't work

AlexandrB 7y ago

Here's an article about the referenced "slow play" by Sidewalk Labs: https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/waterfront-toronto-chair-expects-sidewalk-labs-final-plan-to-be-a-few-months-late/?/ https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/waterfront-toronto-chair-... Unfortunately most of it is behind a paywall. Can anyone else provide additional context?

OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago

if mistakes are the norm, they ain't mistakes

ksec 7y ago

I disagree about Firefox losing users due to Google's Opps incident. I forced the use of Firefox over 100s of computer and witness the growth of Chrome all by user installing it themselves. And when I ask them why, trying to talk them out of it, the number one reason was, Chrome was WAY faster than Firefox at the time. From Cold Start, Prefetch, rendering, first time to paint, actual UI etc. Every single god damn thing. And many users notice. At first I would not help them to install Chrome or told them Firefox was simply better. Over time one by one they just install it themselves. And that was the era when Mozilla thought Javascript speed would solve everything, and Memory bloat was the root of all evil and started MemShrink later. It wasn't about the Open Web, Standards etc. None of the users cares about any of these. It was the actual browser UX.

Dolores12 7y ago

How about we put all these 'oopses' in one place and keep updating?

loudtieblahblah 7y ago

With AMP, the fact MS Edge is joining the chromium ranks ensuring more and more sites are Chrome only, all the "oops" stuff. Google is worse than MS ever was

wanone 7y ago

reCaptcha on any other browser than Chrome is nightmare. Hate what Google is doing to web.

cromwellian 7y ago

Since Inbox is often brought up as a textbook example, I'll give my two cents and some history. This is my post-mortem perspective, and the opinion of my former team members may be different. I worked on Inbox from inception (as a former member of the GWT team), at the time Google was moving towards 'mobile first' (notice how there's no still Web version of the new Google Calendar), so the new generation of apps prioritized architecture and design for native-mobile and material design over desktop. Inbox was mostly written in a shared Java codebase transpiled with GWT (later J2CL) and J2ObjC (for iOS), so it could run natively on mobile from a single codebase. It obtained >75% code reuse between platforms, but a result of that however was a rather large SPA on the Web. Because of its design as an installable material-design mobile app, it forced bleeding edge technology on the Web version to maintain a shared codebase. So for example, because it includes an entire compiled datastore/synchronization engine that is too heavyweight to run on the browser UI thread, it made early use intensive of WebWorkers to simulate multithreading (at a time when there were lots of browser implementation bugs in Workers). For most of the time that I worked on it, Firefox Dev Tools couldn't even debug web workers well, and often Firefox dev tools would just fail with huge size of SPAs like Inbox. Getting material-design style animations compositing at 60fps cross browser was also fraught with peril because the different browser renderers had very different ways they scheduled GPU texture uploads for compositing, different hazards when they fall back to software rasterization, and very poor devtools visibility into what would cause anomalous painting problems (excessive repaints, layouts, or straight up freezes waiting for the GPU). Yes, today that is all much better, but in 2012 it wasn't, and short of getting ahold of browser engineers and asking them to hook up C++ debuggers or instrumentation to tell Web engineers why rendering was failing, debugging performance jank was hard. When we ran into a rendering problem with Chrome, we'd file bugs against Blink, and when we encountered problems with Firefox, we'd contact the engineers there. Perhaps because of heavy work on Firefox OS at the time, the Blink engineers would respond with help faster, so that obviously had an effect on performance differentials and delays, especially when the problems are mystifying to a Web Dev without browser internals knowledge. Even something as simple as Javascript arrays were fraught with peril. Inbox made heavy use of protobuffers. Protobuffers compiled to JS exist as sparse arrays in Javascript due to proto-number extensions having huge gaps. Well, on Firefox at the time, if you did something like var a = [], a[100000000]=1, and then Object.keys(a), it would return an array with 100 million elements IIRC, but Chrome/Safari/Edge would return an array of 1 element. When you tried to debug this, Firefox Dev Tools would just freeze. It took me a week of inserting console.logs and bisecting until I figured it out. (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1088189 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1088189) Now you could say argue one of the following: 1) Google could have held up shipping Inbox until Firefox and Edge fixed all of their bugs that were blocking it 2) They could have just shipped the Android/iOS versions and held up the Web versions 3) They could have chose a different architecture (no shared code with mobile, rewrite a custom 100% web version from scratch) 4) Avoided excessive use of WebWorkers or SPAs 5) Not required a UI design/DOM structure that would require complex layout and painting stressing rendering pipelines But no where in there was any active attempt to try and disadvantage other browsers. They sat out with an ambitious design for a Web app that they wanted to be 100% in parity with native mobile versions, and then found out that the Web platform itself wasn't up to handling it. Chrome could barely handle Inbox in 2012.