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It looks nefarious but it is 100% corporate priorities. I doubt anyone at Google is working under a mandate that says explicitly "we must kill Firefox by makin

by xrd 7y ago

It looks nefarious but it is 100% corporate priorities. I doubt anyone at Google is working under a mandate that says explicitly "we must kill Firefox by making our services fail when people use it!" Instead, every team working on these services at Google has a massive backlog of bugs. The product managers look at the bugs that start with "on Firefox, feature ABC doesn't work correctly..." And then they look at the bugs that are for Chrome. And they put the Chrome ones at a higher priority every time. They know that their bonuses are tied to Chrome somehow inside the massive Google goal structure. No one on the team argues about the decisions to deprioritize those bugs. And, bugs for Firefox get fixed at a slower rate than Chrome, and here we are.

tareqak 7y ago
Corporate priorities can be absolutely 100% nefarious as the wage-fixing antitrust investigation and subsequent settlement shows: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-steve-jobs-brutally-callous-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/ https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s... https://pando.com/tag/techtopus https://pando.com/tag/techtopus In May of this year (2019), https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 . I take this last event as an example of "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing": these sorts of events that further corporate priorities without corporate knowledge or corporate sanction clearly can and do happen. --- Widely speculative thought experiment follows 1. Let's hypothetically assume there was a rogue team at Google trying to kill of Mozilla Firefox. 2. Let's further suppose like the YouTube IE6 story they flipped some switch to start the process yesterday. 3. Let's further suppose they were discovered by any one or more of their managers / their directors / Google's legal and compliance / C-level executives today. 4. In my opinion, what we should be asking ourselves is: what actions the last group of people (3.) can take at and with what would be corresponding probability of that action being carried out. --- tl;dr Do we trust Google to not "be evil"?
- username90 7y ago
  A Google engineer would have no incentives to kill Firefox unless he can convince a promo committee that killing Firefox is good for Google, so I am not sure why anyone would do it. I mean, do you think someone would put "Slowed down Firefox gmail page load by 50%." on their promo packet? So for it to be done in secret for many years you would need someone with enough clout to circumvent the promo process behind it. I am not sure how high up you need to be to do that, or if it is even possible to do for engineers. Instead if you take the promo driven perspective, it is a lot easier to make things work well in a single browser. So the engineer makes a site twice as faster in Chrome, writes "Made the site twice as fast" in their promo packet and gets promoted. No need to mention that Firefox performance got worse after the fix, the promo committee wont have time to check that.
  - tareqak 7y ago
    Did the people who killed IE6 have to convince a promotion committee that killing IE6 would be good for YouTube and Google?
    - username90 7y ago
      Basically every web developer hated IE6 so they have personal reasons to kill it, I don't know of anyone who hate Firefox.
      - yoz-y 7y ago
        This. Nobody at the time liked IE6 but it’s not a stretch to assume that a lot of Googlers use Firefox on personal machines.
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
If you log into gmail via Edge, Google will pop-up a div [1] and email you an ad [2] to push you onto Chrome. Prioritization is not an excuse when they're actively writing code inside gmail to push users off of non-Chrome browsers. 1: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/1081074389133680640 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743891336806... 2: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/1081074391016910848 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743910169108...
masswerk 7y ago
However, this is policy. E.g., as an independent vendor or developer, your priorities are probably: "Let's make sure this works on all (or most) major browsers before release." Probably, you have a list of high priority compatibility targets and a list of lowers ones, and there's some room for taste and judgement here. But, if your list of high priority targets consists just of your own products, you're much on the former path of the Microsoft, back when they arguably had some problems with their priorities. Edit: I once had a conversation with a Chrome developer, when Chrome 32 broke the established behavior of source buffers in the Web Audio API. I was really surprised to learn that they were working in total isolation and didn't even know how other major browsers behaved and what the established behavior was. I wouldn't blame the individual developers, but I'd expect there to be a process in the corporate culture to check such things (at least) before release. (Are we breaking anything?) Having no such a process – and by this favoring your own product and vision over standards – is arguably an aspect of corporate policy. Especially, if you have all the resources to establish such a process.

by xrd 7y ago

tareqak 7y ago

Corporate priorities can be absolutely 100% nefarious as the wage-fixing antitrust investigation and subsequent settlement shows: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-steve-jobs-brutally-callous-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/ https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s... https://pando.com/tag/techtopus https://pando.com/tag/techtopus In May of this year (2019), https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 . I take this last event as an example of "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing": these sorts of events that further corporate priorities without corporate knowledge or corporate sanction clearly can and do happen. --- Widely speculative thought experiment follows 1. Let's hypothetically assume there was a rogue team at Google trying to kill of Mozilla Firefox. 2. Let's further suppose like the YouTube IE6 story they flipped some switch to start the process yesterday. 3. Let's further suppose they were discovered by any one or more of their managers / their directors / Google's legal and compliance / C-level executives today. 4. In my opinion, what we should be asking ourselves is: what actions the last group of people (3.) can take at and with what would be corresponding probability of that action being carried out. --- tl;dr Do we trust Google to not "be evil"?

username90 7y ago
A Google engineer would have no incentives to kill Firefox unless he can convince a promo committee that killing Firefox is good for Google, so I am not sure why anyone would do it. I mean, do you think someone would put "Slowed down Firefox gmail page load by 50%." on their promo packet? So for it to be done in secret for many years you would need someone with enough clout to circumvent the promo process behind it. I am not sure how high up you need to be to do that, or if it is even possible to do for engineers. Instead if you take the promo driven perspective, it is a lot easier to make things work well in a single browser. So the engineer makes a site twice as faster in Chrome, writes "Made the site twice as fast" in their promo packet and gets promoted. No need to mention that Firefox performance got worse after the fix, the promo committee wont have time to check that.
- tareqak 7y ago
  Did the people who killed IE6 have to convince a promotion committee that killing IE6 would be good for YouTube and Google?
  - username90 7y ago
    Basically every web developer hated IE6 so they have personal reasons to kill it, I don't know of anyone who hate Firefox.
    - yoz-y 7y ago
      This. Nobody at the time liked IE6 but it’s not a stretch to assume that a lot of Googlers use Firefox on personal machines.

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

If you log into gmail via Edge, Google will pop-up a div [1] and email you an ad [2] to push you onto Chrome. Prioritization is not an excuse when they're actively writing code inside gmail to push users off of non-Chrome browsers. 1: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/1081074389133680640 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743891336806... 2: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/1081074391016910848 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743910169108...

masswerk 7y ago

However, this is policy. E.g., as an independent vendor or developer, your priorities are probably: "Let's make sure this works on all (or most) major browsers before release." Probably, you have a list of high priority compatibility targets and a list of lowers ones, and there's some room for taste and judgement here. But, if your list of high priority targets consists just of your own products, you're much on the former path of the Microsoft, back when they arguably had some problems with their priorities. Edit: I once had a conversation with a Chrome developer, when Chrome 32 broke the established behavior of source buffers in the Web Audio API. I was really surprised to learn that they were working in total isolation and didn't even know how other major browsers behaved and what the established behavior was. I wouldn't blame the individual developers, but I'd expect there to be a process in the corporate culture to check such things (at least) before release. (Are we breaking anything?) Having no such a process – and by this favoring your own product and vision over standards – is arguably an aspect of corporate policy. Especially, if you have all the resources to establish such a process.