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Corporate priorities can be absolutely 100% nefarious as the wage-fixing antitrust investigation and subsequent settlement shows: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/

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.

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.