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I have contacted local authorities twice about anti competitive behavior from Chrome. If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look lik

I have contacted local authorities twice about anti competitive behavior from Chrome. If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-) Same if ten - twenty Germans or Brits or French do the same. I would mention: 1. that some of their web properties (calendar and YouTube) have been intentionally incompatible with Firefox as evidenced by how well they work in Firefox if one changes how the browser identify itself. 2. How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE. As we saw yesterday with AWS authorities are willing to punish rampant abuse if they have a good case and this definitely is one. Edit: since this comment is getting a lot of attention the relevant authority in Norway is Konkurransetilsynet with web address https://konkurransetilsynet.no https://konkurransetilsynet.no (Finding the exact correct form on that site and for this purpose seems to be an art and/or science it seems but if you can't find any just submit somewhere and explain the situation.) It would be beautiful if everyone could post underneath with the address to the equivalent office in your jurisdiction.

judge2020 5y ago
> anti competitive behavior Have some examples? On Desktop, I don't see any, but I would get if you mean Mobile since Chrome is still the default browser there for Android.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  This thread from a former Mozilla exec: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20
  - freediver 5y ago
    Very instructive, thanks for sharing.
- stelonix 5y ago
  I remember when gmail outright crippled itself when I used it some 5 years ago. I also remember other Google services disabling some features only on Firefox.
- ALotOfBees 5y ago
  Google Ads is practically unusable with Firefox
  - LightG 5y ago
    Feature, not a bug.
- eitland 5y ago
  Have you used Firefox with Google Docs Calendar or YouTube over the last ten years? (Multiple more examples exist for those willing to dig: at one point the search results page would peg one processor core briefly every 30 seconds as long as you stayed on that page - and used Firefox) Edit: and as you mention, the situation with Chrome on mobile is basically a 1-1 of IE on Windows.
  - PoignardAzur 5y ago
    Not OP, but I have. I'm currently typing this answer on Firefox, have been using google Docs, Calendar and Youtube for years, never had major problems. (Of course this is all anecdotal.)
  - arp242 5y ago
    I never have any problems with YouTube; it works well for me. What problems are there? I use Google Docs only sporadically (mostly to read .doc(x) files sent to me), and it's kinda slow, but that's not necessarily Google's fault. Slack is (was? Haven't used it in year) unusably slow on Firefox too, and don't get me started on the "new" Reddit that couldn't even scroll right last time I tried it.
- mmis1000 5y ago
  Google sheets used to be broken `BASED ON USER AGENT`. https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069/google-sheets-automatically-adds-newline-when-editing-cell?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069/google-sheet... After i found that spoof browser agent fixed it. They locked the thread coincidentally and the bug is also fixed coincidentally a few days after. I don't know if it is really a coincident, but I definitely have 0 trust of them after it.
  - meibo 5y ago
    It's common to work around browser bugs like this. I wouldn't blame some possible hack a tired dev implemented on a busy Thursday on a grand scheme to strip you of your freedom - in the end it's just people working there. Especially seeing that the bug was fixed after someone complained/made them aware.
    - eitland 5y ago
      If you are Google, a multi billion company, pushing your own browser with a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions range (seriously, this was important to them, the only ad important enough to reach the front page of Google AFAIK) - then you better make sure you make it work everwhere instead of this constant "ooops"-thing that shows that Google doesn't even do the smallest amount of testing in Firefox, or they do it deliberately.
      - meibo 5y ago
        If you can save a million or two in salaries for testers for all Docs products, for software that in most cases just works as well as in Chrome, why waste the money? Google is a company. Automated tests can help with this, but you also need to maintain and write those in the first place. Just trying to follow the thought process as an economist. It's likely hard to justify, especially with admins being quick at noticing these things and employees on docs products usually being receptive on bug trackers since it is a business offering.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  Youtube on iOS is deliberately changed in a way that it breaks playing video/audio in the background. iOS is capable of that by default with HTML5, but Youtube sells background play as a paid feature.
- grawprog 5y ago
  Even if just mobile I'm still not sure how they get away with it. They have 71% of the global mobile marketshare, my phone came preinstalled with chrome, I cannot remove it, only disable it. How is that any different at all to what Microsoft was doing with IE in the 90's?
granzymes 5y ago
> How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE. Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle. Windows was the product everyone wanted, and Microsoft abused its dominance in operating systems to increase its share of the browser market by refusing to sell you Windows unless you also took Internet Explorer. By contrast, Google does not condition the use of Search on the use of Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a product to customers who use one of your other products (or we’d have to break up pretty much every multi-product company).
- gibba999 5y ago
  No, Microsoft's primary offense was making non-Microsoft tools awkward. Windows without IE was awkward. Windows wasn't done until it gave odd error messages on DR DOS. Borland always seemed to have incomplete documentation, late. Etc. Google works poorly enough on non-Chrome browsers that it's the same thing.
  - granzymes 5y ago
    You are welcome to read the complaint. I've pulled out some choice paragraphs: 5. To protect its valuable Windows monopoly against such potential competitive threats, and to extend its operating system monopoly into other software markets, Microsoft has engaged in a series of anticompetitive activities. Microsoft's conduct includes agreements tying other Microsoft software products to Microsoft's Windows operating system; exclusionary agreements precluding companies from distributing, promoting, buying, or using products of Microsoft's software competitors or potential competitors; and exclusionary agreements restricting the right of companies to provide services or resources to Microsoft's software competitors or potential competitors. 17. But Mr. Gates did not stop at free distribution. Rather, Microsoft purposefully set out to do whatever it took to make sure significant market participants distributed and used Internet Explorer instead of Netscape's browser -- including paying some customers to take IE and using its unique control over Windows to induce others to do so. For example, in seeking the support of Intuit, a significant application software developer, Mr. Gates was blunt, as he reported in a July 1996 internal e-mail: 18. Second, Microsoft unlawfully required PC manufacturers, as a condition of obtaining licenses for the Windows 95 operating system, to agree to license, preinstall, and distribute Internet Explorer on every Windows PC such manufacturers shipped. By virtue of the monopoly position Windows enjoys, it was a commercial necessity for OEMs to preinstall Windows 95 -- and, as a result of Microsoft's illegal tie-in, Internet Explorer -- on virtually all of the PCs they sold. Microsoft thereby unlawfully tied its Internet Explorer software to the Windows 95 version of its monopoly operating system and unlawfully leveraged its operating system monopoly to require PC manufacturers to license and distribute Internet Explorer on every PC those OEMs shipped with Windows. https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp
gibba999 5y ago
My child's school uses Google Classroom. The Google experience is unusable in Firefox. Meet doesn't work (e.g. he sees nothing when the teacher screenshares). This seems really quite anti-competitive. My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Unless Meet and other Google apps are really tailored to subperform under firefox I don't think it's a solid case. If google devs code doesn't run as fast in firefox why should google take the blame ? or maybe google is using non html5 apis to tap into chrome for faster perf in which case things are muddy.. since whatwg kinda allows unofficial apis
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    Obviously, a private company can do what they want and they shouldn't be forced to make their code run on other platforms.
    - dathinab 5y ago
      No, IMHO they should be forced to comply with web standard and at least try to work with browsers they don't support first class. (Microsoft simply doesn't allow you to open any of their web apps, weather it's for teams or some of their other apps.) Especially if it involves quasi monopolies. I.e. the it's a quasi Monopoly of chrome like browsers spear headed by Google and Microsoft.
      - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
        I agree, I should've made clearer I was being sarcastic. The quasi-monopoly thing is often ignored when it comes to Big Tech silencing voices.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > No, IMHO they should be forced to comply with web standard The problem is that they ram whatever internal Chrome APIs they want through standards bodies and call it a standard. Others just can't keep up: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
chrisseaton 5y ago
How can you 'lie' about an opinion like 'better'?
dontblink 5y ago
How do you know this is because of Chrome in the first place? Another explanation is that it could be Edge or even users moving to use mobile (browsers) more? Genuinely curious where the market share and total number of users in the market (broken down) has shifted.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  It may also not exclusively be anticompetitive behavior from Chrome, but just Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox. They constantly manage to generate shitstorms around updates (how does this never happen with Chrome?) and then the plain disregard/making fun of user feedback [1] is just a kick in the teeth. For me at least, that's in large part why I moved to Chrome. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200731211652/https://twitter.com/EmilyKager/status/1289308930972278789 https://web.archive.org/web/20200731211652/https://twitter.c...
  - dontblink 5y ago
    It does happen with Chrome. See the whole ublock origin debacle. I guess it doesn't impact end users as greatly or maybe Firefox users are more vocal about changes? Also: yikes on that link. I would feel disillusioned if my feedback was responded to in that manner. Sometimes empathy can get you so much further.
    - littlecranky67 5y ago
      Whats that debacle about? I'm using latest Chrome and am still using uBlock origin.
      - Volundr 5y ago
        https://www.techradar.com/news/popular-chrome-ad-blockers-could-be-crippled-under-proposed-design-changes https://www.techradar.com/news/popular-chrome-ad-blockers-co... If I recall correctly they backtracked, but it was a big deal for awhile.
  - 5y ago
coldtea 5y ago
>If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-) That 5 people wrote to them?
- eitland 5y ago
  Yes. It is my sincere belief that very few people notice && care enough to figure out who to contact, how to contact them and actually do it.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    Yeah, most people seem to waste their time contacting the BBB, instead of their State AG with complaints against businesses. You can get a lot more done complaining to the right places.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    I agree about that. The fact that "but if 5 (or 10 or 50) people wrote them it would have an impact" I'm sceptical about. 99.9999% it would just be ignored. Campaigns with 100s of thousands of people are ignored all the time...
    - eitland 5y ago
      Thanks for explaining! As I mentioned avove I think now is a particularly good time!
chakhs 5y ago
We use Google Meet at work, and I use Firefox. The "Change background" feature was not "supported" in Firefox, then suddenly I could use it so I thought they finally implemented it for Firefox as it was working perfectly. Two days later the feature disappeared, and I keep getting that "your browser doesn't support this feature" popup since.
- dietr1ch 5y ago
  That sucks, but take the time to imagine what might be going on on the other side. There's a dev running an experiment to whitelist more combinations of the huge space of (Device, CPU, GPU, OS, OSVersion, Browser, BrowserVersion) to use that feature. What would you do after seeing that the metrics show that most of the users on your experiment had a bad experience? In that case you'd want to rollback your experiment right away and figure out what's wrong. You really expected all, if not most of the combinations you selected to actually work well, but it's apparently not the case.
  - chakhs 5y ago
    yeah I'm over fetching indeed :') A/B testing sucks, they should've let me know it was an experiment, I had high hopes
    - dietr1ch 5y ago
      Yeah, there's definitely room for improvement there, but I feel that it'd only target more advanced users. I'd like that you could opt-in into being aware of the experiments you are running, and be allowed to opt-out early of experiments when they don't work, or sign-up to run them permanently (as long as they are actually running) if they work great. Although, letting users know about the experiments might also ruins some experiments as users could start assuming that the experiment really changes things. I imagine you can easily run a dummy experiment and have people talk about how much faster/slower their browser runs with it.
kgarten 5y ago
thanks for the info. Will also report this issue to the authorities. I love keyboard driven browsers and had also some issues with nyxt and qutebrowser. I want to avoid installing chromium on my linux box and I just can't. Recommending others also to report it. If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-)
- eitland 5y ago
  > If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-) Second this. I want to like Google and did for the longest time. You do so much great stuff but some stuff like this is so damaging for both the ecosystem and for you, because as long as this is going on my best hope is a giant fine.
lobocinza 5y ago
To be fair Google's products are not great as they were. GDrive sometimes does not work at Chromium. You can't disable 3rd party to download cookies. Console is a pile of errors. UX is not consistent. And new services don't integrate properly even with Google services.
midrus 5y ago
First world problems
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Are problems of the first world a priori invalid because they are of the first world? What makes you think that non-first world people also don’t care about these things. Even the concept of first world seems a little data anymore. Between urbanization and the internet a lot of those categories have blurred in the last few decades.
agilob 5y ago
Mozilla is killing firefox by introducing hostile behaviour, breaking user expectations, not delivering on promises and ignoring voices of MANY users. I used to be firefox user since Phoenix, but I gave up on it after 89 when context menus were broken, megabar was still as shitty as when introduced first tie, and new stupid mobile look on my 4k screen? It's almost like they are killing firefox on purpose, but I realised that loyalty to a software product is stupid and moved to Brave. Why do you care about Firefox and not Safari or Samsung browser?

judge2020 5y ago

> anti competitive behavior Have some examples? On Desktop, I don't see any, but I would get if you mean Mobile since Chrome is still the default browser there for Android.

dmitriid 5y ago
This thread from a former Mozilla exec: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20
- freediver 5y ago
  Very instructive, thanks for sharing.
stelonix 5y ago
I remember when gmail outright crippled itself when I used it some 5 years ago. I also remember other Google services disabling some features only on Firefox.
ALotOfBees 5y ago
Google Ads is practically unusable with Firefox
- LightG 5y ago
  Feature, not a bug.
eitland 5y ago
Have you used Firefox with Google Docs Calendar or YouTube over the last ten years? (Multiple more examples exist for those willing to dig: at one point the search results page would peg one processor core briefly every 30 seconds as long as you stayed on that page - and used Firefox) Edit: and as you mention, the situation with Chrome on mobile is basically a 1-1 of IE on Windows.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  Not OP, but I have. I'm currently typing this answer on Firefox, have been using google Docs, Calendar and Youtube for years, never had major problems. (Of course this is all anecdotal.)
- arp242 5y ago
  I never have any problems with YouTube; it works well for me. What problems are there? I use Google Docs only sporadically (mostly to read .doc(x) files sent to me), and it's kinda slow, but that's not necessarily Google's fault. Slack is (was? Haven't used it in year) unusably slow on Firefox too, and don't get me started on the "new" Reddit that couldn't even scroll right last time I tried it.
mmis1000 5y ago
Google sheets used to be broken `BASED ON USER AGENT`. https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069/google-sheets-automatically-adds-newline-when-editing-cell?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069/google-sheet... After i found that spoof browser agent fixed it. They locked the thread coincidentally and the bug is also fixed coincidentally a few days after. I don't know if it is really a coincident, but I definitely have 0 trust of them after it.
- meibo 5y ago
  It's common to work around browser bugs like this. I wouldn't blame some possible hack a tired dev implemented on a busy Thursday on a grand scheme to strip you of your freedom - in the end it's just people working there. Especially seeing that the bug was fixed after someone complained/made them aware.
  - eitland 5y ago
    If you are Google, a multi billion company, pushing your own browser with a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions range (seriously, this was important to them, the only ad important enough to reach the front page of Google AFAIK) - then you better make sure you make it work everwhere instead of this constant "ooops"-thing that shows that Google doesn't even do the smallest amount of testing in Firefox, or they do it deliberately.
    - meibo 5y ago
      If you can save a million or two in salaries for testers for all Docs products, for software that in most cases just works as well as in Chrome, why waste the money? Google is a company. Automated tests can help with this, but you also need to maintain and write those in the first place. Just trying to follow the thought process as an economist. It's likely hard to justify, especially with admins being quick at noticing these things and employees on docs products usually being receptive on bug trackers since it is a business offering.
littlecranky67 5y ago
Youtube on iOS is deliberately changed in a way that it breaks playing video/audio in the background. iOS is capable of that by default with HTML5, but Youtube sells background play as a paid feature.
grawprog 5y ago
Even if just mobile I'm still not sure how they get away with it. They have 71% of the global mobile marketshare, my phone came preinstalled with chrome, I cannot remove it, only disable it. How is that any different at all to what Microsoft was doing with IE in the 90's?

granzymes 5y ago

> How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE. Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle. Windows was the product everyone wanted, and Microsoft abused its dominance in operating systems to increase its share of the browser market by refusing to sell you Windows unless you also took Internet Explorer. By contrast, Google does not condition the use of Search on the use of Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a product to customers who use one of your other products (or we’d have to break up pretty much every multi-product company).

gibba999 5y ago
No, Microsoft's primary offense was making non-Microsoft tools awkward. Windows without IE was awkward. Windows wasn't done until it gave odd error messages on DR DOS. Borland always seemed to have incomplete documentation, late. Etc. Google works poorly enough on non-Chrome browsers that it's the same thing.
- granzymes 5y ago
  You are welcome to read the complaint. I've pulled out some choice paragraphs: 5. To protect its valuable Windows monopoly against such potential competitive threats, and to extend its operating system monopoly into other software markets, Microsoft has engaged in a series of anticompetitive activities. Microsoft's conduct includes agreements tying other Microsoft software products to Microsoft's Windows operating system; exclusionary agreements precluding companies from distributing, promoting, buying, or using products of Microsoft's software competitors or potential competitors; and exclusionary agreements restricting the right of companies to provide services or resources to Microsoft's software competitors or potential competitors. 17. But Mr. Gates did not stop at free distribution. Rather, Microsoft purposefully set out to do whatever it took to make sure significant market participants distributed and used Internet Explorer instead of Netscape's browser -- including paying some customers to take IE and using its unique control over Windows to induce others to do so. For example, in seeking the support of Intuit, a significant application software developer, Mr. Gates was blunt, as he reported in a July 1996 internal e-mail: 18. Second, Microsoft unlawfully required PC manufacturers, as a condition of obtaining licenses for the Windows 95 operating system, to agree to license, preinstall, and distribute Internet Explorer on every Windows PC such manufacturers shipped. By virtue of the monopoly position Windows enjoys, it was a commercial necessity for OEMs to preinstall Windows 95 -- and, as a result of Microsoft's illegal tie-in, Internet Explorer -- on virtually all of the PCs they sold. Microsoft thereby unlawfully tied its Internet Explorer software to the Windows 95 version of its monopoly operating system and unlawfully leveraged its operating system monopoly to require PC manufacturers to license and distribute Internet Explorer on every PC those OEMs shipped with Windows. https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp

gibba999 5y ago

My child's school uses Google Classroom. The Google experience is unusable in Firefox. Meet doesn't work (e.g. he sees nothing when the teacher screenshares). This seems really quite anti-competitive. My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.

agumonkey 5y ago
Unless Meet and other Google apps are really tailored to subperform under firefox I don't think it's a solid case. If google devs code doesn't run as fast in firefox why should google take the blame ? or maybe google is using non html5 apis to tap into chrome for faster perf in which case things are muddy.. since whatwg kinda allows unofficial apis
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  Obviously, a private company can do what they want and they shouldn't be forced to make their code run on other platforms.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    No, IMHO they should be forced to comply with web standard and at least try to work with browsers they don't support first class. (Microsoft simply doesn't allow you to open any of their web apps, weather it's for teams or some of their other apps.) Especially if it involves quasi monopolies. I.e. the it's a quasi Monopoly of chrome like browsers spear headed by Google and Microsoft.
    - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
      I agree, I should've made clearer I was being sarcastic. The quasi-monopoly thing is often ignored when it comes to Big Tech silencing voices.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > No, IMHO they should be forced to comply with web standard The problem is that they ram whatever internal Chrome APIs they want through standards bodies and call it a standard. Others just can't keep up: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

chrisseaton 5y ago

How can you 'lie' about an opinion like 'better'?

dontblink 5y ago

How do you know this is because of Chrome in the first place? Another explanation is that it could be Edge or even users moving to use mobile (browsers) more? Genuinely curious where the market share and total number of users in the market (broken down) has shifted.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago
It may also not exclusively be anticompetitive behavior from Chrome, but just Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox. They constantly manage to generate shitstorms around updates (how does this never happen with Chrome?) and then the plain disregard/making fun of user feedback [1] is just a kick in the teeth. For me at least, that's in large part why I moved to Chrome. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200731211652/https://twitter.com/EmilyKager/status/1289308930972278789 https://web.archive.org/web/20200731211652/https://twitter.c...
- dontblink 5y ago
  It does happen with Chrome. See the whole ublock origin debacle. I guess it doesn't impact end users as greatly or maybe Firefox users are more vocal about changes? Also: yikes on that link. I would feel disillusioned if my feedback was responded to in that manner. Sometimes empathy can get you so much further.
  - littlecranky67 5y ago
    Whats that debacle about? I'm using latest Chrome and am still using uBlock origin.
    - Volundr 5y ago
      https://www.techradar.com/news/popular-chrome-ad-blockers-could-be-crippled-under-proposed-design-changes https://www.techradar.com/news/popular-chrome-ad-blockers-co... If I recall correctly they backtracked, but it was a big deal for awhile.
- 5y ago

coldtea 5y ago

>If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-) That 5 people wrote to them?

eitland 5y ago
Yes. It is my sincere belief that very few people notice && care enough to figure out who to contact, how to contact them and actually do it.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  Yeah, most people seem to waste their time contacting the BBB, instead of their State AG with complaints against businesses. You can get a lot more done complaining to the right places.
- coldtea 5y ago
  I agree about that. The fact that "but if 5 (or 10 or 50) people wrote them it would have an impact" I'm sceptical about. 99.9999% it would just be ignored. Campaigns with 100s of thousands of people are ignored all the time...
  - eitland 5y ago
    Thanks for explaining! As I mentioned avove I think now is a particularly good time!

chakhs 5y ago

We use Google Meet at work, and I use Firefox. The "Change background" feature was not "supported" in Firefox, then suddenly I could use it so I thought they finally implemented it for Firefox as it was working perfectly. Two days later the feature disappeared, and I keep getting that "your browser doesn't support this feature" popup since.

dietr1ch 5y ago
That sucks, but take the time to imagine what might be going on on the other side. There's a dev running an experiment to whitelist more combinations of the huge space of (Device, CPU, GPU, OS, OSVersion, Browser, BrowserVersion) to use that feature. What would you do after seeing that the metrics show that most of the users on your experiment had a bad experience? In that case you'd want to rollback your experiment right away and figure out what's wrong. You really expected all, if not most of the combinations you selected to actually work well, but it's apparently not the case.
- chakhs 5y ago
  yeah I'm over fetching indeed :') A/B testing sucks, they should've let me know it was an experiment, I had high hopes
  - dietr1ch 5y ago
    Yeah, there's definitely room for improvement there, but I feel that it'd only target more advanced users. I'd like that you could opt-in into being aware of the experiments you are running, and be allowed to opt-out early of experiments when they don't work, or sign-up to run them permanently (as long as they are actually running) if they work great. Although, letting users know about the experiments might also ruins some experiments as users could start assuming that the experiment really changes things. I imagine you can easily run a dummy experiment and have people talk about how much faster/slower their browser runs with it.

kgarten 5y ago

thanks for the info. Will also report this issue to the authorities. I love keyboard driven browsers and had also some issues with nyxt and qutebrowser. I want to avoid installing chromium on my linux box and I just can't. Recommending others also to report it. If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-)

eitland 5y ago
> If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-) Second this. I want to like Google and did for the longest time. You do so much great stuff but some stuff like this is so damaging for both the ecosystem and for you, because as long as this is going on my best hope is a giant fine.

lobocinza 5y ago

To be fair Google's products are not great as they were. GDrive sometimes does not work at Chromium. You can't disable 3rd party to download cookies. Console is a pile of errors. UX is not consistent. And new services don't integrate properly even with Google services.

midrus 5y ago

First world problems

Tagbert 5y ago
Are problems of the first world a priori invalid because they are of the first world? What makes you think that non-first world people also don’t care about these things. Even the concept of first world seems a little data anymore. Between urbanization and the internet a lot of those categories have blurred in the last few decades.

agilob 5y ago

Mozilla is killing firefox by introducing hostile behaviour, breaking user expectations, not delivering on promises and ignoring voices of MANY users. I used to be firefox user since Phoenix, but I gave up on it after 89 when context menus were broken, megabar was still as shitty as when introduced first tie, and new stupid mobile look on my 4k screen? It's almost like they are killing firefox on purpose, but I realised that loyalty to a software product is stupid and moved to Brave. Why do you care about Firefox and not Safari or Samsung browser?