5 ms·

IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers. * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "ho

IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers. * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue" * engineer adds a flag, with different control parameters * Some genius in Product figures this out and updates the experiment to slow down for competitors When company gets a backlash from public: "oops, we forgot to clean up all parameters of feature flag and it accidentally impacted Firefox"

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue" “Research”
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  Researching how best to fuck with your competitors.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Next: researching regulatory capture?
- Jensson 3y ago
  They have done such research before, Google published this at a time when developers were all "100 ms more or less web load time doesn't matter". Since then webpages has gotten much more focused on performance. https://blog.research.google/2009/06/speed-matters.html https://blog.research.google/2009/06/speed-matters.html
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    The dog slow load times of ad infested AMP pages would suggest otherwise.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      The prevailing developer discussions going from "Load speed doesn't matter, stop complaining about useless stuff" to "load times matters, but here we choose to make it slow for other reasons" is a massive improvement though. Today speed is valued, it wasn't back then. There are many such tests being written about in blogs today. So now a developer can get time to optimize load times based on those blog posts while before managers would say it was worthless.
      - b112 3y ago
        Untrue. I optimized pages pre-2000, and it had always mattered. It's always, always mattered. If anything, people care less today, with the entire ridiculous 100 loads per page.
        Jensson 3y ago
        Of course it always mattered. But at the time lots of people argued it didn't matter, which is why the headline is "Speed matters". You thinking it did matter at the time doesn't mean the general community thought so.
        b112 3y ago
        But the general community did care about speed. Everyone worked towards small load times, optimized (for example) image size for optimal load time, everyone cared. Whomever didn't care was weird.
    - xxpor 3y ago
      AMP pages load way, way faster IME
      - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
        Not as fast as with 90% of JS blocked. That's how the web was supposed to work, not downloading 50 MiB on every hyperlink.
progval 3y ago
"oops" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
- Jensson 3y ago
  Google stopped testing stuff in Firefox, that is all they did afaik. We all should know how many bugs and "oppsies" you get when you don't test before releasing new features. Test code snippets being pushed to prod etc. Engineers tend to create paper trails on what they work on, code reviews and bug logs etc are everywhere, so I doubt there is any of those where they say "Make things shit for Firefox to hurt our competitors", that would net them an easy loss in court. But not testing in browsers with small userbases will hold in court.
  - progval 3y ago
    Firefox has a small userbase partly because of the early "oopses" described in the article I linked. Those happened a while ago, when Firefox had more users than Chrome.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Chrome was bigger than Firefox by 2012, the accusations that Google intentionally made things worse for Firefox came many years after that.
      - toyg 3y ago
        But they referred to behaviour that was present pretty much from the start. It's just that Mozilla folks were extremely tolerant and assumed good faith for a very long time. Google have been disgustingly anticompetitive for a very, very long time at this point.
        acdha 3y ago
        Yeah, one of the biggest examples being the HTML 5 video push and Chrome’s claims around H.264: Google promised they were going all in on WebM and would remove support soon, but never did. That meant that Firefox users got more errors outright but also that for years even sites like YouTube would leave Firefox using 100% CPU with your laptop fans on high doing software WebM while Chrome users got hardware accelerated H.264. That became moot after Mozilla and Cisco struck that deal and video hardware acceleration for other formats shipped but there was a multi-year period where Firefox suffered badly in comparison to other browsers.
n4r9 3y ago
Very good point. It's important to recognise that developers in many companies are often not fully aware of the intended use of features they're asked to create. Another example that springs to mind is Uber, who used a tool called "Greyball" to avoid contact between drivers and authorities: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B00E/ https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B0... My initial reaction was astonishment that the engineers would happily implement this. And maybe that is what happened. But the alternative possibility is that product and senior management assigned different parts of the feature to different teams e.g. one team develops a pattern recognition system to detect users' professions, another team develops a spoofing system for use in demos, etc...
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Why would you be surprised that they'd implement this? It's their job to implement things.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    They were using it to evade law enforcement while flouting regulations. It's highly unethical and almost certainly illegal.
    - brailsafe 3y ago
      Oh I thought you were referring back to the YouTube issue
      - n4r9 3y ago
        Tbh even that is ethically very questionable, if the engineers knew that the outcome would be a delay specific to Firefox.
no_wizard 3y ago
This doesn’t add up. In order for someone to slow down the by browser they need someone to have coded the following: - UA Detection - Branching for when the flag is on or off - a timeout that only runs when these two things are true That takes an engineer to do the work. Marketing and product managers are not writing this code certainly. If they’re abusing a differ t flag, then the real question I have is what the flags purpose is and why is it screening Firefox. Either way there is an intention of UA checking and throttling based on the UA and that takes an engineer to do it
- patchguard 3y ago
  Not so hard to believe tho. I work on a product that has parametrized feature flags. This means that, from a web interface, someone can say things like "activate feature X, on machines running operating system Y, at version Z, and are running product version W with license type Q". This is not a hard thing to build, and once you have it you can mix and match filters without being a software engineer or knowing how it works behind the scenes.

lotsofpulp 3y ago

> * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue" “Research”

HlessClaudesman 3y ago
Researching how best to fuck with your competitors.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Next: researching regulatory capture?
Jensson 3y ago
They have done such research before, Google published this at a time when developers were all "100 ms more or less web load time doesn't matter". Since then webpages has gotten much more focused on performance. https://blog.research.google/2009/06/speed-matters.html https://blog.research.google/2009/06/speed-matters.html
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  The dog slow load times of ad infested AMP pages would suggest otherwise.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    The prevailing developer discussions going from "Load speed doesn't matter, stop complaining about useless stuff" to "load times matters, but here we choose to make it slow for other reasons" is a massive improvement though. Today speed is valued, it wasn't back then. There are many such tests being written about in blogs today. So now a developer can get time to optimize load times based on those blog posts while before managers would say it was worthless.
    - b112 3y ago
      Untrue. I optimized pages pre-2000, and it had always mattered. It's always, always mattered. If anything, people care less today, with the entire ridiculous 100 loads per page.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        Of course it always mattered. But at the time lots of people argued it didn't matter, which is why the headline is "Speed matters". You thinking it did matter at the time doesn't mean the general community thought so.
        b112 3y ago
        But the general community did care about speed. Everyone worked towards small load times, optimized (for example) image size for optimal load time, everyone cared. Whomever didn't care was weird.
  - xxpor 3y ago
    AMP pages load way, way faster IME
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      Not as fast as with 90% of JS blocked. That's how the web was supposed to work, not downloading 50 MiB on every hyperlink.

progval 3y ago

"oops" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Jensson 3y ago
Google stopped testing stuff in Firefox, that is all they did afaik. We all should know how many bugs and "oppsies" you get when you don't test before releasing new features. Test code snippets being pushed to prod etc. Engineers tend to create paper trails on what they work on, code reviews and bug logs etc are everywhere, so I doubt there is any of those where they say "Make things shit for Firefox to hurt our competitors", that would net them an easy loss in court. But not testing in browsers with small userbases will hold in court.
- progval 3y ago
  Firefox has a small userbase partly because of the early "oopses" described in the article I linked. Those happened a while ago, when Firefox had more users than Chrome.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Chrome was bigger than Firefox by 2012, the accusations that Google intentionally made things worse for Firefox came many years after that.
    - toyg 3y ago
      But they referred to behaviour that was present pretty much from the start. It's just that Mozilla folks were extremely tolerant and assumed good faith for a very long time. Google have been disgustingly anticompetitive for a very, very long time at this point.
      - acdha 3y ago
        Yeah, one of the biggest examples being the HTML 5 video push and Chrome’s claims around H.264: Google promised they were going all in on WebM and would remove support soon, but never did. That meant that Firefox users got more errors outright but also that for years even sites like YouTube would leave Firefox using 100% CPU with your laptop fans on high doing software WebM while Chrome users got hardware accelerated H.264. That became moot after Mozilla and Cisco struck that deal and video hardware acceleration for other formats shipped but there was a multi-year period where Firefox suffered badly in comparison to other browsers.

n4r9 3y ago

Very good point. It's important to recognise that developers in many companies are often not fully aware of the intended use of features they're asked to create. Another example that springs to mind is Uber, who used a tool called "Greyball" to avoid contact between drivers and authorities: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B00E/ https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B0... My initial reaction was astonishment that the engineers would happily implement this. And maybe that is what happened. But the alternative possibility is that product and senior management assigned different parts of the feature to different teams e.g. one team develops a pattern recognition system to detect users' professions, another team develops a spoofing system for use in demos, etc...

brailsafe 3y ago
Why would you be surprised that they'd implement this? It's their job to implement things.
- n4r9 3y ago
  They were using it to evade law enforcement while flouting regulations. It's highly unethical and almost certainly illegal.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    Oh I thought you were referring back to the YouTube issue
    - n4r9 3y ago
      Tbh even that is ethically very questionable, if the engineers knew that the outcome would be a delay specific to Firefox.

no_wizard 3y ago

This doesn’t add up. In order for someone to slow down the by browser they need someone to have coded the following: - UA Detection - Branching for when the flag is on or off - a timeout that only runs when these two things are true That takes an engineer to do the work. Marketing and product managers are not writing this code certainly. If they’re abusing a differ t flag, then the real question I have is what the flags purpose is and why is it screening Firefox. Either way there is an intention of UA checking and throttling based on the UA and that takes an engineer to do it

patchguard 3y ago
Not so hard to believe tho. I work on a product that has parametrized feature flags. This means that, from a web interface, someone can say things like "activate feature X, on machines running operating system Y, at version Z, and are running product version W with license type Q". This is not a hard thing to build, and once you have it you can mix and match filters without being a software engineer or knowing how it works behind the scenes.