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This reminds me of a blog post a former exec of Mozilla put out saying Google had been intentionally breaking things to get users to jump ship to Chrome. https

This reminds me of a blog post a former exec of Mozilla put out saying Google had been intentionally breaking things to get users to jump ship to Chrome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357

forward1 3y ago
Is that what you think happened here? Google made the search page blank for Firefox users to get them on Chrome? Or perhaps it's the work of Hanlon's razor.
- phreack 3y ago
  That's discussed on GP's link, a former Firefox vice president said > "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said. I tend to believe him
  - forward1 3y ago
    This is a baseless accusation which defies logic. Chrome has 65.76% of the browser market share. Firefox has 2.93% of the browser market share, and of those, only some Android users were affected. And you're saying Google purposefully contrived a situation to break their own service to get those <3% of users to go and install Chrome, and assume those users knew to take that action? All while keeping this conspiracy quiet from other staff at Google and with malicious (and possibly anti-competitive) intent? Or is it possible no one cares about Firefox because so few people use it and this is the result of a simple bug?
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade. It's even broken for me, a user on macos using firefox without an ad-blocker enabled for youtube in premium mode. The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'. Videos play fine but often when trying to scrub with the timeline the timeline thumbnail will not respond or other controls will be very sluggish.
      - forward1 3y ago
        > Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade. I use Youtube in Firefox daily, even in Strict mode with many user.js tweaks, and have never had a problem. > The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'. Get a faster computer.
        rixthefox 3y ago
        This is the wrong assumption to make. I can tell you as someone with a powerful rig that is by no stretch a "slouch" sitting at 0% CPU and 0% GPU I have seen Youtube act like garbage for absolutely no reason. I've even had video playback skip ahead a second as well and it throws me off when watching videos. > Get a faster computer or... and keep up with me here. Google has been known to do A/B testing on users. Just because your part of "B" group that doesn't see it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It only means Google is artificially putting their thumb on the scale and I take serious issue with people handwaving issues with "get a better computer" Nothing is wrong with my computer and only Youtube has this issue, any other video platform does not do this so why is it only Youtube?
        sleepybrett 3y ago
        > Get a faster computer. Yeah my m2 max is a total fucking slouch, just barely better than a 486.
        forward1 3y ago
        If you can't play videos on an M2, that's not a Youtube problem, that's a "you messed your computer up" problem.
- acdha 3y ago
  I don’t think there’s an official “sabotage Firefox” memo waiting to be subpoenaed. I think it’s more along the lines of Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari, figuring that they save money and, probably never written down, any problems just make their browser look better. This keeps happening over and over for Google at a rate far in excess of other major tech companies so we know they don’t make an effort to test with Firefox, and it’s why I’d like regulators to force anyone making a browser used by more than, say, 100k people to be obligated to test in other browsers on every site their larger organization operates and have a maximum time to patch any compatibility or performance issue which isn’t due to a browser not implementing a W3C standard. The goal would be to cover things like YouTube using the Chrome web component API for ages after the standard shipped and serving a slow polyfill to non-Chrome browsers.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    > Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari FWIW, over my time at Google (2012-2022) we had massively better testing on Firefox than Safari, because you can run Firefox on Linux on arbitrary hardware while Safari requires MacOS which requires Apple hardware and is automation-hostile. We did eventually get some tests on Safari, but they were slower and flakier.
    - acdha 3y ago
      So I guess my question would be where things were breaking down - Meet was almost unusable in Firefox for 2019-2021 (Slack, Teams, Zoom, Chime, and WebEx were all fine), and the GCP console login would periodically get into a login redirect loop only in Firefox on a regular basis for months. Our GCP rep never could get an answer on whether anyone was even aware of that problem.
      - jefftk 3y ago
        My guess is those paths didn't have automated tests, or the automated tests missed some important aspect of real-world usage? Issues engineers working on the product ran into were way more likely to get fixed (among other things because reproducing the issue was easier) and almost all engineers primarily used Chrome. (Not defending; trying to give background.)
- WhackyIdeas 3y ago
  Considering it has happened time and time again, and this latest one happens just by changing the UA… yes. If it looks like a banana, shaped like a banana, feels like a banana, it’s probably a banana (or a plantain).
  - gkbrk 3y ago
    Come on, don't sell Google short here. The previous one happened just by changing the UA too :)
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  There isn't a good reason to UA sniff. I run Firefox serving a Chrome UA as my daily driver, and never run into any issues. The reason I started this nonsense was because of a few sites that completely falsely asserted they needed Chrome to run properly, aka the only issue was the fact that they looked at the user-agent string. Not to mention the fact that this is google.com, not some wild feat of frontend engineering. They shouldn't be serving any JS that wouldn't run on IE, forget anything close to a modern browser.

forward1 3y ago

Is that what you think happened here? Google made the search page blank for Firefox users to get them on Chrome? Or perhaps it's the work of Hanlon's razor.

phreack 3y ago
That's discussed on GP's link, a former Firefox vice president said > "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said. I tend to believe him
- forward1 3y ago
  This is a baseless accusation which defies logic. Chrome has 65.76% of the browser market share. Firefox has 2.93% of the browser market share, and of those, only some Android users were affected. And you're saying Google purposefully contrived a situation to break their own service to get those <3% of users to go and install Chrome, and assume those users knew to take that action? All while keeping this conspiracy quiet from other staff at Google and with malicious (and possibly anti-competitive) intent? Or is it possible no one cares about Firefox because so few people use it and this is the result of a simple bug?
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade. It's even broken for me, a user on macos using firefox without an ad-blocker enabled for youtube in premium mode. The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'. Videos play fine but often when trying to scrub with the timeline the timeline thumbnail will not respond or other controls will be very sluggish.
    - forward1 3y ago
      > Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade. I use Youtube in Firefox daily, even in Strict mode with many user.js tweaks, and have never had a problem. > The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'. Get a faster computer.
      - rixthefox 3y ago
        This is the wrong assumption to make. I can tell you as someone with a powerful rig that is by no stretch a "slouch" sitting at 0% CPU and 0% GPU I have seen Youtube act like garbage for absolutely no reason. I've even had video playback skip ahead a second as well and it throws me off when watching videos. > Get a faster computer or... and keep up with me here. Google has been known to do A/B testing on users. Just because your part of "B" group that doesn't see it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It only means Google is artificially putting their thumb on the scale and I take serious issue with people handwaving issues with "get a better computer" Nothing is wrong with my computer and only Youtube has this issue, any other video platform does not do this so why is it only Youtube?
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
        > Get a faster computer. Yeah my m2 max is a total fucking slouch, just barely better than a 486.
        forward1 3y ago
        If you can't play videos on an M2, that's not a Youtube problem, that's a "you messed your computer up" problem.
acdha 3y ago
I don’t think there’s an official “sabotage Firefox” memo waiting to be subpoenaed. I think it’s more along the lines of Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari, figuring that they save money and, probably never written down, any problems just make their browser look better. This keeps happening over and over for Google at a rate far in excess of other major tech companies so we know they don’t make an effort to test with Firefox, and it’s why I’d like regulators to force anyone making a browser used by more than, say, 100k people to be obligated to test in other browsers on every site their larger organization operates and have a maximum time to patch any compatibility or performance issue which isn’t due to a browser not implementing a W3C standard. The goal would be to cover things like YouTube using the Chrome web component API for ages after the standard shipped and serving a slow polyfill to non-Chrome browsers.
- jefftk 3y ago
  > Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari FWIW, over my time at Google (2012-2022) we had massively better testing on Firefox than Safari, because you can run Firefox on Linux on arbitrary hardware while Safari requires MacOS which requires Apple hardware and is automation-hostile. We did eventually get some tests on Safari, but they were slower and flakier.
  - acdha 3y ago
    So I guess my question would be where things were breaking down - Meet was almost unusable in Firefox for 2019-2021 (Slack, Teams, Zoom, Chime, and WebEx were all fine), and the GCP console login would periodically get into a login redirect loop only in Firefox on a regular basis for months. Our GCP rep never could get an answer on whether anyone was even aware of that problem.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      My guess is those paths didn't have automated tests, or the automated tests missed some important aspect of real-world usage? Issues engineers working on the product ran into were way more likely to get fixed (among other things because reproducing the issue was easier) and almost all engineers primarily used Chrome. (Not defending; trying to give background.)
WhackyIdeas 3y ago
Considering it has happened time and time again, and this latest one happens just by changing the UA… yes. If it looks like a banana, shaped like a banana, feels like a banana, it’s probably a banana (or a plantain).
- gkbrk 3y ago
  Come on, don't sell Google short here. The previous one happened just by changing the UA too :)
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
There isn't a good reason to UA sniff. I run Firefox serving a Chrome UA as my daily driver, and never run into any issues. The reason I started this nonsense was because of a few sites that completely falsely asserted they needed Chrome to run properly, aka the only issue was the fact that they looked at the user-agent string. Not to mention the fact that this is google.com, not some wild feat of frontend engineering. They shouldn't be serving any JS that wouldn't run on IE, forget anything close to a modern browser.