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It doesn't use any Chrome specific features and it will work on FF, but it needs to be optimized to get buttery smooth 60fps animations. As you know, the logic

It doesn't use any Chrome specific features and it will work on FF, but it needs to be optimized to get buttery smooth 60fps animations. As you know, the logic for when the various browsers do layout, create layers, upload them to the GPU, etc is different, and that causes divergence rendering performance. It was hard enough to do this on Chrome, it just takes time. We also ran into a recent difference in the way sparse JS arrays as handled. We use sparse JS arrays for some data structures, but array.splice(0) on Chrome runs much faster than FF when using this to clone a sparse array. There's no intent to exclude Firefox, engineers are staying late in the office working on it.

fabrice_d 12y ago
Still, people wanting to use it will likely switch to chrome. That's a tactic google already used for hangouts - only to end up with a very unconvincing "oops, that was a mistake" answer (see https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912). Instead, you could just notify the user that performance may not be as good on other browsers for now.
fabrice_d 12y ago
Still, people wanting to use it will likely switch to chrome. That's a tactic google already used for hangouts - only to end up with a very unconvincing "oops, that was a mistake" answer (see https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912). Instead, you could just notify the user that performance may not be as good on other browsers for now.
jgon 12y ago
What an incredibly disingenuous reply. Chrome is truly this decade's IE, and watching Google try to play this kind of crap off would be disappointing if it wasn't so insulting. "There's no intent to exclude Firefox", it just turns out you've done that for like 2 major product releases in a row along with a giant flashing button suggesting that the user downloads Chrome. I'm not stupid, you don't have to lie to my face.
- cromwellian 12y ago
  I take offense to someone calling me a liar. Try typing this into a JS Console: var xx = []; xx[30000000]=42; var yy = xx.slice(0); It took almost a week to track down this problem where FF was taking 13 seconds to startup. We've spent a lot of time working on this and it is always in the cards to support this on all the other browsers. We've fixed tons of bugs and have gotten closer to it working the way it should, and people have spent countless hours staying very late at the office to try and finish a polished FF release before the deadline, and we just didn't make it in time. I spent the past 5 years of my time working on open web stuff. Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just flat out wrong. This was a "mobile first" designed app, it's not designed to promote browsers of any stripe, it's designed to promote an experience for gmail users. If we really wanted to shit over a platform, why bother with iOS? Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't.
  - Touche 12y ago
    > Try typing this into a JS Console: var xx = []; xx[30000000]=42; var yy = xx.slice(0); What specific problems does this create that prevents you from shipping with a degraded experience? Or feature detect this problem and serve some type of notice. If bleeding-edge Chrome is the only browser good enough for this site then it's a problem with the site's architecture. > Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just flat out wrong. Maybe not you in the engineering team, but the designers / PMs who decided to stick a "install Chrome instead" banner definitely had it in mind. > Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't. That's either a lie or incredibly naive. You wouldn't have shipped without iOS. Full-stop.
    - cromwellian 12y ago
      >What specific problems does this create that prevents you from shipping with a degraded experience? It's not just a degraded experience as in 'turn off this feature', the bug in question affects the entire infrastructure of how the app works, since it is part of the message passing and serialization mechanism used. It's legal, standard, JS, that just happens to run slow. In this case, a workaround is available, and it is already fixed, but not shipped, because we froze commits some time ago for launch. > That's either a lie or incredibly naive. You wouldn't have shipped without iOS. Full-stop. You mean like we didn't ship support for Android tablets? You would have thought with the big Android Lollipop and Nexus 9 launch, we would have made sure this worked there, right? Maybe you should think about Hanlon's Razor as an explanation.
cpeterso 12y ago
> It doesn't use any Chrome specific features and it will work on FF Does "will work on FF" mean "FF will eventually be supported"? Because today we see: "Inbox only works in Google Chrome. More browsers coming soon. Download Google Chrome."

fabrice_d 12y ago

Still, people wanting to use it will likely switch to chrome. That's a tactic google already used for hangouts - only to end up with a very unconvincing "oops, that was a mistake" answer (see https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912). Instead, you could just notify the user that performance may not be as good on other browsers for now.

fabrice_d 12y ago

jgon 12y ago

What an incredibly disingenuous reply. Chrome is truly this decade's IE, and watching Google try to play this kind of crap off would be disappointing if it wasn't so insulting. "There's no intent to exclude Firefox", it just turns out you've done that for like 2 major product releases in a row along with a giant flashing button suggesting that the user downloads Chrome. I'm not stupid, you don't have to lie to my face.

cromwellian 12y ago
I take offense to someone calling me a liar. Try typing this into a JS Console: var xx = []; xx[30000000]=42; var yy = xx.slice(0); It took almost a week to track down this problem where FF was taking 13 seconds to startup. We've spent a lot of time working on this and it is always in the cards to support this on all the other browsers. We've fixed tons of bugs and have gotten closer to it working the way it should, and people have spent countless hours staying very late at the office to try and finish a polished FF release before the deadline, and we just didn't make it in time. I spent the past 5 years of my time working on open web stuff. Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just flat out wrong. This was a "mobile first" designed app, it's not designed to promote browsers of any stripe, it's designed to promote an experience for gmail users. If we really wanted to shit over a platform, why bother with iOS? Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't.
- Touche 12y ago
  > Try typing this into a JS Console: var xx = []; xx[30000000]=42; var yy = xx.slice(0); What specific problems does this create that prevents you from shipping with a degraded experience? Or feature detect this problem and serve some type of notice. If bleeding-edge Chrome is the only browser good enough for this site then it's a problem with the site's architecture. > Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just flat out wrong. Maybe not you in the engineering team, but the designers / PMs who decided to stick a "install Chrome instead" banner definitely had it in mind. > Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't. That's either a lie or incredibly naive. You wouldn't have shipped without iOS. Full-stop.
  - cromwellian 12y ago
    >What specific problems does this create that prevents you from shipping with a degraded experience? It's not just a degraded experience as in 'turn off this feature', the bug in question affects the entire infrastructure of how the app works, since it is part of the message passing and serialization mechanism used. It's legal, standard, JS, that just happens to run slow. In this case, a workaround is available, and it is already fixed, but not shipped, because we froze commits some time ago for launch. > That's either a lie or incredibly naive. You wouldn't have shipped without iOS. Full-stop. You mean like we didn't ship support for Android tablets? You would have thought with the big Android Lollipop and Nexus 9 launch, we would have made sure this worked there, right? Maybe you should think about Hanlon's Razor as an explanation.

cpeterso 12y ago

> It doesn't use any Chrome specific features and it will work on FF Does "will work on FF" mean "FF will eventually be supported"? Because today we see: "Inbox only works in Google Chrome. More browsers coming soon. Download Google Chrome."