Ask HN: Is Google Secretly Undermining Firefox?
I have noticed recently, after switching to Firefox, that a lot of Googles stuff doesn't work with Firefox. Most resent example is downloading attachments in Gmail. In FF clicking the download attachment button cause the Google servers to basically not respond for at least a few minutes before it would finally allow me to grab the file.
It strikes me that instead of the old motto of "Don't Be Evil" Google is now implementing the new motto of "Be Evil All The Time". Very disappointing.
43 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 94.6 ms ] threadStill, this reminds me of the article [2] "Chrome is Not the Standard"
[1] https://caniuse.com/#comparison
[2] https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/chrome-is-not-the-standard.h...
And I confirm OPs assumptions. I also feel this is a tricky way of Google to make Firefox users feel their browser of being "slow". It is basically power abuse. As Microsoft did it in the 90s.
Do you see the same issue in any other browsers?
If you want to get to the bottom of this, you need to treat it like any other bug and come up with a reproducable test case to share. Until we know more, there's no point in speculating.
Also, duckduckgo :)
Of course there likely won't ever be hard evidence that they are doing this deliberately. There are many ways for them to achieve this outcome without explicitly instructing their developers to degrade FF experience.
They can successfully bullshit most users that way, but for me this is just more reason to use FF more and Google less. I just hope there are enough other people with the same attitude for us to matter.
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>Of course there likely won't ever be hard evidence that they are doing this deliberately.
First of all, I am speaking as an official Google employee and on behalf of Google. I can share an employee number and a screenshot of our internal mail. One of the official guidelines we have internally reads as follows:
"We have a near monopoly on search and free web email. Let's abuse it illegally.
As googlers, we have an obligation to illegally abuse our monopoly. If you're working on a web application at Google, make sure you break it on Firefox!
Don't post screenshots of this email anywhere, or we could be fined $10 billion.
This is official Google policy."
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3. How this hack works. Someone at Google will quote this email to their legal team, who will crap their pants, and a strongly worded email will cause all this to stop.
In the spirit of "Hacker" news, let's see if this works! :D
Like?
It's not hard to justify focusing on the most popular browser (which "so just happens" to be Chrome) over a browser that is less popular and not even a system default on Windows or MacOS.
Devs write bad code, gets fixed only in Chrome. Or devs test only in Chrome from the start because they don't have time to test everywhere and if it doesn't even work in Chrome you get bad looks, so it only works well in Chrome.
This is really the shitties thing I have seen from Google, especially first hand.
I doubt anyone at Google is working under a mandate that says explicitly "we must kill Firefox by making our services fail when people use it!"
Instead, every team working on these services at Google has a massive backlog of bugs. The product managers look at the bugs that start with "on Firefox, feature ABC doesn't work correctly..." And then they look at the bugs that are for Chrome. And they put the Chrome ones at a higher priority every time.
They know that their bonuses are tied to Chrome somehow inside the massive Google goal structure.
No one on the team argues about the decisions to deprioritize those bugs.
And, bugs for Firefox get fixed at a slower rate than Chrome, and here we are.
https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s...
https://pando.com/tag/techtopus
In May of this year (2019), https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 was on HN here: 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.
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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.
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tl;dr Do we trust Google to not "be evil"?
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.
1: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743891336806...
2: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10810743910169108...
E.g., as an independent vendor or developer, your priorities are probably: "Let's make sure this works on all (or most) major browsers before release." Probably, you have a list of high priority compatibility targets and a list of lowers ones, and there's some room for taste and judgement here. But, if your list of high priority targets consists just of your own products, you're much on the former path of the Microsoft, back when they arguably had some problems with their priorities.
Edit: I once had a conversation with a Chrome developer, when Chrome 32 broke the established behavior of source buffers in the Web Audio API. I was really surprised to learn that they were working in total isolation and didn't even know how other major browsers behaved and what the established behavior was. I wouldn't blame the individual developers, but I'd expect there to be a process in the corporate culture to check such things (at least) before release. (Are we breaking anything?) Having no such a process – and by this favoring your own product and vision over standards – is arguably an aspect of corporate policy. Especially, if you have all the resources to establish such a process.
I work at Google and I use Firefox. Based on everything I have seen, it boils down to: browser compatibility requires work. If you don't test it in Firefox, and don't prioritize fixing any issues that appear, then things are going to break. It doesn't require any sabotage, just entropy. I wish Google prioritized Firefox compatibility more.
It's not. This is an anti-trust case waiting to happen.
First it was only youtube videos, but now it has expanded to docs and other services also.
From last six months Gmail never opens on first attempt in my firefox second is required, but if I switch to chrome it not only magically opens at first attempt but with faster page load.