Ask HN: Is Google deliberately breaking Firefox?
I recently switched back to Firefox after being a Chrome user for a long time and I noticed that a Youtube live stream I was watching kept breaking. I would reload the page only to find the stream lagged and then stopped working completely over and over again. When I loaded it in Chrome I still had occasional lags but the stream never completely broke once.
This morning I was trying to edit some photos in Google Photos and I noticed that if you apply a few filters it stops working as well. The first few edits work okay, but after 3 or 4 filters the edits no longer apply.
Can't help thinking it's Google either deliberately breaking things in Firefox or genuinely not caring. Reminds me of tactics Microsoft used against competitors in the 90s and 00s.
80 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadEdit to add: To clarify and be more specific, I watched a live stream on YouTube recently and it seemed to work fine.
For anything other than logs, I just use the Lens desktop app.
Visually ugly, poor performance, functionally buggy with no sign of support for an independent developer.
I know all of that is not Angular's fault but some of it sure is.
Firefox is a the one different browser with an entirely different pedigree. Assumptions made about _all– other browser will not necessarily hold true for Firefox.
Ah, but sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice
Are you sure about this? It's the default and main browser on every Mac computer, and there's a fair number of those out there, probably far more than the number of people using Linux on the desktop (unfortunately IMO).
>Edge is Chrome with a Microsoft skin and Microsoft advertising swapped for Google's.
Sure, but it's still a different browser, maintained by a competing tech giant and promoted as the default browser on the world's most-installed desktop OS. Tech people may understand it's just a Chrome re-skin, but the people running the court system don't understand or care.
It could be that the encoded video block required by Firefox and not used that much, as such the cache hit rates are bad requiring trips back to an overloaded origin server.
Every team has a mountain of bugs screaming for their attention and a director losing their mind over AI.
And no one gets promoted for fixing bugs anymore.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Now the experience with other Google services, plus Firefox mobile is terrible. I log into Gmail from time to time, it's awful. No, I don't want to use the app, I have other reasons and procedures.
YT Premium is supposed to be ad-less? What the advantages of uBlock here?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510#c114
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1djkdql/for_people...
According to the reddit comments it's a broken implementation by Google that doesn't trip up Chrome.
In case you're curious: My issue was that it'd cause a burst of high CPU usage, which would result in an emergency shutdown of my system.
Firefox is fixing youtube's bug because google won't fix a bug
"All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks."
"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,"
When exactly should we shift our framing of an issue from "conspiracy theory" to "actual concern"?
And as some other people it's better Firefox on Android than the app. I don't have to deal with adds on Firefox, the official app always have 2 or 4 adds waiting for the next video
Seeing how many of the users report the problem goes away if they let Firefox report as Chrome I personally am rather sure this is intentionally from Googles side:
Yes, I believe there are some real bugs, but I also think Google do take advantage of "useful" bugs to force us over to Chrome.
So I have decided to put my money where my mouth is and since last month I am a nebula subscriber. I am also considering Patreon.
Please consider doing the same, and please do write competition authorities in your country and do ask about when they will look into Googles rampant abuse of market position.
I feel its far more likely Google devs are just lazy and don't bother to test in Firefox, much like devs at pretty much every company these days. Unfortunate, but (probably) not part of some deliberate evil plan.
Now, if YT and Chrome were distaste companies, then we might not have this problem...
When you have a long-standing pattern of behavior, you need to start using critical thinking, instead.
Is there a benefit to Google from breaking Firefox?
Yes, clearly.
Does Google have the technical competency to avoid breaking Firefox if they want to?
I would say this is very likely.
If you misapply Hanlon's Razor where it's no longer appropriate, you're liable to cut yourself off from the truth.
Also, as pointed out by others, when again and again these stupidities benefits the bottom line there is good reason to ask if someone somewhere doesn't have a bonus that goes up with every mistake.
We have one screen in our admin Ui which loads way too much data and it is notably slow on FF, but otherwise it is great.
I have definitely noted sites hat are incompatible with Firefox are turning up but YouTube is by far the worst and most common. So I browse YouTube with Edge.
Yes, and they have been doing so for years.
> a former Mozilla exec who bemoaned intentional sabotage from the Google camp over several years. Johnathan Nightingale, who worked as a GM & VP on Firefox, saw relations between Google and Firefox sour as the former grew more ambitious for browser market share. Not only did YouTube suffer, he saw "oopses" hitting functionality and performance in other popular Google properties like Gmail and Google Docs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delaye...
They may not be using explicit "Works best with Internet Explorer" stickers, but I come across a "requires edge or chrome to work properly" or "for best results"-style popup at least twice a week. Or sometimes things just straight-up don't work until you switch to chrome.
Don't get me started on text-fragments.