In such cases, I tend to go with "never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence".
Most things that people assume are malicious often are usually prioritization issue. FF market is small, engineering resources are scarce (you may think they are vast, it's google after all, but you need to think of the "impact" engineer has to drive for promotion, which FF barely clears if anything).
Well, yes, but I worked on developing Admob SDK for Windows Phone. So it's not as clear cut as you may have thought of.
Breaking youtube might also be a resourcing issue still - like making sure they control the release process without having to allocate resources to make sure what they do work for windows phone too.
These claims aren't isolated. I think it's a bad look for Google to repeatedly make mistakes when they are currently under multiple investigations for monopolistic behavior.
Yeah. I've also never seen convincing evidence that the alleged deliberate breakage is actually true. There may be legitimate reasons to send different code to different user-agents (feature support; working around bugs in a certain client; bugs or feature support in older versions of a certain client; straight up mistakes; so on). I'm not one to give Google the benefit of the doubt, but surely someone with some web tech chops could actually come up with a smoking gun if this was true. But no one ever does even a base level analysis, it's just gut feelings reddit posts.
Yeah, there are a lot of different things in that thread which have been claimed to fix the problem for the particular user. You'd think if they were nefariously targeting Firefox users, they'd either make the issues very intermittent (even when the user doesn't try any fix), or very incessant (even when the user tries some fix). Of course, there are plenty of complaints to be had about invisible A/B testing, but direct malice seems a bit far-fetched.
FF has a strong reputation for adhering to open standards. For Google to not dedicate “scarce resources” (what a choice of words when talking about a company with a market cap over Two TRILLION dollars) to those standards, I think it’s fair to call this a deliberate action by leadership to prioritize their browser over any other.
This would suggest that google never accidentally makes bad experiences because it can throw big money at everything but that's clearly not the case nor how software nor org management work.
I think this is a fantasy we have about big companies, esp big tech companies, often until we work at one.
"But they have so much money, surely it wasn't just one guy working on this major thing" and "If they wanted to do it right, it would have been done right" and such.
Point is... Maybe it shouldn't be up to Google that the prioritization other browsers get is "one guy in his spare time." Maybe society is allowed to hold the dominant market player to a higher standard? The market itself is, after all, a made-up set of rules people agree on; we could make those rules encourage multiple options over a single winner.
You would change your opinion on my "choice words" if you decide to work at a trillion dollar company one day.
Trillion dollar company with probably <100K eng, spread over hundreds of products/features/etc, who also have to go through performance reviews and have to show impact.
So yes, my choice words are very intentional in this case.
leadership to prioritize their browser -> leadership to prioritize the most popular browsers. Yes.
Unless one is of the philosophy that Google is not required to support alternative browsers more than complying with (their best interpretation of) the standard, which is not a philosophically incoherent position.
(On the other hand, perfectly reasonable to assert "If the rules say the market leader doesn't have to care about the welfare of others in the market, maybe those rules need to change").
Is 100k somehow a small number? How many of them are working on YouTube? To prioritize an issue and not another is a deliberate act, and YouTube has had problems in Firefox for years.
Google has Android, Chrome OS, Youtube, Search, Search Ads, Display Ads, Drive and products, Cloud, etc... So divide by all, and each product has much less engs.
> Most things that people assume are malicious often are usually prioritization issue
Monopolists shouldn't have the benefit of doubt. If it acts in a way that seems like dominant market position abuse, the default position should be assume that's the case, and act accordingly.
At Google's scale, the easiest way to harm Firefox's market share is to simply not test changes on Firefox. Let Mozilla keep their browser implementation-compliant with Google's interpretation of the spec, not the other way around.
Everyone should have the benefit of the doubt. It's simply the right way to act. One doesn't act right towards people because they deserve it in some cosmic sense, but because it's the moral thing to do.
The idea isn't about "benefit of the doubt", it's about having an accurate world view. If you attribute to malice every action of monoploies, you have an inaccurate world view. It's a world view you're of course entitled to, but that doesn't make it a good one to have.
Yes, reddit is very quick to jump to malice, but I don't think it's a big jump to think that Google is out to show you ads by any means necessary. They are an ad company, that's their purpose.
Really? Then why run antivirus? Why have home defense, pepper spray, alarms, doors, locks, personal alarms, police, security guards? Why all the hate against United Health CEO and support for the assassin? Every company is in it for the money and if they can "get you", they will. And from a business competition standpoint, it's been proven time and time again that companies will go to great lengths to curtail their competition. We've seen the numerous lawsuits but what about things we don't see?
The problem goes away though by simply switching the user agent so there's something being deliberately done differently for Firefox users that's causing the issue. It's not simply that Firefox does something different in their engine that Google would need to investigate and address, the problem going away when the user agent is set to Chrome proves that.
You are mixing many things together. Google is so evil, please do not use anything they build, even things they directly or indirectly contributed to, like open web standards!
I am no Google fan, and I left it for a bunch of reasons. There may probably places where they do have monopolistic practices - and I won't comment on them - but my engineering sense is the explanation is much simpler here.
Yes, I also tend to suspect incompetence, or worse, indifference. I have a Sony TV that runs Google TV. When I cast photos from my Pixel device, they show at a grainy 1024x768 resolution. I have been unable to find out why this is the case. When my wife casts the same photos from her iPhone, they show in gorgeous full HDR. I don't know what to make of it except somebody at Google doesn't care enough about my particular combination.
It can be many things really, Sometimes the issue is on Google's end, sometimes it's on Sony - OEMs are also not great at implementing things properly too. So it can be on either end - even if Iphone seems to work.
When "incompetence" is so conveniently beneficial, and you have no way to prove, then the appearance of impropriety is enough to go ahead and charge impropriety.
I'm "incompetent" at doing the laundry. Strangely it's ok because strangely I never get asked to do the laundry. What a totally coincidental benefit that I am not knowingly perpetuating at all.
Most Googlers use Chrome at work so it’s going to be better supported incidentally. The reason behaviors change when switching UA is because features vary across browsers and the UA ends up acting as a flag that turns features on or off. Not because someone is putting in a sleep() when they see Firefox. That would make for a very awkward code review.
When I was a Googler I exclusively used Firefox. Things were never so bad that I had to switch over to Chrome even with internal tools, though I suffered many hiccups due to this choice.
When I was at Google, I had to chase around a major regression in only Firefox. Rendering of a part of the site worked great in Chrome, great in IE, great in Safari... Tanked to seconds-per-update on Firefox.
I was ultimately never able to find the root cause, and the issue went away with the next minor update of Firefox itself.
The thing is: for a junior engineer (who are often the ones who get assigned that kind of task because it's not high-priority to the product's feature list, which is the primary driver of success), that's a hell-project. Ultimately, it's a negative mark on performance review: "I spent a month chasing a problem with a browser used by 2% of our userbase and the end result is the problem fixed itself" is a terrible waste of company resources. And since Googlers get to choose what they think will be most impactful, it should be no surprise they avoid that choice every chance they get.
Google's whole self-management approach tends to optimize towards the center at the cost of the fringe.
That’s exactly how it is, and one of my biggest gripes was that the most impactful projects naturally tend to be the ones that carry larger risks. In an environment where you expect people to manage their own success as described in their own words, they are never going to choose the projects with the biggest potential impact, only the safest project with the greatest perceived impact.
That goes beyond ignoring the long tail of issues: it chokes out innovation.
So you're saying Google sends something different to Firefox causing performance issues yet when Firefox pretends to be Chrome, it works better. Seems sus to me.
I am so glad for this post. I thought all my recent YouTube issues were maybe related to a hardware problem, and or Linux kernel update.
It’s a hard problem to solve, that is to incentivize YouTube to care about Firefox even if Google had no relation to YouTube simply because FFs market share is so small.
That being said I think it is a shame that somehow the web became what it is. Would it not be nice if YouTube was a API and the player/site could be implemented by anybody, so you could choose from many players provided by different people ?
Same. Had issues, but they have since been fixed. According to the dev, YT was serving a bad-muxed VP9 byte stream. But one can hardly call this a deliberate act against FF when the fix was patching the WebM demuxer to handle segments better.
yt-dlp has the ability to log into sites. You can give it your username and password, or hand it a persistent session cookie extracted from your browser. If logging into a premium account gives it access to higher bitrate streams, it can select those.
IME the only thing Premium is good for is getting rid of most ads and enabling background playback in YouTube's official app.
Yes. I am not sure YTP grants access to higher bitrate streams.
In any case, I am using YTP as a leverage. It's well-known Google doesn't like Firefox and yt-dlp, so I am using those with YTP to make the point that maybe they should think twice about it.
Not really saying it is intentional by Google, but I'm a Firefox user and noticed this started happening again recently. YouTube for me is super slow, buggy, not registering clicks, locking the UI.
It did happen in the past and was fixed after around 1 month (which was good because it decreased my time spent on YouTube).
Right now YouTube is almost unusable for me on Firefox with uBlock Origin on M1 Max and has been for the last couple of days for whatever reason. Even disabling uBlock Origin doesn't help.
Just followed the instructions on that post to install the extension that spoofs the user-agent and, believe or not, all the issues are gone... YouTube works completely fine now on Firefox if the user-agent is Windows + Chrome.
I've heard this multiple times over the years. I offer an alternative explanation:
I always have uBO enabled with a bunch of extra rulesets for curtailing tracking and "annoyances". If I turn that off, I get weird behaviours in YouTube (and other sites). Re-enable it and I get back a smooth, reliable site.
Facebook, eBay, newspaper websites, Amazon, et al all demonstrate similar behaviour: slownews and broken behaviour without uBO, performant and reliable with.
Maybe it is coder bias unintentional or otherwise.
Or maybe it's the ever-bloating workload of user-tracking and ads causing problems.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadIn such cases, I tend to go with "never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence".
Most things that people assume are malicious often are usually prioritization issue. FF market is small, engineering resources are scarce (you may think they are vast, it's google after all, but you need to think of the "impact" engineer has to drive for promotion, which FF barely clears if anything).
But this time, I'll assume a mistake because the potential anti trust fallout isn't worth it.
Breaking youtube might also be a resourcing issue still - like making sure they control the release process without having to allocate resources to make sure what they do work for windows phone too.
Note: I no longer work at google.
https://mspoweruser.com/google-claims-edge-slowing-empty-div...
These claims aren't isolated. I think it's a bad look for Google to repeatedly make mistakes when they are currently under multiple investigations for monopolistic behavior.
I think this is a fantasy we have about big companies, esp big tech companies, often until we work at one.
"But they have so much money, surely it wasn't just one guy working on this major thing" and "If they wanted to do it right, it would have been done right" and such.
Trillion dollar company with probably <100K eng, spread over hundreds of products/features/etc, who also have to go through performance reviews and have to show impact.
So yes, my choice words are very intentional in this case.
leadership to prioritize their browser -> leadership to prioritize the most popular browsers. Yes.
This should be considered malice rather than incompetence. I believe that's what others are getting at.
(On the other hand, perfectly reasonable to assert "If the rules say the market leader doesn't have to care about the welfare of others in the market, maybe those rules need to change").
"sort by revenue", or "sort by users" is not as deliberate in my opinion. But sure.
Monopolists shouldn't have the benefit of doubt. If it acts in a way that seems like dominant market position abuse, the default position should be assume that's the case, and act accordingly.
Fair enough, Apple videos playing nice with Android cast devices is also trouble.
At Google's scale, the easiest way to harm Firefox's market share is to simply not test changes on Firefox. Let Mozilla keep their browser implementation-compliant with Google's interpretation of the spec, not the other way around.
Corporations are not people.
I doubt anyone has something like "if firefox sleep (100)"
Did you know that the DOJ (in the US) recently ruled Chrome to be separate from Google, due to monopolistic practices?
>never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence
Really? If only they uttered this phrase during the trial the could have got away with it, dang!
I am no Google fan, and I left it for a bunch of reasons. There may probably places where they do have monopolistic practices - and I won't comment on them - but my engineering sense is the explanation is much simpler here.
>please do not use anything they build
I actually try not to.
That's not even related to what I said. I mentioned the issue here is less likely to be due to monopolistic causes.
Also see this reply from an eng that did work around firefox regressions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389526
It corroborates with what i said.
"Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system."
We should aim to have incentives that produce the behavior we want, which is that YouTube should function the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome.
I'm "incompetent" at doing the laundry. Strangely it's ok because strangely I never get asked to do the laundry. What a totally coincidental benefit that I am not knowingly perpetuating at all.
Most Googlers use Chrome at work so it’s going to be better supported incidentally. The reason behaviors change when switching UA is because features vary across browsers and the UA ends up acting as a flag that turns features on or off. Not because someone is putting in a sleep() when they see Firefox. That would make for a very awkward code review.
When I was a Googler I exclusively used Firefox. Things were never so bad that I had to switch over to Chrome even with internal tools, though I suffered many hiccups due to this choice.
I was ultimately never able to find the root cause, and the issue went away with the next minor update of Firefox itself.
The thing is: for a junior engineer (who are often the ones who get assigned that kind of task because it's not high-priority to the product's feature list, which is the primary driver of success), that's a hell-project. Ultimately, it's a negative mark on performance review: "I spent a month chasing a problem with a browser used by 2% of our userbase and the end result is the problem fixed itself" is a terrible waste of company resources. And since Googlers get to choose what they think will be most impactful, it should be no surprise they avoid that choice every chance they get.
Google's whole self-management approach tends to optimize towards the center at the cost of the fringe.
That goes beyond ignoring the long tail of issues: it chokes out innovation.
It’s a hard problem to solve, that is to incentivize YouTube to care about Firefox even if Google had no relation to YouTube simply because FFs market share is so small.
That being said I think it is a shame that somehow the web became what it is. Would it not be nice if YouTube was a API and the player/site could be implemented by anybody, so you could choose from many players provided by different people ?
As far as I remember this has since been addressed. I personally have no issues on Firefox on Linux.
IME the only thing Premium is good for is getting rid of most ads and enabling background playback in YouTube's official app.
In any case, I am using YTP as a leverage. It's well-known Google doesn't like Firefox and yt-dlp, so I am using those with YTP to make the point that maybe they should think twice about it.
It did happen in the past and was fixed after around 1 month (which was good because it decreased my time spent on YouTube).
Right now YouTube is almost unusable for me on Firefox with uBlock Origin on M1 Max and has been for the last couple of days for whatever reason. Even disabling uBlock Origin doesn't help.
Something is definitely going on between the two.
I always have uBO enabled with a bunch of extra rulesets for curtailing tracking and "annoyances". If I turn that off, I get weird behaviours in YouTube (and other sites). Re-enable it and I get back a smooth, reliable site.
Facebook, eBay, newspaper websites, Amazon, et al all demonstrate similar behaviour: slownews and broken behaviour without uBO, performant and reliable with.
Maybe it is coder bias unintentional or otherwise.
Or maybe it's the ever-bloating workload of user-tracking and ads causing problems.