> "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said.
> "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," Nightingale said.
You can do a lot more damage as a trusted friend than you can as a known enemy.
Microsoft can and does do this now in retaliation, they own enough web properties that this makes a difference. Firefox doesn’t have a huge web presence though, nothing anywhere on par with Google advertising their browser in their search engine and email client.
Unfortunately, from my experience many third party web developers only test in Chrome, and hence actually encourage Chrome use even when there’s no incompatibility with Firefox or Edge.
I’ve started doing this. In the case of CCPA, GDPR disclosures and “do not track” requirements I suggest uninstalling Chrome and all Google software and switching to Firefox with proper as locking software enabled. I think Google is compliant with neither, and if a user is actually concerned about their privacy they definitely shouldn’t be using Chrome.
It would be great to understand the downvotes on this.
Chrome/Chromium phones home, period. Last time I've personally checked this [1] was still true.
It's hard to argue that Google doesn't have an interest on collecting as much data it can. Especially, since their heavy focus on ML, where the algorithms are very data-hungry.
As someone who uses neither a Chromium-based browser nor Firefox, I certainly would not like that. Web devs shouldn't be deciding what tools users use to view their pages. They should strive to create sites that work on anything.
I don't see how that would be a true statement in almost any context, barring specifically using features that you know Chrome doesn't work well with or going through the chromium bug tracker to find things to do that break Chrome.
If developers use Firefox instead of Chrome you do get some rendering bugs in Chrome. Standard compliance have gotten much better, but at one point in my last project Edge, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox where all doing different things while I was trying to fix an odd CSS issue.
I had something similar, then I dug into it and found that my CSS was not specified correctly. After looking into the spec, I realized that what I thought Firefox was doing wrong, was actually the correct behavior. Chrome and Edge just covered up my mistake is all.
I hope this is a joke. Safari is easily the worst of the big four, and view web standards as suggestions that are to be ignored at any time. My company doesn't support IE anymore, but safari, not edge, is the new hated browser for web dev for sure.
Compared to what, Chrome? It took them how long to get position sticky, backdrop filters, etc? Meanwhile Google views web standards as their property they can willy-nilly do with what they please.
Talking from the user perspective ?
The chrome/ram meme are enough to explain the issue
And I’m sure macbook owners care about battery more than what you think !
And for the argument of Safari is the hated browser I’m more than okey with that at least they still test for it (I feel sorry for Firefox because the oups we didn’t test blablabla
I use Safari so that someone captures user issues that result from developing for Chrome. Other people on the team use mostly Firefox/Chrome so we have coverage of all the major browsers we target.
> [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox
As a firefox user, the thing that annoys the hell out of me is the inability to use the mouse menu for cut and paste in Google Docs unless you're using chrome. I don't understand why it forces you to use the keyboard shortcut. I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and prefer just using the right-click mouse menu.
> I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and prefer just using the right-click mouse menu.
it's a little surprising to me that you can't remember cut, copy, and paste that works on any computer in the last two decades but can remember all of the esoteric emacs shortcuts, which include references to a key that doesn't even exist.
Emacs is unchanged muscle memory for the last 30+ years. Cut is ctrl-k (or ctrl-w depending on your perspective), yank is ctrl-y. How many WYSIWYG editors have risen and died in that time? How many desktop environments?
And the "cut copy and paste that works on any computer" -- on a windows pc its ctrl-blah, and on a mac its cmd-blah.
This whole thing seems somewhat ridiculous to me. If there is intent here (which evidence seems to dictate that there is), then Google is playing a very short-term game and Google’s strength has been it’s long-term thinking.
There’s not even much to argue about: web tech is standardized, and each vendor can (and should) be held to an objective measurement o how well they implement the spec. When MS chooses to make spec-compliant sites, they should be easily (and even publicly) able to say “hey your browser is out of spec, and this is why”.
Just so odd to think that these sort of classroom politics still happen.
> All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course.
Is it though? It blows my mind how Google gets a pass on stuff like this. Way back when MS got slapped for monopolistic practices the key argument was that by bundling IE with Windows they were leveraging their dominant position in desktop OSs to gain an unfair advantage in another industry (browsers/web, via IE).
Meanwhile Google leverages their position in search, email, etc. to push Chrome and whatever else, and no one bats an eye.
I got a popup telling me I could install other browsers, and some directions on how to do so. I knew it had to be in response to the EU case, but you couldn't tell from the phrasing that they did it involuntarily.
> You can do a lot more damage as a trusted friend than you can as a known enemy.
Reminds me of the Young Pope's first episode.
"Friendly relationships are dangerous. They lend themselves to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and conflicts, and they always end badly. Formal relationships, on the other hand, are as clear as spring water."
In my opinion, it's very difficult to use a Windows machine as your daily driver as a Software Engineer at Google. Windows VMs are banned by corporate policy. Getting an extra Windows laptop to test things requires a business reason and approval from a VP.
> "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome, and most folks we spoke with inside [Google] were Firefox fans," Nightingale recollected in a Twitter thread on Saturday.
> "When Chrome launched...
... many of those same folks started to use Chrome, making it easier to miss Firefox bugs?
Jonathan Nightingale is claiming a company-wide conspiracy ("coordinated plan" in Jonathan's words) across "hundreds" of different product teams could be executed without any Firefox users or other internal Mozilla sympathizers picking up on it.
We're talking Google here: they have a hard enough time coordinating internally when they're openly trying.
This seems like a very complicated theory when the natural consequences of everyone switching to a different product provide an obvious and ready explanation for what we're seeing.
Ideally developers ought to test everything across different browsers, I agree, but we know in practice developers are only human and humans are lazy. And testing is still no substitute for using a browser day in and day out.
I want better support for Firefox and other browsers, but blaming lack of support on a conspiracy is an easy cop-out that doesn't help us address the real issues at stake.
> We're talking Google here: they have a hard enough time coordinating internally when they're openly trying.
Which is an interesting point here: is Google a drunken master pretending to be an incompetent but way more coordinated than they appear or is Google simply an incompetent company whose left hand never knows what its right hand is doing, but yet has been extremely lucky at pretending to be competent?
(Either way, given such history how can you trust anything about Google if they seem so uncoordinated and prone to so many "oops"?)
> "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said.
> "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," Nightingale said.
You can do a lot more damage as a trusted friend than you can as a known enemy.