> "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.

Why don't webdevs fight back and put "best viewed on Firefox" pop-ups on their pages (whenever the user is using Chrome).

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.

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.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Chromium/comments/3fgabt/privacy_is...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla

Seems to be fairly common to see a “works on Chrome, my job is done” attitude. Especially with SPAs.

I worry that we’re going to see another generation of crappy line of business apps that only work (badly) in one browser because of this attitude.

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

But also, ime, Safari has the best UX of all the browsers I’ve tried.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's besides the EU's investigation and fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Andr...

I can't say I've ever seen that dialog, though.

Ironically, it seems Google did just that to the detriment of Mozilla. Browser Wars are such shit-shows.

Whoever said that didn't have many enemies.

- Stannis Baratheon

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."

> "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.

Yet for some reason each oops only resulted in Google's favor. It's like slipping on banana peel and doing a perfect backflip. Every time.

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"?)

Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I'm not even going to get into the whole endless captcha on firefox 'feature'.

It knows my user agent. It knows very well that the Firefox extension is the relevant result. This is 100% done out of malice.

Nor are user-agents in any way reliable.

Reliable enough to constantly break, penalize and nag me for using Firefox in other ways, apparently. This happens and is well-documented, not a conspiracy theory.

It's not uncommon that I'll have a customer try to tell me that some search or selection algorithm in our product that I wrote is making use of unknowable information to bias it's results.

I think that the anger is justified but it doesn't justify making up poorly substantiated conspiracy theories. The hard facts are enough to see what Google is doing anyway, no need to write fanfiction.

I can believe that they don't purposefully break Firefox for the sake of it, but it's clear that they make no effort to make their websites compatible and they don't appear to consider these issues like bugs. If it works on Chrome then it's good enough. I suspect that internally compatibility issues with Firefox are not even considered bugs at all, it's just the way it is and it's up to Mozilla to fix their browsers to be compatible with Chromium (I have no insider knowledge, but it's the way it feels from the outside).

Googlers push new code to production regularly, with the cycles getting faster all the time. It used to be biweekly (as the article alludes). Then it was weekly. Then it was daily. Then it was "push on every green build".

If you push to production literally the moment your test suite passes, then your browser compatibility is a function of two things:

1. What the engineers developing a feature use.

2. What is easiest to build automatic test suites with.

In both cases the answer was Chrome and Chrome. Firefox has never had good support for API driven embedding. Embedded Gecko never took off. The automated GUI test drivers that became popular were mostly WebKit/Chrome based, with some support for IE and using it via RDP to a VM. Nobody forces Googlers to use any particular browser but Chrome was the best so that's what they used.

Also, Google culturally is always on the bleeding/cutting edge of HTML stuff. So it's more likely to hit edge cases than others.

Result: occasional glitches where Firefox bugs or Google app bugs intersected. They always got fixed quickly when reported. Only crazy people would think this was some conspiracy involving tens of thousands of developers who mysteriously never leaked their evil plan.

Mozilla would have done themselves a world of benefit if they'd been pushing hard their own CI/integrated Gecko based test suite and made it the best.

Having been involved in a number of these reports, this is flat-out false. Basic "fix your CSS to not rely on this Chrome bug; here's the exact diff you want to make it work both in browsers that follow the CSS spec and in Chrome" things regularly take 2-3 months to apply on the Google side. Basic "your browser user-agent sniffing is broken _again_ in the same way as three months ago" things take a month or two to fix.

Disclosure: Mozilla employee, have been cced on far too many of these bug report threads over the years.

Disclosure: former Google employee, I did many pushes and fixed browser compatibility bugs whilst I was there.

In the timeframe we're talking about most products were on a biweekly push cycle. In the ideal case where there was no delay at all between you reporting a bug and it reaching the right person inside the company who could fix it, if that day happened to be on a branch cut day then that's a minimum of a two week delay to reach production unless the bug was so severe that the entire product was hosed for all Firefox users. Minor glitches in rarely used screens wouldn't count for a rollback or emergency push, for instance.

But sometimes pushes fail. There's a severe bug, attempts to fix it are too slow and the push window closes so the servers are rolled back. Now the latency is a month.

That's only software bugs. Now include the time taken for the bug report to be triaged, mis-directed, pinged, rerouted to the right person. Now include delays incurred if that person goes on holiday, gets sick or has other higher priority tasks, as bug handoff works about as well there as anyone else. That can easily add more time.

Finally, regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated. If they weren't testing Firefox well enough before they weren't testing it well enough after either. If Google had a central rule about which browsers had to be supported then I didn't know about it. There was just an assumption you'd try to support the browsers people used as best you could.

I'm not saying it was awesome or right, just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific and there were plenty of IE or Safari compatibility bugs too.

And just to be clear, there are certainly cases when things got fixed quickly. But "always" is really stretching it; this was the exception, not the norm.

> regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated

Sure. The problem is the environment and corporate policy, not individual engineers. They're just responding to incentives as best they can, and in my experience are generally quite helpful within the constraints of the system.

> just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific

Indeed, I don't think it was. It was not-Chrome specific.

Here's a thought experiment. Say someone at Google who did _not_ test in Chrome committed a change that degraded the visual experience of gmail in Chrome and it got shipped. How would fixing that be prioritized vs a similar visual degradation in Firefox or some other non-Chrome browser? Assuming there is no emergency push involved, if the fix was not ready by the next push cycle, would it just slide, or would the original commit get rolled back?

I can't quite recall the timelines, but I remember it felt like years before the Chrome team shipped a native Mac/Linux version. They also fixed a lot of bugs that broke features of the various apps, e.g. lack of printing was a big one for a while.

I imagine you're talking about later when Chrome got really big. But it's hard for me to say what would have happened because when the features are themselves being developed in Chrome there are hardly ever cases like that when it works in every browser except Chrome and this is somehow not noticed during the canary period.

Disclosure: xoogler with my name carved in stone outside Mozilla HQ.

Yep, that works too.

I was there. That was the headline cause of their legal troubles, but far from the only thing Microsoft got up to. They intentionally broke other sites, threw misleading messages and tried to play games with standards.

In other words, many actions that look familiar today with different actors.

My old laptop fans go crazy when I launch chrome. It’s too much heavy for a mail client.

It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years.

You might enjoy this talk if you haven't seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452

You get a much better experience with a native app, like MailMate or Thunderbird.

I just don't understand people using webmail on their workstations, especially Gmail. It was cool doing that in 2004, but it got old.

I actually got curious and tested Firefox with my personal gmail account (using it for >10 years, so it has tons of emails, filters etc). I did not notice any big issues, text rendering seems slightly different, maybe chrome version is slightly snappier but that's it.

I am not sure what exactly Gmail does on Firefox, but it makes using AOL.com in 2020 feel like a better email experience.

That goes both ways. I’m categorically not replacing Firefox with Chrome, and when Gmail became unbearable in Firefox I switched to something else.

Gmail is hardly a unique product, nor uniquely good in 2020, and it haven’t been for quite a few years.

I had to help someone with something the other day and saw the current version of gmail in safari and I feel sorry for anyone that has to use that.

Not sure what the captcha on Firefox 'feature' refers to but nothing springs to mind as not working in that department either.

Microsoft probably won't be much better though in the long run...

The fact that so many of us in the development community, who are particularly sensitive to privacy concerns, unashamedly use Chrome continues to baffle me. I had one guy on Reddit tell me he feels really bad about knowing how little privacy he has using Chrome, but that he continues to use it because the font kerning on Chrome is slightly better.

Windows is only now trying to level the playing field to that which Google already assumes.

For those who don't know about it, VSCodium is a community-delivered build of Visual Studio Code with telemetry removed.

https://vscodium.com/

We care a lot about GDPR and privacy, and there's been a big top-down push to reduce the amount of telemetry collected, including giving good justifications for anything we want to keep collecting. We have to make sure all the data is kept in GDPR-compliant systems that can handle the deletion and security policies, and we regularly take training to tell us what is and isn't compliant use of customer data. My team uses it mostly for seeing the success rate of our feature across different hardware, firmware and OS versions, which helps us identify issues and poke certain partners to improve ecosystem reliability. I can't speak for the Edge/Bing/Whatever teams, but I'd hope they take it as seriously as us.

I definitely wish users had more control over data collection without resorting to group policy, and I wish users had more visibility and control over more of the OS in general, but I feel we've learned the wrong lessons from Apple so everything must be unconfigurable and only give vague feedback like, "Something is happening..." (but I digress). In terms of caring about privacy I'd still give Apple the crown, but I don't think it'd be unfair to give Microsoft second place.

As you aren't management, I get that you can't really do much to impact that. But I think the idea that "seeing the success rate of our feature" can't possibly be worth the risks and harm to goodwill and trust that Microsoft's telemetry approach took.

Side note "Something happened" as an error message when trying to upgrade Windows 10 is my favorite go-to example of bad error messages. It didn't even give you the paradoxical 0x80000000 error code that you had to use a search engine to figure out what meant. It was just a notice that something went wrong.

— I am making no judgment calls on the validity of profit motive, nor am I saying that Google is any more evil for having one. It is the blatant doublespeak about what Google is and does that grates my nerves.