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"?)
> "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.