Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years (2019)
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1. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
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}, 5E3);The general push towards a single engine is just undeniable at this point. Whoever controls the browser, controls the web.
What are some of the glitches? I'm curious if I've ran into any of them.
But all things considered that's pretty minor
Type a long blurb into a text input widget e.g. a comment on a pull request. The text just bounces up and down as you type. I've noticed this with whatever the extended support version of Firefox (macos 10.14) is and with the current Firefox (macos 14.1). To be fair GH renders widgets partially off screen with whatever version of Safari comes with macos 10.14 There is no more static text on GH so if you go back further than that (or have javascript disabled) nothing renders at all.
There's no issue tracker (because why would there be?) but there was a discussion thread. Last I saw someone posted detailed steps to reproduce a search bug and the GH response was to lock the discussion thread.
Repository settings have a whole lot of knobs and toggles that don’t save or remain disabled unless you manage them from a chromium-something.
I agree that while it doesn’t need to be targeted at specific agents, the fact that they don’t spend the time to test their things on other agents is saying enough.
I fear you're right. Evidence: IE6. But eventually we will come out the other side.
With one notable exception of Google Meet, which consistently tended to fail on anything but Chrome.
1. At first it was “works best with Netscape Navigator”
2. Then it was the same with IE
3. Now it’s Chrome.
I'm not going to use Chrome outside of work (I hate to say it but their dev tools are just hard to walk away from - please Mozilla, invest in your dev tools more).
Even though I didn't work at one of the colluding companies, I got a ~20% step function in my income when the collusion finally collapsed and wages became more competitive across the industry. Considering indirect effects like this, the amounts stolen from workers in related industry probably amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars.
The theft by google and apple had effects broadly in the economy, far outside of the colluding companies.
If you hold down the wages of of the top 10% of laborers, then the next 10% have a harder time getting raises too, etc.
In addition, if those systems of collusion become established, they're a strong profit-motive to gradually expand how many workers are being harmed.
For those who don't remember this, here's Wikipedia's article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem
They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation.
HN has a serious revisionist history problem w/r/t Mozilla.
The memory problems, and the lack of multiprocessing, were both hamstrung by the Firefox extension model, which allowed nearly unlimited customization of the browser, at the expense of nearly unlimited ability to muck up the internals of the browser. It led to any poorly coded extension being able to cause all sorts of memory leaks, sluggishness, bugs and crashes.
And yet techie types were screaming bloody murder when they started talking about "innovation" via transitioning away from the XUL foundations. They didn't care about performance or security so long as their XUL extensions kept working, they said. I remember those threads well.
edit: oh look, there's one in this very thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686
Certainly they could have made more progress and faster, had they not had a huge existing community to transition, unlike Chrome who had a completely fresh start and far more resources.
Also, on all your other issues, see https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...
this is bullshit. people working on Netcape's dime, myself included, under the Mozilla project umbrella, and with approval from the Mozilla leadership, myself included, created the browser that would come to be Firefox.
Look, no offense, but to do "harm" by killing Servo, people would have had to have been using Servo, or there would need to be a clear path to people using Servo, which there wasn't, really. The parts of Servo which were technically viable in any reasonable timespan were already mainlined into Firefox.
>embedding Pocket
You genuinely think this is "more harm" than Google? Seriously? Not to mention that Pocket is a non-Google source of profit for Mozilla.
>and let's not forget how they siphoned the money they made with their Google contract, they chose to fund their other questionable endeavors instead
"questionable endeavors" like, um, Rust and Servo? You're ignoring the successes while only alluding to failures. I like both Rust and Servo, but say what you will about Firefox OS, at least it presented new market opportunities. Rust and Servo did not.
>When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem
Please suggest a viable business model for Mozilla, then.
So... pick one, but you can't both be angry at Mozilla because they use Google's money and be angry at Mozilla because they're trying to find a way to work without Google's money.
More seriously, if Mozilla really can't afford to do browser R&D, I really have to wonder why they keep dumping money into political & non-browser related causes.
(I'm kind of surprised it's just the one previous submission.)
Honestly, Microsoft is becoming the new Microsoft.
If Firefox wanted to be at the top, they have to pay cash to Google.
They might be that indifferent though. If everyone in an organization knows that there are no repercussions to being incompatible with a particular entity, they will spend no time ensuring such compatibility. Entropy will do the rest.
Sometimes an anticompetitive situation can evolve without anyone taking an assertive action.
I don't think you can conclude that, at least not without playing with the definition of "malicious" which according to MW is "having or showing a desire to cause harm to someone."
If a typical engineer at Google, who is under the gun on schedule and needs to ship, prioritizes getting stuff working on Chrome which serves the vast majority of the market, and never ends up testing on FF (which may not even be installed on their machines), that's not the engineer "having a desire to cause harm to [mozilla]".
If you are arguing that the outcome is still the same, then I don't disagree, but even then still I think motivations matter for some things. Someone who accidentally hits a pedestrian and kills them is IMHO a different (and importantly different when it comes to meting out justice) situation vs a person intentionally aiming for and killing a pedestrian.
One example from TFA is checking a user agent and purposely adding a 5 second timer if it is not Chrome, which imo is hard to accidentally do.
“YouTube artificially slows down video load times when using Firefox” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858
Both Mozilla and OpenAI were for-profit companies fully owned by a non-profit of the same name, and dependent on a large corporation (Google/Microsoft) for a large majority of their finances.
And both times, the large company ended up competing directly (Chrome/whatever's happening here) due to being slowed down, while still being the main financier of the original company.
I keep chrome/chromium around for "broken" sites and to chromecast even. It is what it is.
ff with adblocker and cookie window blocker kinda helps, but now reddit, twitter and medium, and quora all want you to login.
Generally don't unnecessarily ascribe things to malice --
-- unless we're talking about a tightly-managed megacorp. Then the probability that one of their managers has engaged in whatever fuckery approaches one.
What I didn't expect was how sluggish Firefox (119.0.1) would become on a brand new machine with around 20 tabs open. By the time I restarted it today, switching to Firefox and acquiring focus took about 2 seconds. I've a grand total of 3 plugins (FB Container, Multi-Account Container, uBlock Origin) installed.
Both on laptop and desktop (although my desktop is way beefier and doesn't mind).
The problem is people can and will endlessly go in circles with their anecdata, to no conclusion. And that's if you're lucky. If you aren't, some optimized statistical average of understandings, misunderstandings, emotionally satisfying interpretations shared by people at the same time can cause a narrative to be ouji-boarded into existence that feels authentic to the participants.
So, yeah. My experience is the opposite, but you should only take that for what it's worth.
Reminds me of Microsoft saving Apple back in the day. It's cheaper to prop up your competitors to avoid becoming a monopoly, than it is to become a monopoly and get broken up. Of course ideally, you don't want to support your competitor to the point of them actually becoming competitive, just enough to have deniability.
Microsoft invested $250 Million in Apple after it already had a multi billion line of credit.
On top of that, Apple turned around and the same quarter spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets. It was three years and much more than $150 million in losses later that Apple became profitable.
And that $250 million was also partially to settle a lawsuit over Microsoft stealing QuickTime source code for its own media player. This is separate from the look and feel lawsuit.
Practically speaking, would things have turned out appreciably different from the way things are now?
People today but especially back during the time that Chrome was released had an disproportionately positive view of The Google in terms of trust and delight from "innovation." If you asked any of them what they think of Mozilla, chances are they'd reply asking "Is that like Godzilla?"
I switched during that time period and took my time switching back. Someone less interested in tech or less concerned with privacy issues probably wouldn't have been motivated to switch back at all. I can't comment on whether Google did use sabotage to win, but they didn't need to.
A more plausible explanation is that there's a very strong culture of using Chrome for work stuff at Google, and a general belief that automated tests can replace manual tests. These "oops"es are more likely the result of engineers doing most of their work in Chrome, and not noticing subtle changes in browsers they don't often use.
It’s silly to assume they didn’t do it on purpose.
You get a bug that a certain feature is crashing Firefox, or slowing it to a crawl. You can't do feature detection, because Firefox reports the relevant features are supported. So you code up a less-efficient behavior that avoids the crash, and only use it for the Firefox user agent.
Months or years later, Firefox improves the problematic behavior, and now performs much better when you switch the User Agent to Chrome and get the efficient path. Nobody at Google is paying active attention to that code anymore, so it remains in that state until someone notices.
The idea of slowing down Firefox based on a User Agent check would be totally crazy to anyone I worked with at Google, and you'd be immediately reported to legal and HR if you tried to get such a thing through code review...
Couple that with the article's documented case of using a deprecated API from Chrome that's unsupported in FF. That's bias in the design, and that's something that leadership is either not catching, or making a conscious decision on. I'm sure it's couched in some statstic about which monetizable users are impacted or something. But at the end of the day it's an organizational, structural bias.
And that's not to say this is necessarily illegal. I honestly wouldn't know. But I think you made a straw man to attack. The allegation isn't necessarily that there's an organization wide conspiracy of evil Googlers. Just that the organization and culture is designed to benefit Chrome and disadvantage Firefox, and that's happening regularly with user-harming effects.
In many ways, I’d treat this like mandatory banking & investment separations where a cost of being a browser developer should be that you can’t ignore things other shops can. Vimeo could decide not to fix a performance regression affecting Firefox but YouTube should be required to fix it within 60 days, and if they don’t like that they can split it into an independent company which wouldn’t have that constant conflict of interest concern.
However, I don't believe that engineers are intentionally disfavoring Firefox, trying to drive market share down to "run out the clock" or "sabotage" competitors.
For all its dysfunction, Google does tend to hire well-intentioned people - the person being quoted even said as much. There's also a long list of annual trainings that coach people to tread lightly regarding anything that might be perceived as anticompetitive.
It's fair to talk about the craft of engineering and how different processes have different effects. Like I said, I have to be conscientious about what I say, so I'm not going to engage that point. But loaded language like "sabotage" and "run out the clock" suggests a malicious intent that I don't believe exists.
Serious shops have literal walls of devices for automated testing across different browsers and OS stacks, with real-time Quality of Experience metrics streaming back from customer devices - tagged with environment metadata - to detect regressions to the experience on every release.
I find it hard to believe that one of the largest web-native giants in our industry didn't follow those practices as an oversight. I hold engineers at Google in higher regard than that.
I doubt Google had any need to pay any kind of attention for Firefox to be bad. They were doing that themselves very well already.
Maybe the problem with Firefox has a lot more to do with their overpaid most likely hippie-feminist person they have as a CEO, no need to search for Google malfeasance when you have THAT type of CEO. Fairly sure she can create political bullshit out of nothing that would bring any org to failure.
I hate the modern world. So hypocrite. We go look for answers on the other side of the planet when it is right there. But you can say it, because it is not politically correct. Seriously kill me already.
Firefox was dominant and Chrome was the little brother, but then the turns tabled.
Firefox lost because it was technically not as good and because of poor leadership. I believe they waste too much ressource on political bullshit, non-working consensus and whatnot.
But most of the defenders are ideological zealots. Which is why I got downvoted because they cannot handle the truth.
Nobody needed to sabotage Firefox, it wasn't very good in the first place.
Or maybe it's also the fault of Google if they suddenly broke all the old extensions and never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back. Or when they disabled the extensions on mobile and did not bring it back despite their promise. Or when they break the user's habits by doing a useless UI revamp every 6 month and ignore the community's feedback.
I know this story already, but as much as I can empathize with this since I am a developer myself, from a user point of view they destroyed the ecosystem that was their strength. When I said "bring back", I do not mean XUL as a technology, I mean the functionalities that the extensions could use.
I was on Firefox because it brought me something more, and because I appreciated it as it was. But now that they dumbed it down and made it like Google Chrome rather than focusing on their strengths, I do not have any good reason to use it. Because the many Chromium-based alternatives are better, more innovative, more reliable, and their UIs are stable and does not change every 6 months.
They did. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831094/firefox-android-...
But still, it's good to know that they finally brought back the extensions on Android. I gave up after waiting one year and a half, and TBH I don't know if I should trust them again to go back to it.