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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

Any time you see a comment like "With some more man hours, it seems trivial for Google to get the application to run in Firefox", you know the author either doesn't know what they're talking about or just hasn't thought about it very much. Anyone who's done any serious web-app development in the past decade knows that cross browser compatibility at the bleeding edge (ie, past what the JS frameworks have worked out) can consume as much time as the rest of the application put together.

At the early fast-iteration stage of a limit-seeking webapp like Inbox, it makes sense to focus on the app itself and limit yourself to just one browser. For Google, obviously they will choose Chrome. Once the app reaches some stability, and major changes are coming far more slowly, then it makes sense to start working in cross-browser compatibility.

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I think that most of those comments stem from Google-hating, which is currently a big fashion here. Were it Apple doing it, they'd be lauded for their attention to user experience. Was Inbox a product of a random startup, it'd be praised for good business approach and proper prioritizing of developer time. But it's Google, so it must be some evil plan.

I'm sure that there's a lot of that going on, yes.

But Google has the legacy of their "don't be evil" company motto to content with. Which is to say that people expect (foolishly) for them to at least try not to appear evil.

The difference between Google prioritizing Chrome vs anyone else is that Google owns Chrome whereas Apple doesn't, and some random startup certainly doesn't.

It smells of Microsoft's "we'll only make this work in IE and fuck everyone else" strategy and that doesn't bring other warm thoughts to mind.

So it's not JUST that it's fashionable to think the worst of Google these days.

Why is picking one browser to get their product tested and working on first (that they happen to own) such a big deal?

These comments really are just FUD and hating (jealousy?) on Google for ignorant reasons.

Apple is doing the same thing for icloud.com on mobile browsers. Only works on mobile Safari AFAIK.

Yes, but Apple never talked about how interoperability was important for them. Apple has always been a walled garden, like it or leave it.

Google, on the other hand, has done a lot for open standards and interoperability.

Is it unreasonable for people to flip out on Inbox while it's still very much in beta? Sure. If it's a real beta. Gmail was in beta for what, 5 years?

Does Google have any obligation -- moral or otherwise -- to make Inbox work cross-browser? None whatsoever.

But them not doing so would constitute a break from past policy which is something that people are worried about.

You might have an argument if Chrome wasn't open source.

Being that is not the case...

Chromium is open source, Chrome is not.

How does open source invalidate that argument?

Anyone can build and release a compatible browser whereas one would be stuck with Internet Explorer (and no compatible browser) if something were only to work on IE.

As it stands, Chromium exists.

How is it any better that something can run on a bunch of slightly different versions of Chromium, but no other browsers built from a different base?

Chrome isn't the only option. It is not a case where it could be Microsoft making Hotmail only work in IE, for example.

Don't want Google's services in your browser? Download Chromium or the dozens of other browsers forked from that codebase.

With something being limited to working in IE, THERE IS NOTHING ELSE, binary or otherwise.

Google Chrome is the only browser running Google's own V8, a very bleeding edge piece of technology. Google is working on things like browser-based material design and persistent connections. Things which Inbox uses.

Providing backwards and parallel compatibility is a secondary concern.

"Providing backwards and parallel compatibility is a secondary concern."

And this is exactly why people are worried about things like this. Google has, depending on who you ask, somewhere between a quarter and a half of all desktop browser usage share. They're the browser shipped by default with Android nowadays, and Android is a big part of the mobile and tablet market these days. By the same token, Google is a huge part of the Internet -- Google runs many of the most popular sites, and is also probably the single-largest source of referral traffic for the vast majority of websites.

And now, you're saying that Google views pushing the bleeding edge in the browser for its browser-based applications is more important to Google than being compatible with other browser implementations. And you wonder why people are starting to worry about Google?

So Mozilla is "some random startup"?

Just out of curiosity, what do people typically slam google for? I feel like I have a lot of trust in their services -- a hell of a lot more than facebook, and somewhere around on par with apple. Sure, they collect a bunch of your data, but it's for the purpose of them being able to serve more relevant ads to you if I'm not mistaken, since that's where most of their money is made, and their ads are fairly clean and not questionable as far as I've seen.

Overall, they have really solid products that have been incredibly useful to me, and you can see how they are working hard on so many important things: surpassing apple on the mobile design front with material design, cranking out bleeding edge and experimental innovations like self-driving cars and glass, and even working on a lot of projects that help to bring technology to those who don't have it, like project loon, the lower cost and open source android stuff, etc -- and these projects have actually been making a really big difference in third world countries (with no strings attached unlike facebook's total bullshit "charity" initiatives).

I'm not a google fanboy by any means. I more or less just use gmail and calendar, and just got an android phone after having an iphone 4 for like four years just to try it out. Just pointing out things I have passively observed about how they run. I would really love to hear the other side of the story though to perhaps balance my perspective a bit more!

"Sure, they collect a bunch of your data, but it's for the purpose of them being able to serve more relevant ads to you if I'm not mistaken, since that's where most of their money is made." You gloss over this as if its not a big deal.

Please cite examples in which Google has demonstrated that they could not be trusted with information that they use to deliver targeted ads to you.

Did they ever pull a Facebook-esque social experiment by trying to limit what you saw in order to manipulate your feelings over the course of a day?

Do they sell personal information about you for other companies to use however they please?

Think about this a little bit before you respond with a generic, mouth frothing "BUT GOOGLES SELLS YER INFO" when they actually don't. They sell access to you when you are exposed to ads. Not access to your info.

> Did they ever pull a Facebook-esque social experiment by trying to limit what you saw in order to manipulate your feelings over the course of a day?

I'd also like to point out that the drama around Facebook's social experiment was totally overblown. People essentially mixed up what Facebook did (something not unlike an A/B test) with what some imagined Facebook in theory could do (silently but significantly influence emotional state of users), and after articles started calling this "manipulating your feelings" the Internet totally lost it. After all, the extent to which Facebook "manipulated your feelings over the course of a day" is much smaller than, say, 9gag's or that of a television ad.

This is the same problem as the one you're complaining about here - generic accusations about totally overblown things.

By your logic, since AFAIK the NSA hasn't ever targeted me specifically, then they must be a okay!

>By your logic, since AFAIK the NSA hasn't ever targeted me specifically, then they must be a okay!

An exact example of the false equivalence fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

Well, is it?

Personally, I am beginning to fear that the whole idea of privacy starts to block progress and in the end we'll have to choose between the two. Apart from the dystopian future everyone fears, there are also astoundingly huge amounts of good things that can happen thanks to data companies like Google or Facebook collect.

Yup, I'd like to know it too. Everything I saw or read confirms that they're one of the most benevolent big companies ever, and yet for some vauge reasons they are called evil.

Google tries to copyright cookies: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0156738.html

Bullshit actions in partnership with Apple: http://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-st...

And, to me, the worst - Bulling the CSS WG: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Feb/0103.h...

When Apple does it, I see a lot of comments about how crappy it is to focus only on their own browser, especially when they exclude Chrome which is highly similar.

If a random startup does it, they don't have the same conflict of interest as a maker of a major browser does, so there's no reason to expect the reaction to be the same.

BS. Half the comments would be slamming them that it's only for Safari (just look at the comments for the stories involving Apple's safari-only streams).

I think skywhopper hit it on the head. Just good ol' abuse of the word "trivial" and an underestimation of how much work is needed to finish the last 1%.

> Anyone who's done any serious web-app development in the past decade knows that cross browser compatibility at the bleeding edge (ie, past what the JS frameworks have worked out) can consume as much time as the rest of the application put together.

Sure thing. As a web developer, I also know that I NEED to follow CSP on every application I do. Something Google doesn't seem to do when running in Google Chrome.

I also know that adding two prefixes along with another prefix, isn't that hard to do.

If you want to be early, fast and get feedback, make sure your application works for more browsers than your own in-house browser. Because when you release it, people will surely use other browsers than your in-house browser.

That is a great technical argument, however, the reason this has attracted so much attention is because this product is about email. Email plays such an important role in our modern lives that any announcement hinting that Google is moving towards vendor lock-in for email access is going to attract scrutiny -- regardless of whether it is by innovative features, enhanced performance, or browser lockout.

> any announcement hinting that Google is moving towards vendor lock-in for email access is going to attract scrutiny

I think that - like often is on the Internet - scrutiny can be attracted too soon. Google stated clearly that current Inbox is not a replacement for GMail. Such "vendor lock-in" can currently be completely explained with the fact that they're just playing around and testing if people like new UX.

Adding innovative features is now considered vendor lock-in? Interesting.

Yes it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extingui...

What are they doing to extinguish competitors?

In this case, blocking them from their properties and requiring that they switch to Google's browser.

The "innovative feature" in question here (that they're depending on in Chrome) is performance of sparse arrays with enormous indexes. That's not an "innovative feature" in my mind; in most languages that would be considered an abuse of the built-in array type.

This doesn't seem to have any relevance to "vendor lock-in" though.

Yes, it does. It was the reason cited for blocking non-Chrome browsers—i.e. locking in users to a specific vendor.

To build upon that, it's worth noting the context: a public beta that's only a few weeks old.

This is an extremely naive comment. While cross-browser testing does take work, it makes an unfair assumption about the experience & knowledge of some of us commenting. Diggan (the user who wrote the gist) is not a regular person - he is an experienced and knowledgeable web developer (I don't necessarily agree with all his opinions, but I do respect his knowledge - I have previously had a vigorous conversation with him on IRC on some technical stuff). When I said CSP and animations are "trivial", it isn't without having had experience doing just that.

As someone who has had to work on teams and who now leads teams on apps with cross-browser functionality (and native mobile via Cordova), I get the challenges. Google definitely has the resources to meet them though. Time is just the x factor, and with this sentiment, I agree with. I have no problems with what Google did here - I merely made observations.

> At the early fast-iteration stage of a limit-seeking webapp like Inbox, it makes sense to focus on the app itself and limit yourself to just one browser. For Google, obviously they will choose Chrome. Once the app reaches some stability, and major changes are coming far more slowly, then it makes sense to start working in cross-browser compatibility.

Would you also agree that it would be OK for Microsoft to create products that only work in IE, then, and to advertise IE whenever you try to use those products?

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