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.
These comments really are just FUD and hating (jealousy?) on Google for ignorant reasons.
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.
Being that is not the case...
As it stands, Chromium exists.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
An exact example of the false equivalence fallacy.
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.
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...
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%.
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.