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Former Firefox VP on What It's Like To Be Both a Partner of Google and a Competitor via Google Chrome (twitter.com)
Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, plans to build a $1 billion high-tech neighborhood in Toronto. The problem? It is facing an opposition from residents who have called for its demise. As the backlash gains momentum, it could force Sidewalk Labs to abandon or alter its vision. On paper, Sidewalk Labs' idea arguably has some merits: It wishes to "set new standards" for how cities are designed and built. But some are apprehensive of Google's plans, because the company has a knack for assuming more control over things and killing local competition.
Johnathan Nightingale, a former VP of Firefox, has seen such behavior first hand. He draws some parallels: I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.
But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible." 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.
This is not a thread about blaming Google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don't like it. And for me it means two things: The question is not whether individual Sidewalk Labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They're great people. But focus on the behavior of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed. Get there faster than I did.
Johnathan Nightingale, a former VP of Firefox, has seen such behavior first hand. He draws some parallels: I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.
But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible." 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.
This is not a thread about blaming Google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don't like it. And for me it means two things: The question is not whether individual Sidewalk Labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They're great people. But focus on the behavior of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed. Get there faster than I did.
At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization
It seems only your 3rd statement is true nowadays.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks." Over and over. (...) 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.
Well, between accidents and malice there's indifference, like we're not actively planting booby traps for Firefox but we're also not doing compatibility or performance testing, we're not assigning the bugs a high priority... I have some such low-priority issues in my backlog that keep getting pushed back and back and back. It's technically not shelved, it just seems unlikely we'll ever get around to fixing it. And it certainly doesn't have the priority to do anything proactive. It's not very hard to understand the corporate priorities...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
only wants to ensure its ads get access.
Any other company, product, service that is not moving their ads is a public relations project.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Why should Google care about any browser engine but their own if their own is #1 used by a wide margain?
Google might be incompetent but the Firefox team did not see the writing on the wall for years and years, so they are the morons in this story.
"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."
As an adult, you just learned that people always have alterior motives. Once you shift your thinking to "don't attribute to incompetence what can be explained by malice" you finally stop being a Rube. I wish you grew up faster so Firefox would not be such a joke today. But hey, everyone in the world means what they say and says what they mean, right? Words mean nothing. Actions mean everything.
I'm not really sure why anyone here cares about Firefox anymore, they lost their way a long time ago. They used to stand for a free and open web but now they're against free speech. They've block the addon dessenter from their addon repository https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-removal-of-the-dissenter-extention/38140 and before some smartass says "well you can side load it" that's not a good argument at all, it illustrates that they are very much against an open and free web despite what they may say. They've shown their support for the anti-freespeech SJW and that is why I for one will no longer be using firefox and instead will use ungoogled-chromium.
As far as the quality of their browser goes, well it's a poorly implemented clone of chrome now anyway. I remember when it first came out it was a very impressive browser and very fast at the time. Just look at it now, it's such a shame.
And I am lambasted with Chome adds... google translator "Doesn't work" (It does with some tricks - more lies.) constant bugs in all things google
All this crap makes me want to use Firefox even more becasue Google has crossed the line - privacy, monopoly, bad faith advertising, dirty tricks and lies.
Google and Facebook are basically Satan and should be avoided whenever possible.
Chrome is the NEW IE
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Any web developer that knows that it's easier to develop for and test against the one platform you're building on. If you're lazy or busy, you may not be as thorough and remember to test on the other platforms like IE, Firefox, and Safari. This same thing happened when Firefox was king and when IE was king. There would always be issues with the other browsers.
Mozilla removed live bookmarks, and still hasn't got the popup blocker to work, yet pushes 'pockets' on me, and "send usage feedback to Mozilla". Thunderbird continues to be the best email program.... all those loyal users, what did you do there? Abandon it.
Honestly, know your audience. Your audience isn't the Google audience, so part ways and move on. But clearly there is something rotten in Mozilla's management, something incompetent.
I use Here.com for maps, I use DuckDuckGo for search and only Youtube remains to be replaced, and Mozilla? Well they seem clueless, adrift, lacking in managerial direction.
If you think Google can't be beat? Well, look at their Pixel phones.... see all those sales? No? All those Chromebooks flying out the factory? No? They're on shark arc.
Isn't this whole bit about Google sabotaging Firefox performance, exactly the same thing we just heard from someone who used to be on the Microsoft Edge team?
At the time, folks around Slashdot were all like, "haw, haw, haw, karma's a bitch, eh there Billy?" Which is, of course, the easy and fun thing to say because of a predisposed hatred of Microsoft.
Now we see that Google has persistently been sabotaging Firefox as well. So maybe the problem wasn't Edge, after all.....
And given how many former Microsoft people are (or have been) at Google -- it's a four-digit number -- I'm really not surprised to see those sleazy late-90s Microsoft anticompetitive tactics show up once again.
... until Firefox won't run!
#DeleteChrome
You might try Yandex translate, it was something of an eye opener (dynamic live translation of sites that Google won't translate). Handles long documents etc.
Google translate is also acting up on Samsung browsers too, I switched links over to y. Pity ddg doesn't have a solution.
They turned Mozilla into Mo$illa by paying them to remove XUL and other features. They cripple competition like Waterfox and Pale Moon by serving up outdated html and give them harder captchas. They even got Microsoft to chromify their browser. I repeat my calls for a truly independent browser foundation that tells Google to get lost.
Ehe, no you fool. Even if they weren't officially a monopoly, sabotaging one service for a specific competitor's product to promote your own is the definition of anti-competitive practices.
Fact of the matter is, Google isn't keeping Mozilla around out of good will. Much like Intel and AMD, they HAVE to keep at least one competitor alive or they'll get officially declared a monopoly. And just like Intel, while doing so they'll sabotage the competitor just enough so they'll retain market dominance without ever risking the regulators.
But lets be honest, he's not a fool. He never complained because he understood Firefox is just a regulatory loophole. And the real damage was in the protocols and other internet bodies decision that kept being ruled over in Google's favor since Mozilla was tipping the balance in their favor thanks to this relationship.
Decentralized protocols... DRM... Ad blocking... Mozilla been lining up to Google's agendas time after time.
It's all a huge scam.
Their non web based things and products such as Android and Chrome seem to work well enough, but about all the web pages they have are.. uuh.. not good.
Basically their web based systems seem to be mostly programmed by random people from the street. Or maybe it is just that they move all the incompetent people from the other parts of their companies there.
Has been doing an excellent job sabotaging itself for over 20 years now.
Did you forget about that whole two years without a browser while they REWROTE GECKO IN C++ instead of C using XUL and interpreted javascript, which wasn't ready for primetime for another 3-4 years, and only as a result of the non-XUL firefox (which used gtk(1 or 2?)) to make the core engine seem faster and more reliable than anything out there and put the final nail in the coffin of the AOL Netscape Browser Suite, before finally being rolled into Mozilla Foundation with its creator and lead developer sidelined as a 'real' netscape guy took over management then fucked it up by rewriting it into an XUL browser, which only worked because of the improvement in CPUs and stock memory and all the nerds who had been pitching it word of mouth to their family members for years. Combined with the new influx of google funding it kept Mozilla going despite their internal mismanagement and incompetence long enough for Google to dominate both the web and browser technology and then probably also buy off key mozilla developers to 'chrome-ify' the new servo firefox in an effort to both destroy Mozilla's addon ecosystem as well as standardize everyone on their own plugin/addon platform while making the browser UI easy to migrate from Firefox to Mozilla via.
The options now are Seamonkey, Palemoon, Waterfox, Netsurf and for some people, perhaps Brave. But Chrome and anything funding/developed directly by the Mozilla Foundation need to die screaming, hopefully along with the 5-6 figure salaried management staff that have been bleeding it dry for the past 2 decades.
No longer relevant.
Why is Snark Required?
I call that (anti-)pattern "Emergent Evil", just like an anthill's behaviour is "emergent behaviour".
But now, before you say "phew, nobody's to blame, then", think about what competencies upper layer management has to bring to the table.
You don't order your programmers to actively sabotage something. You just starve (a little) this or that department, you just overload (just a tad) this gal or that guy. That sort of thing.
I've had my share of time at corps where all (OK, most) of the folks working there were charming, nice people and where the whole thing was... a monster.
Which is more likely?
- That Google engineers are laughing maniacally in the style of a movie's evil character, while thinking at the best strategy to kill their competition in a horrible death?
For no reason except for the evulz, because they aren't making their money by *selling* software, they make money by marketing the shit out of people online, no matter what browser they used, as long as these people online to be marked?
- Or that they're just horribly lazy, because they test of their product on their own web engine, because that's what they use themselves while developing? And it happens to work anyway, because once you factor in Google Chrome and all the other browser running on a Blink/WebKit/KHTML core, you happen to cover close to 90% of all only browser, so often errors go unnoticed and later aren't put on top of the priority list due to low exposure?
In the absence of equivalent to the Halloween documents leak, I would more likely presume the second options.
I'm not saying that it's not bad. It *is*. Their careless-ness could very easily lead to a new era of microsoft-levels of monopolies and smothering of alternatives. They are seriously at risk to fuck up the computing ecosystem, and instance taking care about competitive behaviour (like the EU) should monitor them closely and force them out of such destructive behaviours.
It's only that the phenomenon probably isn't conscious and planned, it very likely due to very massive levels of carelessness, simply because they can get away with it. Somebody (like e.g.: the EU) should come and slap them on the hands, and theach them not to try to get away with carelessness but pay attention.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
As a company grows larger and is profit driven it's incentive to do evil things increases. Google seems now to be the new Microsoft of evil.
First mistake Mozilla made was to accept revenue stream from Google. Second was to claim your for people and all that crap and still take money from Google. If you wanted Firefox to be something that did not rely on big corporate control you should have never done deals with Google. Honestly this is why Mozilla doesn't whine too much about Google simply because they pay the bills. Sort of sad, Google could pull their revenue and Mozilla would die.
Too many boot-lickers on the site. Score should be +5.
In business, your competition IS your enemy. That's not an exaggeration. It's not life or death, but it's financial life or death. I work for a small, successful retailer, and we won't do business with Amazon. At all. We don't sell through them. We don't buy from them. We don't even buy company snacks at Whole Foods any more. Whether it has that much of a difference to either us or them is immaterial. We're in a financial fight for our lives, and we're not going to give up a penny or any information to our competition.
Mozilla shouldn't have anything to do with Google. Zero. They need to find some other way to sustain themselves other than sucking from the teat of the company that's trying to kill them (financially).
I don't respond to AC's.
Agreed, that has been the best post on the page so far.
Oh, wow, has the default search engine reset back to Bing?
Wow. What a weird bug.
We'll get that fixed in the next push.
It doesn't matter at all to Amazon whether you buy your pens from them or from Staples. If you're paying more out of spite that is not logical.
Every browser has the potential to do this, don't act like Firefox is the only one. You have to actively work to make all the fingerprinting/tracking/pinging disappear in the user.js. But I doubt Chrome/Chromium have any real way of doing that consistently, so I'm stuck with Firefox.
Dissenter's website is still up and you can sign in and browse in other tabs or windows. Just a quick copy/paste on the URL you want to comment on and the functionality is the same on the website as it was in the extensions.
Dissenter isn't "gone", you just need mere seconds to do what you were doing before in the extensions.
See subject: Via APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux/BSD h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r L i n u x . z i p
Yields more security/speed/reliability/anonymity vs. any 1 solution (99% of threats use hostnames vs. IP address most firewalls use) more efficiently/FASTER/NATIVELY 4 less!
Vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr' illogic-logic" slowing u hosts speed u up 2 ways: Adblocks + Hardcode fav. sites u spend most time @ vs. competition w/ security bugs (DNS/AntiVir) + overheads slowing u (messagepass 'souled-out' to advertisers easily detected & blocked addons + firewall filtering drivers) & complexity leads to exploit!
* JEWgle = BIGGEST SPAMMER/Tracker/INFECTOR (via ads & scripts) + SLOWDOWN - I stop it!
APK
P.S.=> Protects vs. scripts/trackers (kernelmode faster vs. usermode slower NoScript vs. 3rd party script)/ads/DNS request tracking + redirect poisoned or downed DNS/botnets/malware download/malcript/email malpayload
What the former VP says makes sense, and yet here's a case which has gone the other way: Google Calendar doesn't work so well on my Chrome 69.x on Linux (the menu doesn't work - nothing happens when you click the button - and there's this blue line at the top going from left to right kinda like a progress bar), so I turn to Firefox to use it. (And yes, I've tried hard reload)
I believe that one possibility is a browser that will only run a small subset of HTML that has been designed to be secure. No JavaScript, minimal if any CSS, IFrames etc.
There is critical infrastructure like dams that cannot rely upon patch Tuesday. And while the machines that control them may not be on the internet, the machines that control those machines are. STUXNET told us about the limitations of air gaps.
If such a protocol was available and supported there would be pressure on many sites to provide a Secure HTML version. Many enterprises would demand it.
And I think there would be sponsors available for that. The Iranian Government might be one (after STUXNET!). So rather than compete with Chrome, produce something that Google could never produce culturally and live in the niche.
A big issue is to get rid of (or at least seriously rework) PKI and much of TLS. PKI relies on the user being able to identify which site they are talking to. Yet there is no browsers that can tell that sIashdot.org is not the same as slashdot.org, even if the user bothered to check. (If you do not believe me, cut and paste those strings into a programming language and test for ==.)
A secure system needs to rely more on pre shared keys. And passwords must never be sent over the web, just proof of possession. Use SRP or maybe just Nonces.
They are "partnering" with people the same way MS did:
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
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