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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...
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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"
Chrome is the NEW IE
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Mozilla has tried really hard to drive away their existing users. If one of the most used extension was Classic theme restorer, a sane management might have wondered if there was something wrong in their new user interface. But Mozilla took the typical corporate decision and just broke the API so CTR-extension would not work anymore. Just to add insult to injury, the APIs used by ad-blockers were equally broken so even the most common reason for using Firefox was terminally removed. For years, even non-techies could teach the adblock to suit their needs and web pages, but not anymore.
As the Firefox UI is cloning Chrome on each release, the plugins and extensions are broken and even Google's pages load slower, there really is no reason to use Firefox anymore. Only the privacy reasons are remaining, but in the big picture, most people have already given away their data to Facebook and Google already, so browser does not really matter anymore.
mine keeps getting switched to AltaVista.
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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