
A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla - 8x8squares
https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686
======
roenxi
One of the 'mysteries' of corporations is that they will either do nothing, or
take an action that furthers their corporate interests. People don't seem to
expect that of companies with a public face and seem surprised when they turn
out to be just like any other corporate group.

It's a coordination thing - coordinating a large group of people is so
challenging only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average.
Simple things with clear metrics.

'Support the open web' has no metrics and is realistically not a comprehensive
shared vision a company can rally around. The message that a Chrome-first
strategy doesn't support the open web is (1) contestable (2) requires a lot of
assumptions.

Anyone who believed or still believes that Google the Corporation is
controlled by the engineers employed by Google is in for an eventual rude
shock. Anyone who believes a corporation will support the open web for any
reason other than it is in their interests to is likewise mistaken.

This is why focusing on capability is more important than focusing on intent,
despite what human instinct generally suggests (humans overweight intent).
Google is a scary company. They have more power over people than most
companies, with the exception of the banks - and look at how the banks are
regulated!

~~~
cm2187
If you own Google docs, ensuring it doesn’t break or show an incompatible
banner on competing browsers is not an abstract or metric-less concept, it is
very tangible and measurable. In fact that’s the sort of thing I would expect
any of their engineer to do as part of the development, unless they have been
told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is OK.

~~~
blihp
But likely few people, if anyone, in the organization have any serious
incentives (i.e. bonus/promotion) to proactively prioritize that. On the other
hand, they almost certainly have at least bonuses on the line to add X users
to service/product Y or roll out feature Z (server or client side.) So people
work toward what the company rewards[1] and everything else becomes a
break/fix situation as it occurs and time permits.

[1] There are also almost certainly individuals/teams in the company who also
try to take the path of least resistance and attempt to hobble the competition
to help get there. These types exist in every company to varying degrees.

~~~
cm2187
I get your point but actually it should go the other way round. If the owner
of Google Doc is really focused on own user base only, the incentive would be
to make it the most browser compatible. By making it run on chrome only,
google docs is potentially sacrificing its user base for a greater purpose.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Why? Remember that at this point, Google Docs is "sticky". Its audience is to
some degree captive, and won't switch _just_ because the document lags a bit
on Firefox. What would they switch to? Office365, for which they have to pay?
It wouldn't even solve their problem, as the document in question is a link
they got from a friend, already in Google Docs. It's just easier to switch to
Chrome.

Most of SaaS applications operate in this regime - they own user data, so they
become "sticky" and non-substitutable very quickly. On the other hand,
standardization of browser features makes browsers not very "sticky". This
way, when a SaaS - any SaaS, not just Google's - works much better on Chrome
than on Firefox, this drives adoption of Chrome by that much.

~~~
frosted-flakes
Online Office 365 is free and has more or less the same functionality as
Google Docs.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Doesn't help you if someone else already made the document on Google Docs and
asked you to collaborate on it.

------
nindalf
I thought the thread would have more substance to it. His claim is that Google
products would have performance bugs or would explicitly block any non-Chrome
browser. As a long time Firefox user, I’m with him so far. But he loses me on
the next bit where he rules out incompetence and then jumps to org-level
malice. I don’t think it’s either. A simpler explanation is that Google simply
stopped caring about non-Chrome browsers. People building say, Inbox were told
it was acceptable to launch a product that is only accessible to one browser
at launch. I hated that decision because it affected me directly but that’s
not malice, simply prioritisation.

Of course standard disclaimers apply. I don’t work for Google, never held
Google stock etc.

~~~
the_duke
Have you tried using the new Gmail interface on Firefox?

It's ridiculously slow, to the point of being completely unusable.

A Google engineer claimed here on HN the reason was that the UI framework uses
some deprecated API that is polyfilled in Firefox but available on Chrome.

Something like that should never have launched, but may have been a somewhat
acceptable reason months ago. Now, after being in production for months, not
fixing this is either saying "we don't care about those <10% Firefox users" or
straight up intentional to force FF users to switch to Chrome.

Either of those amount to the same thing and classify as malicious to me.

~~~
HenryBemis
I don't buy the "oops we dropped the ball on UAT". I was working in a bank
once and we were making sure that our web-banking would work properly with
EVERY POSSIBLE browser. And I don't mean IE, FF, Opera, Chrome.. I mean some
end-of-corridor browsers that you could get from tucows. I don't buy that
Google made mistakes like that with one of the top5 browsers. Did they ever
pull a trick like that with Microsoft's IE?

~~~
devoply
According to an M$ intern they did which eventually caused Edge to fail and
for M$ to say hey we'll just be a wrapper around Chrome and then they can't
screw us.

------
bprasanna
I don't know whats going wrong with Firefox. Im still an active firefox user.
I intentionally avoid Chrome and use it rarely to see if the site which
doesn't work in Firefox also doesn't work in Chrome. IMHO Firefox didn't make
me feel slow anytime. The whole point of Google Chrome automatically logging-
in as Gmail user throughout the browser should have sounded alarm for people
who care about privacy. I do agree Google brings latest of web tech to Chrome
fast, but that makes other browsers falling behind in terms of features.
Catching up wastes lots of time for the other browser makers. IMHO monopoly in
browser is not a good idea. We know what a monopolistic attitude brings to
plate. Also, when we see new extensions for Chrome with an explicit subject as
"extension for Chrome", for Firefox users it feels like being sidestepped.
Then it becomes the onus of the Firefox user to see if he/she needs to get in
touch the extension developer to see the possibility of portability. A caring
developer shouldn't sidestep Firefox or even other browsers per se. If every
developer becomes selfish about developing tools/extensions for their own
environment, they are blocking the goodness to others.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I do agree Google brings latest of web tech to Chrome fast, but that makes
> other browsers falling behind in terms of features._

Fire and Motion. By being first to add stuff that users (web developers)
immediately start expecting from everyone, they ensure everyone else is too
busy catching up with them to actually compete. Thus, they secure their
leadership position. See: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-
motion/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/).

~~~
blub
Yes, Google's using all sorts of these tactics against Firefox.

I don't think Ff will survive, too many useful idiots out there to have any
hope left.

~~~
sterlind
It's pretty grim for Ff, but our real doom starts when they pull an Android
and bundle lots of non-redistributable components to cut off their real
competition, the Chromium clones. It'll be like Play Services in the aftermath
of the Kindle Fire all over again, probably under the guise of Flutter and
AMP.

~~~
taneq
Isn't there already something of this sort happening with DRM components?
There was a story on here recently about someone whose Chromium-based browser
was locked out of the video streaming addons. To be fair, that was more by the
video streaming plugin developer than by Google, but it was still an example
of undermining the open source portion of the product.

~~~
pritambaral
> To be fair, that was more by the video streaming plugin developer than by
> Google

The video streaming plugin was Google Widevine.

------
mastrsushi
All I got out of that link of tweets was a series of "Look at all the ways big
evil Google steered us off the internet". I'm not doubting any if those claims
are true. At the same time, I don't think any of those malicious motives were
strong enough.

That post came off as more of a whistle blowing speech from an oppressed
developer. Nothing written was solid enough to make me think "Ohhh that's how
Google killed Mozilla"

Just as Firefox destroyed IE, Chrome generally outperforms Firefox. If you
dont believe me, read any benchmark out there. If you're too cynical, run them
both yourself.

The GUI features Google introduced were very important. Draggable, swappable
tabs that can be pulled out into separate windows, address bars with
integrated search engines, built in PDF viewers. 10 years later these features
sound like ridiculous remarks, but they were prominent selling points for many
average users.

Not to mention, Google had an ever growing sense of brand identity. Especially
during this time range of the YouTube aquisition, and rise of Android OS.
Whether it's now or a decade ago, what is the first thing that comes to mind
when the average user sees the name Mozilla? Does this demographic even know
what Mozilla is? I stress average user because to us there is of course
JavaScript and Netscapes heritage. Which is unfortunate to see Rome collapse
this way, but so did IBM.

~~~
austincheney
> Chrome generally outperforms Firefox.

I don't agree. Chrome is pretty fast at executing JavaScript, but it is
hundreds of times slower at executing DOM instructions compared to Firefox. It
is also the slowest modern browser, by very far, at executing CSS animation.

~~~
ahartmetz
It is ridiculous that JS benchmarks are accepted as "browser benchmarks". They
are probably so popular with tech journalists because they are easy to run.
How do you properly measure page load time (of real pages over the internet)
anyway?

~~~
a_imho
I found benchmarks to be a red herring. For me, the most significant factor
seems to be an adblocker. Without one, most sites are barely usable.

~~~
darkhorn
You can block ads in Firefox without using addon. There is an setting for
that.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-
blocking](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking)

~~~
a_imho
I only skimmed this page but I don't see it mention ads only trackers?
Honestly, FF should just integrate something like ublock but this won't happen
for reasons.

Anyway, the performance impacts alone are so huge, imo adblocking should be
enabled by default for every user focused browser not supported by ad money.
Simply a superior browsing experience.

~~~
darkhorn
Ads are considered tracker. I have enabled this setting and I don't see any
ads. See "content blocking" [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-
blocking#w_how-...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-
blocking#w_how-to-block-more-or-fewer-trackers)

------
GrayShade
They didn't try to, they actually won. Microsoft switching to Blink was had
news for Mozilla, and sites that are "optimized for Chrome" started to crop up
all over the place.

Yes, Firefox is slow on Macs, but you should consider switching to it. We know
how it went with IE back then. On Android, the extension support alone makes
it so much better than the competition.

~~~
jhasse
> On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the
> competition.

Firefox doesn't open links handled by apps directly with the app, like almost
every other Android browser does. This makes it unusable for me.

Here's the bug report (7 years old) btw:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806385](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806385)

~~~
anhner
I consider that a feature. If I go to youtube.com with firefox, it means that
I intentionally want to avoid opening the app, so I don't want every video I
click on in firefox to open with the youtube app.

However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to.

~~~
TeMPOraL
+1. YouTube example is spot-on, as this is no.1 case where I actively avoid
the app in favor of the browser. YoutTube's app and mobile website have some
ridiculously stupid extra filtering that silently removes many videos - videos
that are suddenly accessible if you check the "Request desktop version" box in
the browsers. It's almost an universal occurrence that the video I'm searching
for is one that gets silently filtered out in the app.

~~~
GrayShade
Nb. with extensions you can also get background play and even ad blocking on
YouTube.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _background play_

Oooh, I so very much want that. Thanks, I'll check it out!

~~~
GrayShade
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-
backgro...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-
play-fix/)

------
ksec
I disagree about Firefox losing users due to Google's Opps incident.

I forced the use of Firefox over 100s of computer and witness the growth of
Chrome all by user installing it themselves. And when I ask them why, trying
to talk them out of it, the number one reason was, Chrome was WAY faster than
Firefox at the time. From Cold Start, Prefetch, rendering, first time to
paint, actual UI etc. Every single god damn thing. And many users notice. At
first I would not help them to install Chrome or told them Firefox was simply
better. Over time one by one they just install it themselves.

And that was the era when Mozilla thought Javascript speed would solve
everything, and Memory bloat was the root of all evil and started MemShrink
later.

It wasn't about the Open Web, Standards etc. None of the users cares about any
of these. It was the actual browser UX.

------
Animats
I see some of those "Oops" items. Recently, Codero's hosting dashboard stopped
working with Firefox. They blame the Firefox configuration. They're trying to
do something with cross-site cookies that Firefox doesn't like.

------
neil_s
I didn't understand the parallel to Sidewalk Labs, can someone please share
more context?

------
Abishek_Muthian
>gmail & gdocs 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.

Of-course not, any country with decent enough anti-competitive laws would give
a verdict in favour of Firefox. But I do understand why Firefox did not take
legal route.

------
ronilan
Related reading (2008)
[https://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/the-
go...](https://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/the-google-
browser/)

(That’s a year an a half before Chrome launched with a leaked comic book)

~~~
l1k
It's also worth mentioning that the Firefox team did the same kind of "oopses"
to browsers embedding Gecko. See this interview with Mike Pinkerton, who later
went to Google to work on the Chrome Mac team:

"People will make changes to do something good for Firefox and because Firefox
is the only really blessed project by the Mozilla Corporation and the
Foundation, that’s their only focus. So they’ll make changes that work great
in Firefox and then they’ll do—they’ll either like, break Camino’s build just
entirely, or things will stop working, or things will slow down, and nobody
will really understand why. Because, you know, there was no communication
about, you know, this change might have this effect. There’s also a lot of
strife back and forth between features that are implemented in the core Gecko
in a way that they will only work with Firefox. [...] So we’d run into
situations where we try and implement a feature and we discover we just can’t
do it. And we kind of raise our hands and say, “Ah, can we get this fixed?”
And the answer would invariably be, “Well, it works in Firefox. Who cares?”
[...] And that’s something that eventually made me sour greatly on the
Foundation and the Corporation and why we kind of took our ball and went
elsewhere, and stopped trying to work directly with the Foundation for the
majority of problems."

[http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277](http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277)

~~~
oblio
Did they actually offer/promote Gecko for embedding? I kind of doubt that.

~~~
l1k
Read the full interview. Netscape was owned by AOL back then and the
motivation for Gecko was to have an HTML engine that could be embedded in
AOL's software. Firefox was just one browser based on that engine, but became
the primary focus once its popularity rose.

Camino was another browser based on Gecko, but died in 2011 when Mozilla
killed off support for embedding:
[http://caminobrowser.org/blog/#mozembedding](http://caminobrowser.org/blog/#mozembedding)

------
deanclatworthy
A better format for reading:

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871231792455686.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871231792455686.html)

------
dastx
For the past 3 years I've noticed gmail being extra slow on Firefox. Every
other site loads almost instantly, except gmail. Even when I used to use
Facebook, it would load fairly quick. Chrome wasn't much quicker or slower.
Except for gmail. Gmail loads almost instantly on Chrome. I've basically given
up on using mail's web interface even though I much prefer it over all linux
mail clients.

------
loudtieblahblah
With AMP, the fact MS Edge is joining the chromium ranks ensuring more and
more sites are Chrome only, all the "oops" stuff. Google is worse than MS ever
was

------
fouc
A tale of how Google won against end users - introduced aggressive auto-
updates under the guise of "security & safety".

------
cromwellian
Since Inbox is often brought up as a textbook example, I'll give my two cents
and some history. This is my post-mortem perspective, and the opinion of my
former team members may be different.

I worked on Inbox from inception (as a former member of the GWT team), at the
time Google was moving towards 'mobile first' (notice how there's no still Web
version of the new Google Calendar), so the new generation of apps prioritized
architecture and design for native-mobile and material design over desktop.
Inbox was mostly written in a shared Java codebase transpiled with GWT (later
J2CL) and J2ObjC (for iOS), so it could run natively on mobile from a single
codebase. It obtained >75% code reuse between platforms, but a result of that
however was a rather large SPA on the Web.

Because of its design as an installable material-design mobile app, it forced
bleeding edge technology on the Web version to maintain a shared codebase. So
for example, because it includes an entire compiled datastore/synchronization
engine that is too heavyweight to run on the browser UI thread, it made early
use intensive of WebWorkers to simulate multithreading (at a time when there
were lots of browser implementation bugs in Workers). For most of the time
that I worked on it, Firefox Dev Tools couldn't even debug web workers well,
and often Firefox dev tools would just fail with huge size of SPAs like Inbox.

Getting material-design style animations compositing at 60fps cross browser
was also fraught with peril because the different browser renderers had very
different ways they scheduled GPU texture uploads for compositing, different
hazards when they fall back to software rasterization, and very poor devtools
visibility into what would cause anomalous painting problems (excessive
repaints, layouts, or straight up freezes waiting for the GPU). Yes, today
that is all much better, but in 2012 it wasn't, and short of getting ahold of
browser engineers and asking them to hook up C++ debuggers or instrumentation
to tell Web engineers why rendering was failing, debugging performance jank
was hard. When we ran into a rendering problem with Chrome, we'd file bugs
against Blink, and when we encountered problems with Firefox, we'd contact the
engineers there. Perhaps because of heavy work on Firefox OS at the time, the
Blink engineers would respond with help faster, so that obviously had an
effect on performance differentials and delays, especially when the problems
are mystifying to a Web Dev without browser internals knowledge.

Even something as simple as Javascript arrays were fraught with peril. Inbox
made heavy use of protobuffers. Protobuffers compiled to JS exist as sparse
arrays in Javascript due to proto-number extensions having huge gaps. Well, on
Firefox at the time, if you did something like var a = [], a[100000000]=1, and
then Object.keys(a), it would return an array with 100 million elements IIRC,
but Chrome/Safari/Edge would return an array of 1 element. When you tried to
debug this, Firefox Dev Tools would just freeze. It took me a week of
inserting console.logs and bisecting until I figured it out.

(see
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045391](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045391)
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1088189](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1088189))

Now you could say argue one of the following: 1) Google could have held up
shipping Inbox until Firefox and Edge fixed all of their bugs that were
blocking it 2) They could have just shipped the Android/iOS versions and held
up the Web versions 3) They could have chose a different architecture (no
shared code with mobile, rewrite a custom 100% web version from scratch) 4)
Avoided excessive use of WebWorkers or SPAs 5) Not required a UI design/DOM
structure that would require complex layout and painting stressing rendering
pipelines

But no where in there was any active attempt to try and disadvantage other
browsers. They sat out with an ambitious design for a Web app that they wanted
to be 100% in parity with native mobile versions, and then found out that the
Web platform itself wasn't up to handling it. Chrome could _barely_ handle
Inbox in 2012.

------
AlexandrB
Here's an article about the referenced "slow play" by Sidewalk Labs:
[https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/waterfront-toronto-
chair-...](https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/waterfront-toronto-chair-
expects-sidewalk-labs-final-plan-to-be-a-few-months-late/?/)

Unfortunately most of it is behind a paywall. Can anyone else provide
additional context?

------
Dolores12
How about we put all these 'oopses' in one place and keep updating?

------
forgotAgain
SSDD: Windows isn't done until Lotus doesn't work

------
wanone
reCaptcha on any other browser than Chrome is nightmare. Hate what Google is
doing to web.

------
HunOL
They did it to Opera. Why shouldn't do it for Firefox?

------
decafbad
Tried?

------
boukestam
I don't understand why nobody even thinks for a second that the reason why
chrome is used more is just because it's better. If firefox would just stop
complaining and look at chrome and what it does right they might actually
learn something from it. Like microsoft who are now going to use chromium

------
neilv
One way Mozilla could still differentiate is by doing privacy&security all-
out.

It currently seems that Firefox is only a little more privacy-respecting than
the browser of one of the most invasive surveillance dotcoms.

It's been that way for years, and every year is lost ground.

I suspect that Mozilla's need for funding, and the sources of funding for so
long, are what have them looking so similar to a dotcom.

When users won't pay money, Mozilla has seemed to focus on ways to sell its
users to big companies.

Maybe there's a viable combination of expense reductions, refined focus, and
switching to solely charitable (hands-off) donations? (Maybe we'd see little
sponsor logos for most of the FAANGs, for various motivations. And for some
other Fortune 500s, for good PR. And for public-interest organizations and
government units/programs.)

~~~
Sylos
It's definitely true that Mozilla needs funding beyond what users are willing
to donate. Especially with other 'free' browsers available. But all scandals
that I'm aware of were nonsense that journalists wanted to believe, in order
to land the next big "the good guys are actually evil"-story.

A more privacy-friendly default search engine is clearly the elephant in the
room, but their other financing strategies have been done to try to supersede
that and to my knowledge did never infringe on privacy. If you feel different
about one of them, please read up on it. There's been a lot of misinformation
out there.

Mozilla would make themselves liable to prosecution, if they were to simply
violate privacy without a very good reason, as privacy is an explicit goal of
their legally-binding non-profit mission statement.

Having said that, there is a good reason why Mozilla has to compromise in
terms of privacy. And that is webpage owners' interests.

Webpage owners want to track you. And they can opt to not support Firefox, if
they can't track you. Which is kind of bad for Firefox and ultimately for
Mozilla's mission, which is making the web a healthier place, for which they
need Firefox even just as a second implementation of the web standards.

So, yes, they do have to balance out webpage owners' interests and yours. And
yes, they cannot give you as privacy-friendly defaults as some of the browsers
that don't have to care about webpage owners' interests. If you're a tiny
Chromium fork, no one's going to block you, because mother Chrome is
absolutely lovely to webpage owners.

But you should notice that Mozilla gives you the tools to fix the defaults and
goes to great lengths to be privacy-friendly when webpage owners are not
involved.

~~~
neilv
Every year is lost ground:

1\. Your conception of a modern browser is what surveillance&brochure dotcoms
want it to be. "Tools to fix the defaults" doesn't fix this.

2\. The anti-user facilities in your browser that are now expected are what
dotcoms wanted. Taking them away will be harder than saying they couldn't have
them in the first place.

3\. The now-massive complexity of browsers (to provide features and directions
that the dotcoms want) is also a barrier to engineering and improvement, and
also keeps out upstarts.

4\. Dotcoms couldn't always afford to block Firefox.

With the now small market share, Mozilla might be a charity case, or it might
be an antitrust buffer case. I'd favor Mozilla adopting a public interest
charity model, and taking PR money from big corps (among other sources) in
exchange for a sponsor logo, but not selling its users in any way.

------
Causality1
I feel like Mozilla had definitely had a culture change during this whole time
period, and I'm not a huge fan of where it's ended up. It seemed to start like
a ray of light from the heavens, proclaiming to all how much better a browser
could be than Internet Explorer. After that, it entered what I would call the
Firefox golden age, from 2006-2011. In that time Firefox built an identity
around browser customization and user choice. The shift to copycat Chrome with
rapid versioning at Firefox 5 in 2011 was the start of the end for the power
user culture at Mozilla. Ever since then, Firefox features have been trimmed
with every release, seemingly in lock-step with its shrinking market share.
Functions that used to be accessed with a button press were relegated to the
about:config menu, and then to extensions, and then support for those
extensions gradually rotted away.

Mozilla's respect for their users has shrunk so much that something as simple
as putting the tabs below the address bar and bookmarks bar is virtually
impossible on Firefox 66, when it used to be as simple as clicking the
customize button and dragging things where you wanted them.

