
Ask HN: Is Google Secretly Undermining Firefox? - x0054
I have noticed recently, after switching to Firefox, that a lot of Googles stuff doesn&#x27;t work with Firefox. Most resent example is downloading attachments in Gmail. In FF clicking the download attachment button cause the Google servers to basically not respond for at least a few minutes before it would finally allow me to grab the file.<p>It strikes me that instead of the old motto of &quot;Don&#x27;t Be Evil&quot; Google is now implementing the new motto of &quot;Be Evil All The Time&quot;. Very disappointing.
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raquo
Yes, gmail, calendar, youtube, etc. are slow and sometimes broken for weeks in
various ways in FF.

Of course there likely won't ever be hard evidence that they are doing this
deliberately. There are many ways for them to achieve this outcome without
explicitly instructing their developers to degrade FF experience.

They can successfully bullshit most users that way, but for me this is just
more reason to use FF more and Google less. I just hope there are enough other
people with the same attitude for us to matter.

~~~
fabiomaia
> There are many ways for them to achieve this outcome without explicitly
> instructing their developers to degrade FF experience.

Like?

~~~
raquo
Like what other people mentioned in this thread about prioritization.

It's not hard to justify focusing on the most popular browser (which "so just
happens" to be Chrome) over a browser that is less popular and not even a
system default on Windows or MacOS.

Devs write bad code, gets fixed only in Chrome. Or devs test only in Chrome
from the start because they don't have time to test everywhere and if it
doesn't even work in Chrome you get bad looks, so it only works well in
Chrome.

------
xrd
It looks nefarious but it is 100% corporate priorities.

I doubt anyone at Google is working under a mandate that says explicitly "we
must kill Firefox by making our services fail when people use it!"

Instead, every team working on these services at Google has a massive backlog
of bugs. The product managers look at the bugs that start with "on Firefox,
feature ABC doesn't work correctly..." And then they look at the bugs that are
for Chrome. And they put the Chrome ones at a higher priority every time.

They know that their bonuses are tied to Chrome somehow inside the massive
Google goal structure.

No one on the team argues about the decisions to deprioritize those bugs.

And, bugs for Firefox get fixed at a slower rate than Chrome, and here we are.

~~~
tareqak
Corporate priorities can be absolutely 100% nefarious as the wage-fixing
antitrust investigation and subsequent settlement shows:

[https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-
show-s...](https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-steve-
jobs-brutally-callous-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/)

[https://pando.com/tag/techtopus](https://pando.com/tag/techtopus)

In May of this year (2019), [https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-
kill-ie6](https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6) was on HN
here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678)
.

I take this last event as an example of "the right hand doesn't know what the
left hand is doing": these sorts of events that further corporate priorities
without corporate knowledge or corporate sanction clearly can and do happen.

\---

Widely speculative thought experiment follows

1\. Let's hypothetically assume there was a rogue team at Google trying to
kill of Mozilla Firefox.

2\. Let's further suppose like the YouTube IE6 story they flipped some switch
to start the process yesterday.

3\. Let's further suppose they were discovered by any one or more of their
managers / their directors / Google's legal and compliance / C-level
executives today.

4\. In my opinion, what we should be asking ourselves is: what actions the
last group of people (3.) can take at and with what would be corresponding
probability of that action being carried out.

\---

tl;dr Do we trust Google to not "be evil"?

~~~
username90
A Google engineer would have no incentives to kill Firefox unless he can
convince a promo committee that killing Firefox is good for Google, so I am
not sure why anyone would do it. I mean, do you think someone would put
"Slowed down Firefox gmail page load by 50%." on their promo packet?

So for it to be done in secret for many years you would need someone with
enough clout to circumvent the promo process behind it. I am not sure how high
up you need to be to do that, or if it is even possible to do for engineers.

Instead if you take the promo driven perspective, it is a lot easier to make
things work well in a single browser. So the engineer makes a site twice as
faster in Chrome, writes "Made the site twice as fast" in their promo packet
and gets promoted. No need to mention that Firefox performance got worse after
the fix, the promo committee wont have time to check that.

~~~
tareqak
Did the people who killed IE6 have to convince a promotion committee that
killing IE6 would be good for YouTube and Google?

~~~
username90
Basically every web developer hated IE6 so they have personal reasons to kill
it, I don't know of anyone who hate Firefox.

~~~
yoz-y
This. Nobody at the time liked IE6 but it’s not a stretch to assume that a lot
of Googlers use Firefox on personal machines.

------
jeremysalwen
(speaking only for myself here)

I work at Google and I use Firefox. Based on everything I have seen, it boils
down to: browser compatibility requires work. If you don't test it in Firefox,
and don't prioritize fixing any issues that appear, then things are going to
break. It doesn't require any sabotage, just entropy. I wish Google
prioritized Firefox compatibility more.

~~~
dasil003
And that plausible deniability is reason enough that it would be a bad
business decision to allocate resources to Firefox compatibility as long as
Chrome is dominant.

------
kn100
I recently started using Fastmail in place of Gmail and the difference in the
frontend responsiveness is ridiculous. Well worth the 5 dollars a month in
time saved. Gmail in Firefox is like navigating a drunk man home.

Also, duckduckgo :)

~~~
O_H_E
This so much. My trial just expired, but I will be waiting for my first
paycheck to throw money at them.

------
iammiles
I've always wondered why performing a Google image search on Firefox for
Android always yields low quality images, yet Bing or other search engines
don't have this problem.

~~~
xthestreams
Try changing the UA string and you'll see that Google is explicitly
downgrading the search experience on Firefox for Android

------
PaulHoule
It's not just Google, there are startups making enterprise software these days
that officially don't support Firefox.

~~~
lovelearning
Some media and banking websites I visit too. I think devs are simply not
bothering to test their sites with FF.

~~~
PaulHoule
In some cases management will say "we don't have the resources to support FF"
too.

------
nesadi
I don't understand why it's okay for such an influential and powerful company
to also control how 70% of users accesses the internet. Chrome needs to be
spun off from Google.

~~~
cyborgx7
>I don't understand why it's okay for such an influential and powerful company
to also control how 70% of users accesses the internet.

It's not. This is an anti-trust case waiting to happen.

------
B_Throwaway
Aside from the slow front ends, Google stuff works on FF for me. Since gmail
is their service I use the most I switched it to the basic HTML view to keep
my sanity.

------
zenlibs
The definitive answer can be gleaned by setting the user agent to Chrome (or
anything besides Firefox). Have you tried that?

~~~
ktpsns
Changing the User Agent might help to fool a HTTP server, but not the client
side scripting, where every browser offers a different API. In web
applications such as GMail, this is the relevant piece.

And I confirm OPs assumptions. I also feel this is a tricky way of Google to
make Firefox users feel their browser of being "slow". It is basically power
abuse. As Microsoft did it in the 90s.

------
skybrian
Could it be an extension? Have you tested with all extensions disabled?

Do you see the same issue in any other browsers?

If you want to get to the bottom of this, you need to treat it like any other
bug and come up with a reproducable test case to share. Until we know more,
there's no point in speculating.

------
musicale
Secretly?

------
patrickthebold
I don't know. Hangouts never seemed to work but Meets does, and I think that's
newer.

------
O_H_E
And I thought there was a problem with my DNS that prevented YouTube from
loading. (I assumed that chrome was using some special settings)

This is really the shitties thing I have seen from Google, especially first
hand.

------
jitendrac
I am using firefox since 2008, google services are lacking performance in
firefox from last 2 years.

First it was only youtube videos, but now it has expanded to docs and other
services also.

From last six months Gmail never opens on first attempt in my firefox second
is required, but if I switch to chrome it not only magically opens at first
attempt but with faster page load.

------
enz
I run FF on Android and desktop Linux. So far, I didn't notice anything
suspicious with Google services such as YouTube and Drive. If technical
problems arise, my choice will be to keep using FF and stop using Google
services (including YouTube) without hesitation.

------
alephnan
It could just be a matter of test coverage and priority, rather than malice

------
yasp
Yes. Try using Google Maps in Firefox.

~~~
enz
Try using Google Maps on Android with the dedicated official app. It's slow as
hell. Maybe Google Maps is just very slow anyway.

