
Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to - mandliya
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-to-google-and-that-should-worry-us-all/
======
mandliya
Wow! if this is true.

"A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such
action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty
HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest,
most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-
life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve
Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt
Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually
superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the
element, to no avail."

~~~
DannyBee
I wonder if this edge developer's moral indignation also extends to the
repeated aggressive "move to edge" tactics. I'm sitting on my windows 10
laptop, where we went from "hey i can switch my browser at will" to "hey we
buried it", and then also "when you try switch, it tries to convince you to
stay with edge in the hopes you will get tired of trying to switch the
defaults".

But that's not enough, apparently, so it was also "when you browse with chrome
or firefox, we give you notifications saying you are draining your battery
faster and should move to edge"[1]. This predates the stuff talked about in
this article.

That's also like the _start_ of these tactics. I'm sure Google and Mozilla
asked Microsoft to stop doing that, "to no avail". Meanwhile, the complaint
here is basically "they made our annoying and stupid notification not true".
Having dealt with these tactics repeatedly, i can't work up any indignation
over this. The only one i feel even mildly sorry for is Mozilla.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12369326/microsoft-
windows...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12369326/microsoft-
windows-10-chrome-battery-life-notifications)

~~~
jgon
Wait a guy who works for a company that uses the world's most popular website
(the google search homepage) to aggressively proselytize it's own browser is
complaining about Windows prompting you to use Edge? For real dude?

Edit: I'll expand. You work for a company the bundled Chrome as a default
install with many other toolbars and utility programs. You sell a line of
computing products where Chrome is not only the default, it is _literally_ the
only browser than can be installed. Chrome is the default browser on the
world's most popular OS (Android). Multiple Google properties have refused to
work on other browsers and displayed a popup asking people to switch the
Chrome (Inbox is the one I remember most vividly). Here's a link to people
trying to figure out how to get Chrome to stop asking to be default every time
it opens: [https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/59843-how-stop-
goog...](https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/59843-how-stop-google-
chrome-not-your-default-browser-message.html) As you can see it's not exactly
an easy task. All of this, and probably more, and you're here talking about
what Windows does? C'mon man.

~~~
DannyBee
I am so unbelievably tired of the hacker news "you work for company x and
therefore your opinion is tainted and you aren't allowed to have personal
opinions" crap I don't even know where to begin. It's just another form of
worthless bias being used to dismiss arguments.

It's no different than any other form of bias, even if it seems more socially
acceptable here.

If you want to argue with what I actually wrote, happy to have that
discussion. Otherwise, not interested, sorry.

------
HALtheWise
This article has some good points, but I don't agree with it's treatment of
the SPDY->HTTP/2 and QUIC->HTTP/3 process. In both cases, Google engineers
identified a real problem, made a prototype solution, encouraged others to
implement it, and ultimately participated as core members of standardizing
what is in some sense a "v2" protocol built on the lessons of their initial
experiments. The article presents the working group as fighting to de-Googlify
the protocols, but the reality seems to be that Google was working closely as
members of that committee, and the new versions were intended to be better for
everyone.

The monopolistic action would be to design a new protocol then keep it
proprietary and secret so your competition can't have services or browsers
that are as fast. That's not what happened.

------
bitpush
The whole article seems to have been motivated by the ex-MSFT engineer's
comment, padded with some false impressions on how standards involve.

HTTP2 and HTTP3 are decided by committees and it isnt Google who controls it.

While I dont know whether the MSFT engineer's claims are true or not, but even
with some benefit of the doubt, having an empty <div> cause such an obvious
performance degradation sounds to be like hyper optimized for an
implementation rather than actual breakthrough.

~~~
dblohm7
> HTTP2 and HTTP3 are decided by committees and it isnt Google who controls
> it.

That was then, this is now. What happens when Google implements its next
protocol in Chromium? With Blink's market share, would they even bother with
committees anymore? At this point, they could more or less get what they want
out of it without the extra bureaucracy.

~~~
dwild
> What happens when Google implements its next protocol in Chromium? With
> Blink's market share, would they even bother with committees anymore?

They didn't bother for SPDY or QUIC. They were implemented in the browser,
like many others features, before any committee. It's the committees though
that decided to base their works for HTTP/2 and HTTP3 over theses.

The danger isn't on what they implements, because that's already something
they do (and all others browsers do), but based on what they DON'T implements.
What if they ignore HTTP3 and only use a new protocol they made?

------
ganeshkrishnan
The absolute worst part is their random bans for ludicrous reasons. Resold
pixel? Ban! Art nudity? Ban! Hollywood photos in app screenshots? Ban! YouTube
reports? Ban!

And the ban hammer deletes everything from Gmail to Google docs to Google
drive.

There is no other company that I despise as much as Google. Not even Facebook.
FB had a customer support call me when my account was blocked due to invalid
credit card in ads. Amazon has excellent customer support for buyers and
sellers.

Google just deletes everything and doesn't even bother providing any support
for it.

The day Google dies, I will be opening up a champagne and celebrating.

~~~
throwmeback
lol'd at FB customer support. sometime in late 2017 someone with a Pakistan IP
has somehow made 2 pages about flowers on my FB account, created an ad account
and ran 2 ad campaigns on them.

weirdly enough they paid for the first campaign, but removed their card
details afterwards.

FB nags me on my wall to update my credit card info for a failed payment of
~20$, a year after I wrote two emails to them explaining the situation.

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
You can just close your fb account and move on with your life. Good luck doing
that with google and its drive/docs/gmail/search/apps/phone/maps/contact
manager/chrome

------
tracker1
I'm not sure I agree with some of the conclusions. Webkit/Blink are open
source, as long as MS contributes back, I really don't see the problem. Anyone
can fork, experiment, enhance etc.

When I've tested under Edge, specifically, stuff that _should_ work often
didn't. It got better each release, but the pace was almost as painfully slow
as IE was before it.

~~~
bad_user
I think people attribute too much to Chromium’s open source nature.

The repository is controlled by Google, it’s their project. Whatever Google
wants in Chromium goes in.

The only path forward in a case in which Microsoft disagrees would be a fork.
However a fork would do nothing to Chrome’s market share. Microsoft failed to
gain any traction with Edge and that won’t change after they start building on
Chromium.

This is also similar with Android, an ecosystem that Google managed to control
even if there’s a lot of incentive for the phone makers to fork. The reality
being that no fork would succeed for as long as Google is pumping money into
the project, because it benefits from the network effects of their app store
and of their flagship apps.

This is why open standards are important, with open source being in fact an
orthogonal issue.

~~~
tracker1
I'm not against open standards... however, when Google was having issues with
Apple in terms of priorities, that's when they forked off... if MS has the
same issues, they can do the same. In the end, there can still be standards,
and I understand that if it hits like 75% market share overall that it becomes
a defacto standard. I saw it with IE6, and it was painful after a while.

However, I don't think Blink will stop getting better just because MS starts
using it, or Google stops. Worst case, we see a fork. Also, now Edge can at
least be available outside windows. I do think the biggest mistakes MS made
are as follows.

    
    
        - Tethering Edge releases to Windows Updates.
        - Renaming IE to Edge instead of updating and hiding old ie better
        - Making it Windows 10 only
    

Those were the worst mistakes that MS made, and to the last one, at least they
made updating to win10 free for a couple years. I also, despite reporting,
don't think the front end will resemble Chromium so much, I do think they will
take some of their own UX lessons and tweak the front end while keeping the
Blink engine in place. Also, swapping a lot of the synching services for MS
equivalents, while keeping plugin compatibility.

------
dejaime
The title implies that we should have handled the Web over to another company.
We should not, to any company.

------
bbulkow
The Google of ten years ago was the company we should have trusted the
internet.

The Google of today has essentially removed the founders and become a search
for profit. Once they split the company 'for accounting purposes' it meant the
google part of alphabet was going to be run for increasing profit almost
exclusively, which mean just what we are seeing now.

~~~
rs23296008n1
The google of old is gone. They operate at a scale and against competitors
that are completely ruthless. It's not just profit. It's winning. Beating the
competitor. Emphasis on "beating".

This is what most corporations at scale actually do and what they are.
Constant battle in a hostile environment.

Google/alphabet is likely under threat of anti-trust and a whole host of other
legal actions, eg possible pending monopoly charges, and likely criminal
charges in multiple ways where they bent a rule for whatever reason. Lawsuits
for other reasons we don't even know about. Lots of other speculative actions
pending or in progress. Who knows what else. This is all part of the legal
framework. An allegation is created and tested to see if could stick. If it
can it gets thrown at the target.

Every other corporation at that scale is fighting these kind of battles every
day. I'd actually be surprised if they weren't.

For those who think I'm talking only about google, you can substitute
Facebook, J&J or any other large corporation across any industry.

------
aloisdg
Is this linked to @JoshuaJB comment here on HN?

comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824)

------
rajacombinator
The company doesn’t matter. The same people would infiltrate and subvert
regardless of company. The web is too important for it to be any other way.

------
foxes
Why don't people push Microsoft to open source Edge?

~~~
00N8
[https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-
edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/)

they did. Microsoft already dropped EdgeHTML & announced they'll be using
Chromium under the hood, although maybe the author didn't know or forgot to
mention that here..

------
myworkhandle
Google, Was dont be evil... Now, Dont get caught

~~~
8bitsrule
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are
almost always bad men."

[https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-
corrupts-...](https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-
absolutely.html)

~~~
rs86
Right on

