
“Google: it is time to return to not being evil” - walkingolof
https://vivaldi.com/blog/google-return-to-not-being-evil/
======
Jonnax
Google are really shitty with their web browser especially on mobile.

If you run Firefox you get a stripped down version of Google Search also with
no infinite scrolling for images and low resolution.

Use a user agent spoofer like this: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-google-android/)

And it seems to work fine on Firefox.

I'm sure their official excuse is that they only support WebKit based browsers
on mobile, like it's the new Internet Explorer with some modern day ActiveX

~~~
freehunter
Let's not forget the time they refused to make a YouTube app for Windows Phone
and when Microsoft made one, Google forced them to remove it. And then
seemingly in retribution for making the app, Google blocked Windows Phone from
being able to access Google Maps even though the browser was technically
capable of using it. Google's reasoning was (similarly to another comment
here) "it's too hard to check functionality in so many browsers" like they're
not literally the most powerful Internet company in the world engaging in
petty nonsense with a basically non-existing competitor.

Remember when Microsoft did the stuff Google does now and the government
actually cared enough to do something about it?

~~~
golfer
Microsoft's YouTube app removed the ads. Violation of TOS. Pretty
straightforward reason for wanting it removed.

Don't act like Microsoft, of all companies, is some poor victim. They compete
their ass off, and sometimes they win, sometimes lose. They lost that time.

~~~
FreezerburnV
Don't forget that Microsoft _publicly offered_ to work directly with Google to
get the Youtube app working correctly according to what Google wanted, ads and
all. The only reason it "stripped" ads originally was because Google didn't
work with them to add them in the first place. Also keep in mind that there
were, at the time, other Youtube apps that worked (to some extent) just fine,
and Google didn't go after them.

I also remember something about how Google demanded that Microsoft implement
something that wasn't technically possible at the time in order to get the
Youtube app to be fully compliant. I don't remember what that was exactly, but
I think it had something to do with how they were rendering the videos.

I was a Windows Phone user at the time, and was very irritated about Google
being petty and not working with Microsoft to get the app working with ads.

~~~
golfer
Ahh, the public offer to help. Great PR move that ignores all Microsoft's
other actions against Google throughout time.

Competition is fair game. Consider:

\- the existence of Bing

\- Every version of IE and Windows starting from over a decade ago has made it
more difficult to change the default search engine from Bing. Comically
difficult, even

\- Microsoft's creation/funding of entities like Fairsearch.org, whose primary
reason for existence is to destroy Google

\- Stealing Google's search results

\- etc etc

Microsoft has tried to defeat Google from day one. Again, they competed and
lost. If they had built up any good will maybe Google would have helped. But
they didn't.

~~~
freehunter
Consider:

Microsoft got forcibly fucked by the US government for unfairly damaging their
competition. Is that really the path that Google wants to follow?

~~~
katastic
I wish they would. Does anyone think all the Microsoft engineers and managers
started off wanting to be known as evil monsters and having to explain to
their friends and families "I'm not evil!" every week? Google has become the
next Microsoft.

However, I don't see Google being sued in the USA. Why? Because (per my other
comment) prosecution of White Collar crimes dropped over 20% (a whopping
amount) when Eric Holder came into power over the DOJ. 20% DROP DURING one of
the largest recessions in USA history! Bush destroyed Enron and sent them to
jail even though that would kill people's pensions. Meanwhile, Eric Holder
brought about the Too Big To Fail era where the DOJ was outright AFRAID of
prosecuting big companies.

We basically don't have a government now. We have corporations. And they don't
have to wait to be voted in, and they don't have to leave after four years.

Look at how companies like Comcast (after the Telecommunications Act) can now
own NBC, and NBC news. They can own the entire chain of wire, to media, to
control of information itself. Is it any wonder why, when ~5 companies control
90% of all US media, that we never hear of "big bad evil corporations"
anymore? In the 90's everyone was rushing to burn Wal-Marts to the ground for
pushing out "the little guy". Now when Google does it, platform liberals and
news pundits cry "Free market!". Are we supposed to believe that in ~25 years,
the same corporations suddenly became ethical? Why is there never any serious
talk of unions (a central tenant of the Democrat platform) anymore? Because
they corporations (not Democrats) control the news now.

------
zmmmmm
A lot of words, but it seems to boil down to:

    
    
        In exchange for being reinstated in Google’s
        ad network, their in-house specialists dictated 
        how we should arrange content on our own website 
        and how we should communicate information to our 
        users.
    

It's impossible to evaluate this without more details. If their web site
actually broke reasonable elements of Google's terms and conditions then it
sounds like this is completely expected. The lack of any further detail to the
allegations makes me strongly suspect that there's another side to this story.
It may still not add up in Google's favour, but without something else I'm
left feeling sceptical about this.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
That is a valid point, but the question remains: How come that one ad network
is powerful enough to make a customer beg for three months to be reinstated
instead of simply choosing a competitor?

Something is clearly out of whack in this market.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Because that ad market is coupled to the largest search engine.

------
tryingagainbro
_Vivaldi CEO – “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”_

Me: that train has left the station. When you have monopoly power (70%-98% of
market share) the governments should return Google and Whatever Corp to not
being evil.

~~~
akerl_
It seems like companies are stuck in a losing game. We constantly push small
companies to capture more market share. Any companies that fold during that
effort, we bring out the pitchforks because the services they ran get shut
off. Any companies that _succeed_ , we bring out the pitchforks because they
own too much market power.

It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow and
simultaneously ensure they never pass 70% market share.

~~~
chki
Do "we" really push companies to capture market share? I mean sure,
stockholders do, but "we" as the general public don't really care about a
companies size until they become too big.

~~~
freedomben
I respectfully disagree that "we the general public" don't really care about a
company's size. I know a lot of people who will not adopt an app or product
until the company has proven and/or established itself in the market. I think
this describes a lot of Apple users who won't adopt new products until Apple
gets in the game (the Apple watch being a recent example). A lot of people
want a seamless and connected experience, and you have to be a massive player
in order to provide that in a lot of cases.

~~~
deadowl
And the XMPP Federation couldn't provide that ideal?

~~~
themacguffinman
Of course it couldn't. Messaging was moving very rapidly with new features
like stickers, reactions, expiring messages, phone number IDs, SMS fallback,
stories, bots...and all of this had to be presented a very integrated and
user-friendly package. You simply can't move that fast (or move much at all)
with a huge standard like XMPP with 20 different clients that barely change.

Not to mention that in this capitalist society, messaging services are
incentivized to grow at all cost because user-base is the best fuel for
monetization. Holding onto XMPP federation like Google did in XMPP's final
years of relevancy would be suicide; you would be helping your competitors
while gaining nothing.

~~~
Zhyl
But by that same token, could it be possible for a new standard which
incorporates all those features to become viable when the messaging space has
stabalised?

------
klondike_
I wish I could use Vivaldi, it seems like a nice browser for power users.
Unfortunately it's closed source (besides the Webkit parts). Considering how
much sensitive information goes through a browser nowadays, I would never
consider something closed source.

I'm sure Vivaldi has no intentions of becoming "evil" like Google, but because
of its closed source nature it wouldn't be hard to slip a tracker or two in
the browser and regular users would be none the wiser.

~~~
roblabla
I don't know what browser you're using, but assuming chrome : it's not open
source either. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary, much
in the same way vivaldi is.

If you want a truly open source modern browser, the only options are chromium
or firefox these days, AFAIK ? (If you know an alternative I'm interested !)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I don't think it's fair to assume that someone who is calling for a browser to
be open sourced is using Chrome rather than Chromium.

------
amirmasoudabdol
YouTube website does everything to be unusable on the iPad. They don't use the
default player. They won't save your settings if you use Safari. They do not
allow full screen video. Even when you request the desktop site, they resist
to load the video properly in first few trials. They are being as annoying as
they can!

~~~
saagarjha
That's because they want you using their app, which they have more control
over and where they can disable features like background playback and Picture
in Picture which they can then charge you for.

~~~
K0SM0S
On a side related note, YouTube Red still isn't available worldwide, so most
people outside the US don't even have the option to pay for background/PiP.
It's a subpar user experience _by design_ and Google apparently doesn't care
at all (it's been years now). Also, still no speed control on the mobile
YouTube app. All of this being true even on Android O.

As most people, I cannot avoid using YouTube, but everytime I need background
play of podcast-like content, I default to another activity (eg actual podcast
app, an audiobook, whatever). Typical case is when you need to communicate at
the same time, or do 'stuff' while listening. When you add it all up, that's
hours everyday lost from me. And I'm just one user, iirc the majority of human
beings don't live in the US...

It's frustrating that you can't even pay to resolve the issue, let alone
knowing that they themselves placed a restriction (background play) that
didn't exist in the first place. Reminds me of the worst from the likes of MS,
Apple, Oracle, Verizon.

------
exikyut
> _It is also fair to say that Google is now in a position where regulation is
> needed. I sincerely hope that they’ll get back to the straight and narrow._

Hah. Even before I read any of this article, just reading the post title as
submitted here made me think of something I ponder often:

The Microsoft antitrust regulations happened ultimately because Microsoft read
the situation wrong and pushed too hard. It's sad to say that Google have
studied what happened very, _very_ well, and they've stepped carefully enough
that, well, we now have Chromebooks - the exact direction Microsoft was
heading in. And nobody's batting an eyelid.

Yes, Google needs to be reminded what its boundaries are.

I believe this can be done.

My guess is that Google have successfully ridden the general consensus of
"it's open source, anyone can fork it" to get away with having Chrome be the
world's dominant browser. But Chrome is not Chromium. Yeah, yeah, the binary
differences are just a crash-reporter and autoupdater (mostly, IIRC), but
still.

So the politicos need to be convinced that we've revisited the same situation.
My suggestion is _stifles laughter_ requiring that Chromebooks provide the
option to install Firefox. :D

(OT trivia: Chromium's builtin spellchecker is fine with "politicos". That's
hilarious. (I know it's on, it doesn't like "autoupdater".))

~~~
studentrob
> My suggestion is stifles laughter requiring that Chromebooks provide the
> option to install Firefox. :D

Google should take that upon themselves.

I was prepared to refute your suggestion until a quick Google search told me
Chromebooks have 58% marketshare in K-12.

It's probably much lower across home devices and much lower still across the
world, but popular enough that, like Android, it should allow installing
competing browsers.

For an antitrust lawsuit to be successful, I imagine their marketshare would
need to be much higher.

~~~
mentando
Do Chromebooks actively block you from installing another browser?

I mean I have a Chromebook and I can install crouton and run Firefox.

Or would Google have to provide a "supported" way to install other browsers?

~~~
studentrob
> Do Chromebooks actively block you from installing another browser?

I don't have one. If it's sufficiently harder, like it was in the Microsoft IE
antitrust case, there may be an argument there. IANAL but I think an antitrust
lawsuit would have to show they have majority marketshare too.

> Or would Google have to provide a "supported" way to install other browsers?

I don't how ChromeOS works. Is Chrome the OS? If so they might have more of an
argument than, say, Microsoft, since Windows existed before IE and it was
clear IE was not integral to the base system.

Still, now we have pretty easy to install flavors of Linux, which is another
difference between now and 2001 when Microsoft settled their case.

~~~
mentando
> I don't how ChromeOS works. Is Chrome the OS? If so they might have more of
> an argument than, say, Microsoft, since Windows existed before IE and it was
> clear IE was not integral to the base system.

It is essentially a really light Linux Distribution with Chrome running on top
of it. But I have no clue, how hard or easy it would be for Google to allow a
package manager or something to work.

As I said, they do not actively block you from installing crouton, which
allows you to use any browser, but I don't know, if that would help with an
antitrust lawsuit.

------
Endy
Well, if I were the team at Vivaldi, I would be using as little of Google's
tech until THEY bend. After all, Opera 15+ and Vivaldi now both use Google's
web engine. That feels like a major mistake to me, because it constantly tells
Google, "regardless of what we say, we need you and we'll give in to your
demands". Attacking Google just turns into biting the hand that feeds when you
rely on them not only for revenue, but even for the core technologies which
you need to exist. Instead of relying on Google for email and online office
function, two options come to mind - either develop your own (time-consuming
and extremely technically challenging) or support Zoho. For search, there's
privacy-friendly DuckDuckGo & StartPage, or Exalead if you're worried about
index size.

I was sincerely hoping that we would get to see a modern equivalent to Presto
in Vivaldi when I first heard about the browser and who was backing it. I
think this would be a great time to begin serious work on that project, a new
and proprietary web engine that's not beholden to Apple, Google, Mozilla, or
any of the major firms.

~~~
dabockster
> a new and proprietary web engine that's not beholden to Apple, Google,
> Mozilla, or any of the major firms

I wouldn't necessarily go as far as proprietary, but I agree everywhere else.
Now that we essentially have a bunch of Chrome flavors, I'm finding myself
missing the browser wars of the mid 2000s. Real competition producing real
results.

~~~
fbender
Have a look at what Mozilla is doing with Gecko (Project Quantum) and Servo.
Even Microsoft is moving in a much better direction with Edge in the recent
years, doing a lot of work and opening up parts of the engine.

I don't know why parent put Mozilla into the same bucket as Apple and Google,
they are not comparable in any conceivable way.

~~~
Endy
Because I don't trust Mozilla to put the user first and not give in to
Google's demands anymore. Between the Australis UI ("Looks like Chrome") and
now WebExtensions ("Works like Chrome"), the fiercely independent and unique
Firefox (and by extension all of Mozilla) from days/years past is forever
gone. Losing Thunderbird & SeaMonkey as fully developed projects was really
the first warning of many; but many people were willing to let it go. I don't
trust any of their new projects to actually remain stable and different from
Google's desires, and really I don't have any reason to believe that they give
a tinker's damn about their long-time users or their original ideals when they
split from Netscape. They are no different from Opera who capitulated
completely (and we see that Vivaldi, while calling them out, isn't announcing
that they're creating their own engine, or switching to raw KHTML), and I'm
just waiting until the day I have to start laughing because Mozilla announces
that, in order to develop for the mobile space of Android & iOS, they're
switching the desktop browser from Gecko to WebKit/Blink. Because I'm sure,
given the track they're on, that day will come. I can no longer summon the
appropriate dread. I can only laugh.

~~~
fbender
> Because I don't trust Mozilla to […] not give in to Google's demands
> anymore.

Huh? How's Google able to demand anything from Mozilla? If you'd refer to the
Search deal, that has long changed. The only way Google can "demand" things
from Mozilla is by the force of the market. That's what happened in many
regards, i.e. users expect certain things from the browser and Google managed
to set the expectations.

> Australis UI ("Looks like Chrome")

Oh come on. This again. And it's been discussed again and again (and, by the
way, clearly visible) that the Australis UI is as similar to Chrome as any
other tabbed browser out there.

> WebExtensions ("Works like Chrome")

I agree that it's sad to see the maximum extensibility go. But it proofed to
be the source of many issues (mostly browser stability and speed as well as
complexitiy, speed, and flexibility of development) for the browser
developers. But also for extension developers since the API was not stable.
The Web Extensions API is far, far better in these regards. Starting from a
tried and tested base instead of rolling your own API was a good decision,
especially considering that MS was also in the same boat.

Keep in mind that the Web Extensions API in Firefox is already much more
capable than what you can find in Chrome. So it's still "Works much better
than Chrome".

> They are no different from Opera who capitulated completely

Uhm, Fx still has their own browser with their own engine which they are
putting an enormous effort into, especially in recent months and to a great
part _enabled_ by the painful decisions they made, e.g. _removing_ support for
the legacy extension system. That's far from "capitulating". Quite the
opposite, they're doubling down on their engine (paradoxically by developing
yet another engine and programming language, but it turns out they were
right!).

------
cromwellian
>The idea of the Internet turning into a battlefield of propaganda is very far
away from the ideal.

Too late, it already happened, and had nothing to do with data collection.
When television was invented, people had much the same visions of utopia:
it'll be used to educate people. The internet is now flooded with propaganda
from think tanks banked by billionaire wingnuts to the Putin Troll Army.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
And think tanks banked by Google, who will pressure them to fire people if
they say the wrong thing.

~~~
cromwellian
Nice try, but no one's complaining about the Web being flooded with propaganda
from Open Markets, nor can really call Eric Schmidt saying he is displeased as
"pressure", then every time Steve Jobs threw a fit about a less than 100%
positive iPhone review, we'd have to be talking about Apple's control of the
media, the blacklisting of reporters, and the withholding of "access".

The kinds of think tanks I'm talking about are things like the Scaife's
funding of the Project for A New American Century, you know, the guys who
masterminded the Iraq war? Or how about the Koch brothers funding of climate
denial? You know, things which actually are fucking up our world and getting
people killed.

I would imagine the kinds of propaganda the Vivaldi CEO is worrying about is
the kinds that get hate groups out in the streets with Nazi signs, not the
kinds that try to lobby the government to protect net neutrality.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Are you really suggesting that Eric Schmidt personally calling their CEO and
expressing his "displeasure" isn't pressure? I suppose when a mob boss says
it'd be "unfortunate if something happened to someone", you'd characterize
that as just an expression of a personal view, too. Perhaps someone "sleeping
with the fishes" really is just a leisurely dip in the Chicago river.

It's also worth noting that there are a significant number of examples where
your employer has invested specifically in people writing about antitrust law,
and specifically, claiming that Google doesn't violate it (see Joshua Wright,
etc.). Suggesting their financial investment is limited to net neutrality
discussions is... pretty misleading.

------
neil_s
I'm a bit skeptical of the claims he's making in his article, since he has
obvious incentives as the founder of a browser company competing with Google.
Judging from the amazing features listed on the webpage (bar charts of my
history, wow, do not need that at all), I'm guessing his product sense might
have some something to do with his companies not working out, not bigger
competitors that are out to get him.

Can anyone point me to links confirming his two claims: that Google services
were maliciously blocking Opera for reasons other than compatibility and
efficiency for a low-market-share browser, and that Google blocked his ads for
spurious reasons. He doesn't really provide details on what rules he was
violating, but judging from the fact that the ads were reinstated the moment
he was in compliance with them, it sounds like a trumped up charge.

~~~
unityByFreedom
> He doesn't really provide details on what rules he was violating, but
> judging from the fact that the ads were reinstated the moment he was in
> compliance with them, it sounds like a trumped up charge.

I agree skepticism is warranted.

This is one side of the story. Even if you have it out for Google, you should
want more details before grabbing your pitchfork. Mistakenly criticizing
someone only empowers them.

------
TruthSHIFT
"Don't be Evil" was just code for "Don't be Microsoft."

But, today even Microsoft has enough sense to not be Microsoft.

~~~
katastic
Microsoft is too busy being a dumpster fire to be evil.

I install and maintain their products for a living. I have horror stories upon
horror stories representing weeks (if not months) of dev time to work around--
including writing a custom plugin with an SDK just to fix a bug in the data
import wizard in CRM.

------
phr4ts
Summary: Google suspends AdWords campaigns of Vivaldi Browser after Vivaldi
CEO wrote an anti-Google article

~~~
gaius
That is not a summary. The article opens with Google faking breaking
compatibility with Opera in order to push their own browser. Why fake? Because
the services worked perfectly when faking the user agent...

~~~
gsnedders
> The article opens with Google faking breaking compatibility with Opera in
> order to push their own browser.

It explicitly states that it got worse when they introduced their own browser,
which implies it pre-dates their own browser.

~~~
gaius
I think he means that first Google was cozy with Mozilla, and then later
introduced Chrome. Opera the browser predates Google the company.

------
drunkenmonkey
Applause for Vivaldi for the backbone to say something openly.

------
MikeGale
There's a pattern here: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-
schmidt-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-
google-new-america.html)

~~~
degenerate
Assuming you've seen this too: [https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-
crucial-role-in-...](https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-
in-team-hillarys-election-tech/)

Schmidt has been wading neck-deep in pulling political strings for years
now... Google is evil, evil, evil.

~~~
HillaryBriss
> Google is evil, evil, evil

well, at least they don't have anyone's personal info

------
mjevans
Setting aside everything else; other comments are doing an OK job discussing
those topics...

What were the content changes that Google forced them to make? I'd like to
know so that I can evaluate how reasonable that request is from my own
perspective.

------
staticelf
Google has become a really crappy company in my eyes. I run Vivaldi nowadays
as my main browser since it is great but it feels like a new UI on Chrome.

Why can't google support all modern browsers for their products? I work as a
web dev and have done so for all of my work.

------
folli
"You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The
Villain" \- Harvey Dent

------
amelius
Never trust a company that has the word "evil" in its company motto, even if
used in the negative sense.

Imagine that Disney used the motto: "We won't kill your children". Would you
still send your kids to their theme park?

~~~
andrenotgiant
Google doesnt use the word "evil" in any of their mottos or official copy.

~~~
grzm
> _Google Code of Conduct_

> _Preface_

> _“Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our
> users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing
> our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving
> them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing
> the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and
> treating co-workers with courtesy and respect._

> _The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into
> practice._

[0]: [https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-
conduct.html](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html)

------
cromwellian
"Seems to work" is not the same thing as "Working As Intended". I work on
Gmail/Inbox (previously GWT). When we released Inbox, it started out as Chrome
only, people discovered they could get it to load and seemingly work on
Firefox by spoofing, but the reality was, it was still broken, and would
eventually consume all memory, because Inbox relies on sparse Javascript array
behavior for protobufs, and something like a[300000000]=1, for(x in
a)/Object.keys(a) would cause the JS engine to allocate a giant array.

Inbox also was a the first web property to adopt a form of Material Design,
and had hard design requirements for 60fps on the Web Animation.
Unfortunately, due to the way browsers upload GPU textures when doing
compositing, animation timing was broke. (Do they count time spent uploading
in the interpolation?) My coworkers spent a huge amount of time fixing it, and
then finally making Edge work. There was no ill will or evil plan, just finite
engineering resources.

I don't know the details around Google Docs, but my guess (speculation) would
be it probably had to do with Content-Editable. Docs was a Google acquisition
of Writely. Back in those days, many online editing apps on the bleeding edge
(ab)used Content Editable. Those of you who are Web developers know that
Content Editable varies wildly across platform, has no real spec stating a
deterministic expectation of what it should do. If the original Writely was
based on this, they probably didn't want to fix it, instead Writely was
rewritten and the new Google Docs basically avoids Content-Editable and
implemented their own complete layout/editing engine in JS. Getting that to
work correctly across many fonts, languages, BiDi support, etc was probably a
hellish amount of work, but the end result was probably to make it more
resilient against across browser issues.

We've now reached a stage where every time something breaks or someone gets
deranked, they immediately start jumping to conspiracy theories about how they
were specified targeted for nefarious reasons, no one seems to understand
Hanlon's Razor.

Google only recently retired IE8 support. I wanted it dead for a long time. Am
I evil? Our code base is littered with horrific code smell in our JS due to
Microsoft's bad garbage collection implementation in prior browsers. In order
to reduce memory leaks in our Closure Library code base, it's full of C++-like
destructors/retain-release like constructs, which increases codesize,
decreases performance. Google Web Toolkit's whole widget system was
constructed around the needs of IE6/8, which ultimately bloated and doomed its
UI system from adapting to the modern web.

Web programming is still fraught with issues, issues you don't encounter on
iOS, and to a lesser extent, Android, because of a single implementation. The
combinatorial explosion of browsers, browser versions, form factors, means
testing on everything and everywhere, and even with the resources of Google
this creates significant impacts on productivity and maintenance. That means
you can't expect a modern, bleeding edge web app, to come out of the gate
working perfectly everywhere, especially if it is adopting only recently
shipped APIs as a core requirement.

So you have only a few choices: hold up your release until everyone catches
up, ship everyone the same lowest common denominator triaging out the advanced
stuff, shipping an app with all kinds of workarounds and fallbacks, or
shipping a native mobile one instead.

It's the threat of the latter which is the real problem these days, because
with mobile first, engineering wise, it looks cheaper and more predictable
with better user experience.

~~~
kuschku
If the Google teams are just focusing on what would get the largest
marketshare, then why did we never see Firefox-only launches of Google
products?

For many years Firefox was the largest browser that wasn't IE, yet no such
launch happened.

Even when Chrome's marketshare was below 5%, Google always launched Chrome-
only.

Your argument is nice, but ultimately invalid: Google never cared about
providing to the most users first, but only about giving an advantage to their
own spyware browser.

~~~
cromwellian
You answered your own question. IE having the largest market share in those
days. "Google always launched Chrome-only" \-- another unsubstantiated claim.
When Chrome was 5%, all their launches were always Chrome only?

I know it doesn't fit your narrative, but we don't launch broken stuff to
screw over other browsers on purpose, period. The number one reason I've seen
for non-working browsers is reliance on some non-standard browser
feature/bleeding edge feature which isn't implemented fully or spec'ed
correctly and doesn't have a good polyfill.

And because of the these claims of nefarious intent, I decided to go back and
look up Writely (Google Docs) and see what it's compatibility looked like.

Here's a description of how it was based on Content-Editable
[https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/3/4484000/sam-schillace-
inte...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/3/4484000/sam-schillace-interview-
google-docs-creator-box)

And here's a comment I found claiming it didn't work on Safari nor Opera.
[https://www.extremetech.com/computing/50680-writely-
googles-...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/50680-writely-googles-
online-word-processor/6?print)

So it seems Google bought Writely, which already did not support Safari or
Opera, rebranded it as Docs, and pending a rewrite of the editing/layout
engine from the ground up, didn't work with Safari and Opera, most likely due
to Content-Editable problems.

~~~
kuschku
> I know it doesn't fit your narrative, but we don't launch broken stuff to
> screw over other browsers on purpose, period

Sure, you never did something that would improve your browser share and then
claim in the media that it was for "technical reasons". You also never
intentionally made usability on other browsers worse, and then threw dozens of
popups and messages into users faces about how they should "upgrade to
chrome".

Oh, wait, regulators actually fined you for that.

It doesn’t matter if the browser support is just a coincidence, or actually
malicious, the end result is the same, and shouldn’t happen.

~~~
cromwellian
Google fines for advertising Upgrade To Chrome? Citation needed. The EU fine
recently was for Shopping, not advertising Chrome downloads.

And as I already pointed out, the Vivaldi CEO claims were based on software
which Google didn't even write. Google Docs (Writely) was an acquisition of a
service with existing customers and it did not work on Safari or Opera before
Google bought them.

Google would have faced a choice after acquisition: continue running a service
for existing users that doesn't work on Opera, or, shut it down immediately
for a year or more until a rewrite was completed And launch on all browsers.

Of course, Google has been attacked for buying startups and shutting down
their products as well, so damned if you do and damned if you don't.

------
LarryPage
Google hasn't been my default search engine for 6+ months. In fact the only
Google things I use frequently are Android and Chromium (through Opera).

I feel better about my internet usage, and I've been having a much better
experience.

Obligatory "username checks out"

~~~
breakingcups
What search engine have you been using? I've tried others but none seem to
come even close, unfortunately.

~~~
Corristowolf
DuckDuckGo works well. Even has those info tiles that google has when you
search a store etc.

~~~
LarryPage
Yeah I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively.

------
mitja_belak
Finally someone other than random bloggers dared saying it clear.

And its not just monopoly over advertising. Lately they are in business of
censoring political 'wrongthink' on one hand and prioritizing the management &
friends political views in mainstream search.

I don't think Google will change anything on its own though and its sad to see
a neutral company of engeeners turn into power hungry megacorp.

------
otterpro
As much as I'd like to agree with the statement, I can't say the same about
Vivaldi/Opera because they have left a bad taste in my mouth when they sued
their former employee who went to work later for Mozilla for $3.4M
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5629255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5629255)).
That lawsuit was dropped later, but as a dev, I wouldn't feel comfortable
working for a company that could sue me later in life.

By the way, I used to be exclusive on Opera many years ago and I loved how
well it worked and how fast it ran, until Chrome came out.

I wouldn't say Vivaldi is good and Google is evil. I think they differ only on
the degree of evilness.

------
sol_remmy
> A monopoly both in search and advertising, Google, unfortunately, shows that
> they are not able to resist the misuse of power.

The ONLY thing that makes Google close to a monopoly is government power -
hear me out:

Google has patented all of their search algorithms. This is akin to patenting
all of the O(nlog) sorting algorithms. Competitors are left with using Bubble
Sort.

The simple solution is to invalidate some of these patents. Then the
"monopoly" problem will fix itself.

------
elihu
It would be great if Google changes their policies and acts responsibly from
here on out, but whether they do or not, I think we would all be better off in
the long run if there were more competing services.

Maybe it's time for a new search engine? (Or a new video sharing site, or a
new email service, or a new online ad delivery system, or a new news
aggregator, or a new cell phone operating system vendor, or a new Internet
business model that isn't dependent on advertising revenue...)

Google started at a time when most people didn't think we need a new search
engine, and it seems to have worked well for them. Maybe it's that time again.
I'm not sure when exactly the PageRank patent expires (people seem to be
saying 2017 or 2018), but it will be soon and that should open up some
interesting possibilities.

~~~
unityByFreedom
> I'm not sure when exactly the PageRank patent expires (people seem to be
> saying 2017 or 2018), but it will be soon and that should open up some
> interesting possibilities.

You could use it right now. In fact, many do.

Google doesn't sue companies for using PageRank or much of their published
research. Much more interesting things have come out since then like BigTable
(led to Hadoop + NoSQL databases) and Word2Vec (better semantic analysis +
search). These are in use all over industry.

ITT people who don't understand the contributions Google has made.

If you're wondering why there aren't competitors, you're not looking far
enough. Baidu competes with Google in China.

~~~
elihu
Patents are a pretty big threat to have hanging over your company -- Google
might not sue other companies for using it now, but they could in the future.
At least, until the patent expires.

I realize Google has created more than PageRank, but PageRank is pretty
fundamental technology. If you can't use it for legal reasons, that's a big
impediment. I don't know how Bing gets around it.

I've never tried using Baidu, but if my main concern is that I don't want a
search engine censoring the Internet, then using Baidu is at least as
problematic as using Google.

~~~
unityByFreedom
> Google might not sue other companies for using it now, but they could in the
> future. At least, until the patent expires

Google's long term strategy is to not do this. So for this to happen they'd
have to end up with a CEO who wants to make a huge pivot.

> I realize Google has created more than PageRank, but PageRank is pretty
> fundamental technology. If you can't use it for legal reasons, that's a big
> impediment. I don't know how Bing gets around it.

Maybe because it's not fundamental at all. It's hardly used anymore. Many
search engines are built without PageRank. You could build one. I suggest
reading about PageRank before claiming it is fundamental to search.

> I've never tried using Baidu, but if my main concern is that I don't want a
> search engine censoring the Internet, then using Baidu is at least as
> problematic as using Google.

Then use duck duck go.

~~~
elihu
Do you have an example of a non-pagerank based page ranking algorithm that I
should look at?

Duck duck go isn't an independent search engine, it's a layer on top of Bing.
That solves the privacy issue, but not the censorship issue, if you're worried
about Microsoft censoring content. (At least we have two major search engines
and not one.)

~~~
unityByFreedom
I suggest reading about search engine technology as a field of study. That
would give an overview of the various approaches and their strengths.

If you're worried that Bing is also censorship, then use Yahoo, or Baidu. They
all order results slightly differently. You could argue each censorship til
the cows come home. I don't see the point. You could say I'm censoring you
right now by not telling you everything I know.

Is there something specific you feel all the search engines are censoring? Or
you just suspect they are?

------
reacweb
Google main focus is AI. To build the future AI (of singularity), google wants
to have a full picture of the entire life of as many people as possible. The
focus of google is the user, but not for its good, but to replace him by
posthumans.

------
ZeroGravitas
I've long maintained that the greatest benefit that Google gets from the
slogan "Don't be evil" is how ridiculous it makes their critics sound when
they bring it up.

I fully support pretty much everything he says in the article, but can't help
but roll my eyes at the headline. I can't see it helping with anyone who isn't
already on board with the message.

I think monopolies cause real societal harm, and that large corporations
should be held very strongly to the rules by regulators but I still find it
hard to use the term "evil" in relation to something that could well just be
corporate bureaucracy gone wrong.

------
piyush_soni
Besides Google being shitty here, the only thing that strikes me in this
article is this irony: According to the article, Jon von Tetzchner is giving
talks and raising concerns on "data gathering and ad targeting practices" from
Google, but in turn, wants to use the same to advertise his product? Doesn't
it show at least some level of hypocrisy? It's almost like "I don't like that
Google tracks its users, so I made this shiny new browser, but I'll use
Google's tracking services to advertise it nevertheless".

------
mcv
I guess this was the reason why Opera was the first browser to support native
user agent spoofing? It was a great feature in the days of websites being
developed for specific browsers. If that's still going on, that would be
really sad and unprofessional.

As much as I appreciate the good work that Google has done, this is absolutely
anti-competitive and deserves to be punished. I really hope Google turns good
again, because otherwise they're really no better than Microsoft in their
worst years.

------
joelrunyon
Question for the HN crowd: is there a single-use browser for desktop like
firefox focus? I really love it on iOS, but they don't seem to make it for
Mac. Any suggestions?

~~~
cpeterso
You can configure Firefox to always open in Private Browsing mode. Look for
"Always use private browsing mode" in Firefox's Privacy & Security settings.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/settings-privacy-
browsi...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/settings-privacy-browsing-
history-do-not-track#w_never-remember-history)

------
dreamcompiler
"Don't Be Evil" stopped working for Google the day of their IPO. You become
evil when your masters (Wall Street) punish you for not being evil.

------
yuhong
I tend to focus on individual problems, the recent think tank debacle or the
ad bubble being examples.

------
thomastjeffery
Internet: it is time to return to not being Google.

------
lightedman
Really sounds like some sort of RICO or extortion charge should be filed
against Google, assuming this is all 100% factual.

~~~
protomyth
it is probably not RICO [https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-
not-rico-...](https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-
dammit/) (a bit salty on the language)

~~~
lightedman
I've actually got a little experience with this particular subject.

The specific part you would charge Google under would be "It shall be unlawful
for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or
the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or
participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s
affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity or collection of unlawful
debt."

Specifically, collection of unlawful debt.

As noted by the Vivaldi man: "We made effort to understand their explanations
and to work with them on their various unreasonable demands (some of which
they don’t follow themselves, by the way). After almost three months of back-
and-forth, the suspension to our account has been lifted, but only when we
bent to their requirements."

If any of those requirements involved a monetary payment, you can very-well
guarantee Google violated RICO. It was literal extortion.

A RICO trial was one of my most fun days in court as a juror. Armenian Power
Gang.

------
duncan_bayne
[https://xkcd.com/743/](https://xkcd.com/743/)

~~~
jsjohnst
Seems you are getting similar treatment as I did in the past for posting
relevant XKCDs. I'm guessing it's because you aren't adding much value to the
conversation, but could be some folks hate XKCD too I guess.

~~~
jacquesm
XKCD is a high iq version of a reaction gif.

~~~
jsjohnst
I agree completely now that you say that.

------
CodeWriter23
Once a pickle, never a cucumber.

------
Steeeve
Isn't vivaldi just another branded chromium? Seems a bit disingenuine for them
to be complaining about the company that built their product.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Isn't Chromium just a repackaging of KHTML from the KDE project?

~~~
Steeeve
Is it really? The last time I played with that it was almost unusable.
(must've been more than a decade ago).

~~~
rrix2
WebKit was originall a fork of KHTML.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins)

------
unityByFreedom
I wonder what the correspondence between Vivaldi and Google looked like.
Specifically, regarding this section:

> When we reached out to Google to resolve the issue, we got a clarification
> masqueraded in the form of vague terms and conditions, some of which, they
> admitted themselves, were not a “hard” requirement. In exchange for being
> reinstated in Google’s ad network, their in-house specialists dictated how
> we should arrange content on our own website and how we should communicate
> information to our users.

> We made effort to understand their explanations and to work with them on
> their various unreasonable demands (some of which they don’t follow
> themselves, by the way). After almost three months of back-and-forth, the
> suspension to our account has been lifted, but only when we bent to their
> requirements.

This is one side of the story. Without seeing the correspondence it's hard to
decide who's being evil.

------
bobsgame
Google is not evil. They provide fantastic services and value and have made
the world a much better place. Mistakes will be made and they will correct
them.

~~~
ionised
Hi Larry.

