going by Hanlon's Razor, i would guess that this is merely the result of an engineering update that nobody bothered to QA on Firefox rather than a malicious attack on a single browser that isn't _really_ winning market share
> Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible' […] All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.' […] Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?
This latest article is basically the same thing again. Google would tell Mozilla it's a genuine bug; they would fix it soon; but Mozilla loses some users and Chrome gains some. Nothing new.
Wouldn't be surprised. The 4th largest browser is a mere 2.7% of the market. What about the fifth and sixth? If I had to decide how to allocate testing hours, I probably wouldn't put much into the 2.7% vs the top 3 with 88%.
Google is a megacorp - Hanlon's razor doesn't apply.
Just because there's no one person twirling their mustache and mwahahaha-ing doesn't mean this isn't malicious and hostile behavior by Google. It doesn't matter even if there's no individual human at Google that intended this.
What does matter is that the leadership at Google clearly doesn't do what is necessary in preventing hostile behavior as a consequence of negligence. They know that if they don't put in the effort to ensure compatibility, side effects will degrade competitor performance. It's an inevitable consequence; they've done, and been forced to do, the right thing, and provide quality assurance and compatibility review in complex systems. There are people that know the consequences of not being proactive. Hell, they probably have lawyers that know the exact numbers - they probably make some tens of millions of dollars more revenue by "slacking off" and not being proactive about compatibility.
I bet this falls into a gray area though. Maybe they’re not exactly trying to kill Firefox, they just don’t mind too much if it dies. Some programmer makes a mistake that affects Firefox and they don’t instantly revert the change because someone higher sees that the mistake is not necessarily bad for Google. Similarly testing is more lax for Firefox. If it had been Chrome, the managers would have paged 50 people to fix it ASAP, and there would be retrospectives about how their testing failed to prevent a future occurrence.
It’s like saying evolution has no purpose, it’s just random mutations, but then there is a selection process that picks non harmful and beneficial mutations, so it does go in a predictable direction.
But knowing you can repeatedly get away with incompetence is malice. Hanlon's razor is used as an excuse for moral culpability, as if who is merely incompetent isn't evil; but, once you point out how that level of incompetence is hurting others, if they choose to not merely prevent such incompetence going forward, but recognize when they make mistakes and take steps to make it right--yes: after the fact; not merely fixing a bug, for example, and not merely apologizing for their incompetence, but making some kind of reparation to those harmed--that must be understood as malicious behavior.
Malice vs incompetence is about intent. It doesn't say anything about if its reasonable. Gross negligence is unacceptable incompetence, but that doesn't imply its intentional.
The idea that Youtube wouldn't QA test on Firefox is ludicrous.
Yes, it's not a massive browser share these days, but it's basically the only major browser left that doesn't share any lineage for the rendering engine.
I agree it'll be incompetence, but they'll definitely have Firefox QA testing.
Incompetence isn't an acceptable excuse for anti-competitive behavior by a company the size of Google. It's their responsibility to ensure that incompetence can't result in things like this. This isn't something that should just be shrugged away.
Yeah, I'm baffled that people on HN will happily accept pretty damning conspiracy theories at face value when there are much more plausible explanations available.
My app is also having performance issues with WebGL on Firefox so I guess I'm part of the conspiracy?
let's not assume Google malice is _too_ competent