Former Firefox VP on What It's Like To Be Both a Partner of Google and a Competitor via Google Chrome (twitter.com) 68
Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, plans to build a $1 billion high-tech neighborhood in Toronto. The problem? It is facing an opposition from residents who have called for its demise. As the backlash gains momentum, it could force Sidewalk Labs to abandon or alter its vision. On paper, Sidewalk Labs' idea arguably has some merits: It wishes to "set new standards" for how cities are designed and built. But some are apprehensive of Google's plans, because the company has a knack for assuming more control over things and killing local competition.
Johnathan Nightingale, a former VP of Firefox, has seen such behavior first hand. He draws some parallels: I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.
But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and 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? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.
This is not a thread about blaming Google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don't like it. And for me it means two things: The question is not whether individual Sidewalk Labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They're great people. But focus on the behavior of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed. Get there faster than I did.
Johnathan Nightingale, a former VP of Firefox, has seen such behavior first hand. He draws some parallels: I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.
But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and 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? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.
This is not a thread about blaming Google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don't like it. And for me it means two things: The question is not whether individual Sidewalk Labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They're great people. But focus on the behavior of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed. Get there faster than I did.
Past, now and then (Score:4, Interesting)
At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization
It seems only your 3rd statement is true nowadays.
Re:Past, now and then (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
"I'm so sorry I hit you. I won't do it again, I'll change. It won't be like all the other times. I don't really mean to hurt you. I'm only doing this because I care about you. And you have to admit you brought this on yourself to some extent. Without me you'd be nothing, no money, no way to survive. Don't you dare think of leaving me!".
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You've deliberately missed the entire point, and I'm not even going to credit you for the irony in doing so.
The point of the article was to contemplate how the whole sometimes differs from the sum of its parts, an
Not a business priority (Score:5, Insightful)
And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks." Over and over. (...) There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.
Well, between accidents and malice there's indifference, like we're not actively planting booby traps for Firefox but we're also not doing compatibility or performance testing, we're not assigning the bugs a high priority... I have some such low-priority issues in my backlog that keep getting pushed back and back and back. It's technically not shelved, it just seems unlikely we'll ever get around to fixing it. And it certainly doesn't have the priority to do anything proactive. It's not very hard to understand the corporate priorities...
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It's not very hard to understand the corporate priorities...
True. Corporate actions are motivated by one of two things: 1. Personal greed of the C-levels making the decisions, or 2. corporate greed to turn a profit for the shareholders.
2 only outweighs 1 when the C-levels think the shareholders are paying attention.
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Well, between accidents and malice there's indifference,
Remember who came up with that quote you're paraphrasing and mangling: a ruthless dictator with ambitions so intense that his name has become synonymous with being a ruthless power hungry dictator. It's pretty safe to say that when a dictator is trying to hand wave some shit away with "incompetence" instead of "malice" it's "malice" every time, as ironic as it is the way it gets used to gloss over repetitive evil on the part of mega corporations and governments these days.
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Firefox's market share is in the mid teens now. Less than Safari. Hard to justify putting a lot of engineering effort into ~15% of the market, most of whom probably also have another browser installed anyway. I've seen it happen at other companies too.
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Hard to justify putting a lot of engineering effort into ~15% of the market, most of whom probably also have another browser installed anyway.
Yes, it's hard to justify futureproofing. But any company which isn't insolvent should have a vested interest in doing it, because it will reduce costs in the future.
An ad company (Score:1)
Any other company, product, service that is not moving their ads is a public relations project.
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Sure, but they're PR projects for the advertiser, not for the company delivering the ads.
firefox rules, chome suxors (Score:2)
Chrome is the NEW IE
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Mozilla has tried really hard to drive away their existing users. If one of the most used extension was Classic theme restorer, a sane management might have wondered if there was something wrong in their new user interface. But Mozilla took the typical corporate decision and just broke the API so CTR-extension would not work anymore. Just to add insult to injury, the APIs used by ad-blockers were equally broken so even the most common reason for using Firefox was terminally removed. For years, even non-tech
This sounds awfully familiar..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this whole bit about Google sabotaging Firefox performance, exactly the same thing we just heard [slashdot.org] from someone who used to be on the Microsoft Edge team?
At the time, folks around Slashdot were all like, "haw, haw, haw, karma's a bitch, eh there Billy?" Which is, of course, the easy and fun thing to say because of a predisposed hatred of Microsoft.
Now we see that Google has persistently been sabotaging Firefox as well. So maybe the problem wasn't Edge, after all.....
And given how many former Microsoft people are (or have been) at Google -- it's a four-digit number -- I'm really not surprised to see those sleazy late-90s Microsoft anticompetitive tactics show up once again.
Hanlon's razor applies. (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is more likely?
- That Google engineers are laughing maniacally in the style of a movie's evil character, while thinking at the best strategy to kill their competition in a horrible death?
For no reason except for the evulz, because they aren't making their money by *selling* software, they make money by marketing the shit out of people online, no matter what browser they used, as long as these people online to be marked?
- Or that they're just horribly lazy, because they test of their product on their own web engine, because that's what they use themselves while developing? And it happens to work anyway, because once you factor in Google Chrome and all the other browser running on a Blink/WebKit/KHTML core, you happen to cover close to 90% of all only browser, so often errors go unnoticed and later aren't put on top of the priority list due to low exposure?
In the absence of equivalent to the Halloween documents [wikipedia.org] leak, I would more likely presume the second options.
I'm not saying that it's not bad. It *is*. Their careless-ness could very easily lead to a new era of microsoft-levels of monopolies and smothering of alternatives. They are seriously at risk to fuck up the computing ecosystem, and instance taking care about competitive behaviour (like the EU) should monitor them closely and force them out of such destructive behaviours.
It's only that the phenomenon probably isn't conscious and planned, it very likely due to very massive levels of carelessness, simply because they can get away with it. Somebody (like e.g.: the EU) should come and slap them on the hands, and theach them not to try to get away with carelessness but pay attention.
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In the absence of equivalent to the Halloween documents leak, I would more likely presume the second options.
Presume, assume, whatever kind of ume you like, but if you're going to make assumptions then it's rarely wise to assume an extreme. The truth usually lies in between things. The typical competitive attitude is "those guys are dumbshits and we're geniuses" and if you let it get out of hand, then you can justify literally any kind of behavior with that kind of thinking.
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In addition to the predisposed hatred, one has to enjoy the delicious irony of Microsoft being on the receiving end of abuse from another entity that has dominance over some part of the tech economy. So in besides the usual Microsoft hate, this is a genuine case of karma being a bitch.
The Firefox guys are much less deserving of such treatment.
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Except that in both cases it seems to be less a case of sabotage and more a case of not being bothered to test their code in anything other than Chrome.
If Google is to be criticised for anything here it's for only supporting their own browser and ignoring the 30-35% of the market that uses something else.
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At the time, folks around Slashdot were all like, "haw, haw, haw, karma's a bitch, eh there Billy?" Which is, of course, the easy and fun thing to say because of a predisposed hatred of Microsoft.
That's one way to put it. Another way is that it's because of our personal experiences with a long history of abuse by Microsoft. Mozilla may be squandering millions of dollars in donations on things users don't want (e.g. Pocket) but lacking a dominant position in the marketplace, they're at least not spending the money making computing worse for other players, if only because they can't. Microsoft and Google both appear to be doing things which are harming Firefox, if not due to actual malice, then at lea
Google Search ain't done (Score:2)
... until Firefox won't run!
Google intentionally crippled Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
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paying them to remove XUL and other features.
Dubious. Can you provide any sources for your claim that Google commissioned Mozilla to make that particular change?
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This is just a wild conspiracy fantasy.
Re:Google intentionally crippled Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're both wrong. XUL was removed because it was insecure. Extensions had access to way too much information, and far too much power to manipulate things.
This wasn't a problem for the power users who only used reputable extensions. But it was a problem for the masses.
Rather than overhaul XUL, they went with an existing solution. But that meant not allowing extensions to do anything Google doesn't want to happen. Not sinister, just easier.
"stuff you're allowed to do to compete" (Score:3, Interesting)
Ehe, no you fool. Even if they weren't officially a monopoly, sabotaging one service for a specific competitor's product to promote your own is the definition of anti-competitive practices.
Fact of the matter is, Google isn't keeping Mozilla around out of good will. Much like Intel and AMD, they HAVE to keep at least one competitor alive or they'll get officially declared a monopoly. And just like Intel, while doing so they'll sabotage the competitor just enough so they'll retain market dominance without ever risking the regulators.
But lets be honest, he's not a fool. He never complained because he understood Firefox is just a regulatory loophole. And the real damage was in the protocols and other internet bodies decision that kept being ruled over in Google's favor since Mozilla was tipping the balance in their favor thanks to this relationship.
Decentralized protocols... DRM... Ad blocking... Mozilla been lining up to Google's agendas time after time.
It's all a huge scam.
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Mozilla saw that there is no future in being the browser that doesn't work with Netflix, Youtube, Hulu etc. DRM sucks but shutting down Mozilla over it would have been counterproductive. Mozilla did what they could to mitigate the damage, e.g. making sure that Firefox DRM modules work with downstream Firefox distributors like the Linux distros.
Ad blocking: Mozilla has shipped Tracking Protection, supports ad blocking extensions on Android where Chrome doesn't, and is ramping up more built-in blocking featur
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They did't claim it wasn't anti-competitive - they claimed they were allowed to do it.
Anti-competitive behavior is only disallowed if the government recognizes you as a monopoly or trade organization. Grease the right palms to prevent that, an no problem.
Heck, here in the US even a convicted abusive monopoly like Microsoft can get away with it. Grease the right palms and nobody will make an issue of it - or at worst "punish" you with a fine far smaller than the excess profits your anti-competitive behavio
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Heck, here in the US even a convicted abusive monopoly like Microsoft can get away with it. Grease the right palms and nobody will make an issue of it - or at worst "punish" you with a fine far smaller than the excess profits your anti-competitive behavior is generating so that it's just a cost of doing business.
Which brings us to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Microsoft was found by the USDoJ to have abused its effective monopoly position in the marketplace in essentially every way possible. Then Ashcroft (under Bush) declared that penalizing Microsoft would not be in the best interests of the nation. Then Bill put his money into his so-called charitable trust, where it can't be taxed, and it's much harder to take away. And there are a variety of ways to get the money back out as needed; there's more in th
Yes Google seems really that incompetent (Score:2)
Their non web based things and products such as Android and Chrome seem to work well enough, but about all the web pages they have are.. uuh.. not good.
Basically their web based systems seem to be mostly programmed by random people from the street. Or maybe it is just that they move all the incompetent people from the other parts of their companies there.
Don't do evil (Score:2)
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Heck, *long* before they dropped it as the company motto, the common joke was they left out the punctuation: "Don't. Be evil."
Emergent Evil (Score:1)
I call that (anti-)pattern "Emergent Evil", just like an anthill's behaviour is "emergent behaviour".
But now, before you say "phew, nobody's to blame, then", think about what competencies upper layer management has to bring to the table.
You don't order your programmers to actively sabotage something. You just starve (a little) this or that department, you just overload (just a tad) this gal or that guy. That sort of thing.
I've had my share of time at corps where all (OK, most) of the folks working there wer
Meet the new boss same as the old boss (Score:2)
As a company grows larger and is profit driven it's incentive to do evil things increases. Google seems now to be the new Microsoft of evil.
Don't sleep with the enemy (Score:4, Insightful)
Mozilla shouldn't have anything to do with Google. Zero. They need to find some other way to sustain themselves other than sucking from the teat of the company that's trying to kill them (financially).
Secure HTML subset -- be different from Chrome. (Score:2)
I believe that one possibility is a browser that will only run a small subset of HTML that has been designed to be secure. No JavaScript, minimal if any CSS, IFrames etc.
There is critical infrastructure like dams that cannot rely upon patch Tuesday. And while the machines that control them may not be on the internet, the machines that control those machines are. STUXNET told us about the limitations of air gaps.
If such a protocol was available and supported there would be pressure on many sites to provid
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The little Google Calendar counter-example (Score:1)
Google is just 21st Century Microsoft (Score:1)
They are "partnering" with people the same way MS did:
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish [wikipedia.org]