Google accused of sabotaging Firefox, again

[Evernessince]

That only makes sense if you buy into the idea that google is being malicious. Some people don’t see that as being the case nor Firefox being a potential victim. They’ve also included examples to support their claim.

Please quote the entirety of my comment. This is already addressed in full.

 

[EClyde]

Maybe try using startpage.com which is a similar concept in secure browsing and was recommended to me by a user on these forums. It's a little slow to open but otherwise works well and I like the Black theme.

I did a search for the exact phrase "my name" and it failed. But will try more. Thank You

 

[EClyde]

how so? What's not right to you?

It doesn't fit. Like a shoe

 

[DelJo63]

Guess I'm too old and too stupid, but I can't understand anything you're saying; sorry

 

[ET3D]

I can load up a youtube video on IE11 at work and have to run properly, but firefox somehow is still having all these issues.

To quote the article: "Google had intentionally slowed down the YouTube loading performance of Firefox and Edge."

 

[hk2000]

How much of this is due to Google's malice, and how much due to Firefox's incompetence?

Reminder, Firefox, despite talking about an open web, is loyal to whomever is willing to give them money. Switching to yahoo search, to the detriment of its own users, installing things like pocket (which stubbornly refuses to die and can only be removed in the about:config menu, yet comes back after updates) and the Mr. Robot promo, and firefox's telemetry-to-track-opt-out-telemetry add ons.

To top it all off Firefox struggles in performance even on sites that hate Google. I visit a lot of smaller sites that fully embrace firefox and FOSS, yet said sites still perform worse on firefox then chrome. Firefox, for me at least, still exhibits small amounts of lag and stutter loading large webpages, whereas google chrome loads instantly. Highlighting text in firefox will often render that text invisible on many sites, and issue that no other browser has. Loading videos Firefox still occasionally suffers from the "video stops decoding midway through playback" bug from 10 years ago. Edge, for all its problems, didnt have these issues. Even IE11 didnt have these problems, and that browser is total trash.

Firefox is too busy getting caught up in virtue signalling about how open it is, while breaking compatibility with add ons users love and continually suffering in browser performance. Firefox focus on mobile, for example, features many optimizations that allowed it to run very well, yet said changes STILL are not part of the regular firefox browser. Firefox on desktop STILL isnt heavily threaded like chrome is. If the firefox devs spent less time complaining about Google and more time actually fixing their browser, and if they used some of their millions from yahoo to actually promote their browser, you know like google does, and actually listening to their userbase, firefox would not be on the ropes like it is now.

Detriment? If you can't switch your search engine in a second, you shouldn't be using it. It's free!!!!! You blame them for trying to get financial support however they can? if the price is to ask you to tweak your own settings, it's not that much of a price to pay. I'd rather they get their money this way and still afford me more freedom than be forced to use Chrome and be spied on and forced to see their ads, along weith all the crap they install w/o your knowledge. I lost count of how many times I had to clean spyware and other crapware installed on family and friends' computers by Chrome!!!.

 

[hk2000]

Microsoft paid dearly for a lot less objectionable behavior than this.

 

[Ecurb]

Chrome is still my primary tool I use to sync across all my devices. Evernote, however, would regularly lock up with chrome so I now launch it with Vivaldi. I suspect it was an extension conflict on chrome but Evernote just works better on Valvaldi. I use Firefox when going anonymous and do searches with duckduckgo in that mode. I've had no issues with Firefox. On low memory servers, VMs, PCs, I use Opera which just zips along compared to Chrome. The bigger and blotier Chrome gets the more I use other browsers. I like the diversity.

 

[Roush60]

You know, from what I can deduce from reading all the comments to this article, is that a majority of the issues stem from trying to watch something on Youtube. I guess I am lucky to not have fallen into that trap/rabbit hole. And compared to the rest of the world, I am still using a model T computer, an HP with an AMD A6 processor and 8 Gb RAM and no extra graphics card add on and purchased in 2012.

Even though I do not fully understand all of the discussion threads talked about in the forum, I wish you all the best of luck in finding a viable solution, whether it be a software solution or the manufacturers finding both a software and hardware solution.

 

[Peter Marreck]

I just tweeted this response thread https://twitter.com/pmarreck/status/1118940166385799169 but reposting it here for anyone else:
> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms.
This is simple competition, pure and simple. There's nothing stopping Firefox from doing the same thing for Chrome search terms... except that http://Google.com might affect it. Which leads to my point…
> gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.”
My point is this: All these problems occurred on THEIR playing field. You were trying to play football on their rugby field, basically.
You cannot fault an entity for preferring to ensure the things in their ecosystem work together properly before they ensure the things outside that ecosystem work together correctly.
Plus there's this: How do you think a Google employee would look, who used Firefox, once Chrome was out?

This is thus more of a story about "look at how the incentives were aligned to explain the behavior," not "look at the *******s who didn't bend over backwards for a product outside their company to ensure it worked as well with their tools as one inside theirs did"

I state this as someone who loves both browsers, and developing for the Internet in general.

 

[Evernessince]

I just tweeted this response thread https://twitter.com/pmarreck/status/1118940166385799169 but reposting it here for anyone else:
> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms.
This is simple competition, pure and simple. There's nothing stopping Firefox from doing the same thing for Chrome search terms... except that http://Google.com might affect it. Which leads to my point…
> gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.”
My point is this: All these problems occurred on THEIR playing field. You were trying to play football on their rugby field, basically.
You cannot fault an entity for preferring to ensure the things in their ecosystem work together properly before they ensure the things outside that ecosystem work together correctly.
Plus there's this: How do you think a Google employee would look, who used Firefox, once Chrome was out?

This is thus more of a story about "look at how the incentives were aligned to explain the behavior," not "look at the *******s who didn't bend over backwards for a product outside their company to ensure it worked as well with their tools as one inside theirs did"

I state this as someone who loves both browsers, and developing for the Internet in general.

Just to point out, if you own a browser and a bunch of conjunctive services like email, video, ect that are intentionally hurting competitor browsers by making your service perform worse on other browsers, that is the classic definition of a vertical monopoly. Given that google has such a massive presence across the board with it's web software including Google search, YouTube, and GMail, it is in a position where it can prevent competition from ever happening. I should not have to explain why vertical monopolies are illegal or why a company doing something like this is bad for the market.

FYI we aren't talking about them "bending over backwards" for other browsers, we are talking about them intentionally including things that hurts competitor's performance. The claims in this article weren't that Google wasn't optimizing enough for Firefox, we don't even know if they do that at all. They were that Google was intentionally going out of it's way to add elements that hurt Firefox and other browser's performance.

 

[wiyosaya]

Detriment? If you can't switch your search engine in a second, you shouldn't be using it. It's free!!!!! You blame them for trying to get financial support however they can? if the price is to ask you to tweak your own settings, it's not that much of a price to pay. I'd rather they get their money this way and still afford me more freedom than be forced to use Chrome and be spied on and forced to see their ads, along weith all the crap they install w/o your knowledge. I lost count of how many times I had to clean spyware and other crapware installed on family and friends' computers by Chrome!!!.

I don't use Chrome and avoid gagme like they are Ebola, however, to be fair, I have had family members get all kinds of crapware installed on their computers just because they are too naive to understand what the link they were pressing was. In my case, it was definitely the operator that was at fault.

That said, however, if Chrome itself is installing crap/spyware, that, IMO, is an egregious issue (though I would not be surprised if it were buried in the Chrome software license - something like "use for free and you agree to let us install crap/spyware to our hearts content"), and I am even more glad I don't use Chrome.

 

[wiyosaya]

I just tweeted this response thread https://twitter.com/pmarreck/status/1118940166385799169 but reposting it here for anyone else:
> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms.
This is simple competition, pure and simple. There's nothing stopping Firefox from doing the same thing for Chrome search terms... except that http://Google.com might affect it. Which leads to my point…
> gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.”
My point is this: All these problems occurred on THEIR playing field. You were trying to play football on their rugby field, basically.
You cannot fault an entity for preferring to ensure the things in their ecosystem work together properly before they ensure the things outside that ecosystem work together correctly.
Plus there's this: How do you think a Google employee would look, who used Firefox, once Chrome was out?

This is thus more of a story about "look at how the incentives were aligned to explain the behavior," not "look at the *******s who didn't bend over backwards for a product outside their company to ensure it worked as well with their tools as one inside theirs did"

I state this as someone who loves both browsers, and developing for the Internet in general.

To me, this looks like the issue you are describing is a completely different issue from what is described in this article.

 

[woofer]

I just tweeted this response thread https://twitter.com/pmarreck/status/1118940166385799169 but reposting it here for anyone else:
> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms.
This is simple competition, pure and simple. There's nothing stopping Firefox from doing the same thing for Chrome search terms... except that http://Google.com might affect it. Which leads to my point…
> gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.”
My point is this: All these problems occurred on THEIR playing field. You were trying to play football on their rugby field, basically.
You cannot fault an entity for preferring to ensure the things in their ecosystem work together properly before they ensure the things outside that ecosystem work together correctly.
Plus there's this: How do you think a Google employee would look, who used Firefox, once Chrome was out?

This is thus more of a story about "look at how the incentives were aligned to explain the behavior," not "look at the *******s who didn't bend over backwards for a product outside their company to ensure it worked as well with their tools as one inside theirs did"

I state this as someone who loves both browsers, and developing for the Internet in general.

Just to point out, if you own a browser and a bunch of conjunctive services like email, video, ect that are intentionally hurting competitor browsers by making your service perform worse on other browsers, that is the classic definition of a vertical monopoly. Given that google has such a massive presence across the board with it's web software including Google search, YouTube, and GMail, it is in a position where it can prevent competition from ever happening. I should not have to explain why vertical monopolies are illegal or why a company doing something like this is bad for the market.

FYI we aren't talking about them "bending over backwards" for other browsers, we are talking about them intentionally including things that hurts competitor's performance. The claims in this article weren't that Google wasn't optimizing enough for Firefox, we don't even know if they do that at all. They were that Google was intentionally going out of it's way to add elements that hurt Firefox and other browser's performance.

If using a deprecated API per puiu above (and some others?), then that is nothing but targeting competition by taking a step backward, not "leading edge".

 

[woofer]

Try using the search engine DUCKDUCKGO.COM instead of Google

Not only that, but try the DDG Android browser - clean and quick, and blocks trackers automatically, although a pop-up blocker would be a welcome enhancement. However, I am watching for big G to sabotage it on Android any time now. In a certain interview, I found that G was extremely "interested" in what the appeal of DDG is for searching, and the interviewer needed repeated explanations of why not being tracked appealed to some folks...

 

[WarlordLestat]

And here does Mozilla what they can do best… blaming others for their own naivety – Have they really been thinking that Google is the friendly benefactor they acted towards Mozilla? And that removing features and choice and adopting stock features and stock design – as persuaded by Chrome engineers – would be a clever idea to mobilize the user-masses?

And now where this failed – oh.. it is Google’s fault all along… because they have…. sabotaged Mozilla! The idea that Mozilla must blame itself for being naive… Impossible taught… never ever! It is always the other party which is to blame!

The glory days of past Mozilla are SO over sadly!

 

[Indekkusu]

Don't everyone just roll over for Chrome now like Microsoft. Heaven forbid that people have options right?! Google doesn't have to intentionally try to hurt Firefox, but you can expect Google to do things that will help themselves, and probably ignore all the collateral damage. But to date, Firefox is still my preferred browser, I only use Chrome when Firefox is stumbling badly as a backup.

 

[Evernessince]

And here does Mozilla what they can do best… blaming others for their own naivety – Have they really been thinking that Google is the friendly benefactor they acted towards Mozilla? And that removing features and choice and adopting stock features and stock design – as persuaded by Chrome engineers – would be a clever idea to mobilize the user-masses?

And now where this failed – oh.. it is Google’s fault all along… because they have…. sabotaged Mozilla! The idea that Mozilla must blame itself for being naive… Impossible taught… never ever! It is always the other party which is to blame!

The glory days of past Mozilla are SO over sadly!

None of this addresses any of the points made in the article or by Mozilla. Please read the article before commenting.

 

[Knot Schure]

And yet, somehow, IE and Edge do not have these problems, this only affects firefox.

I dont see how Firefox devs being unable to keep up with the web is Google's problem. Is google acting like a petulant child? Yes. But, somehow, no one else is having the issues firefox is having, and has had, over the years. I can load up a youtube video on IE11 at work and have to run properly, but firefox somehow is still having all these issues. Same with Gmail, and IE11 isnt even supported by Gmail anymore.

There is a reason Hanlon's Razor exists.

It is a shame there is no easy to use privacy focused Chrome spinoff. I wouldnt be surprised if one of Firefox's spinoffs eventually usurps firefox itself.

Indeed, but there is also Epic Privacy Browser, which is Chrome based. But yes, if I had to choose which one would become the parent of privacy, it is way more likely to be Firefox.

 

[Rq3EWAq]

For me, it will be difficult to judge which browser is faster. The reason is very simple, I've never used Chrome, I am on Firefox since the project was in alpha version. I've seen it rise from nothing, seen it defeating Internet Explorer, seen it reaching the peak, now I see it slowly losing users to other browsers. I don't care, because it's my browser of choice. Free and open source, there is no greedy commercial 3rd party behind it. I will keep using it, or if it's dead, then I will keep using it's FOSS fork, forever.
No thanks, Chrome. I have enough tracking me in the web as it is already.

 

[hyperspaced]

On a happy note, Microsoft's chromium-based Edge (in beta) is a joy to use. Nice and clean looking.
Has replaced my main browser (Chrome).

 

[Avro Arrow]

I've used Firefox exclusively for over 20 years. Mozilla is non-profit and is therefore most focused on the end user. I've found that the most tech-savvy people use Firefox and with good reason.