Comment by throwaw12
2 years ago
IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers.
* Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue"
* engineer adds a flag, with different control parameters
* Some genius in Product figures this out and updates the experiment to slow down for competitors
When company gets a backlash from public: "oops, we forgot to clean up all parameters of feature flag and it accidentally impacted Firefox"
"oops" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Google stopped testing stuff in Firefox, that is all they did afaik. We all should know how many bugs and "oppsies" you get when you don't test before releasing new features. Test code snippets being pushed to prod etc.
Engineers tend to create paper trails on what they work on, code reviews and bug logs etc are everywhere, so I doubt there is any of those where they say "Make things shit for Firefox to hurt our competitors", that would net them an easy loss in court. But not testing in browsers with small userbases will hold in court.
Firefox has a small userbase partly because of the early "oopses" described in the article I linked. Those happened a while ago, when Firefox had more users than Chrome.
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Another person is claiming that Google writes custom code for Firefox (or other browsers) to enable tracking, because of the feature difference between Firefox and Chrome [1]. Only one of you can be correct.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347364
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This should be a top level comment on news like this. Everyone needs to be reminded that this is neither a new behavior nor something unintentional.
Very good point. It's important to recognise that developers in many companies are often not fully aware of the intended use of features they're asked to create.
Another example that springs to mind is Uber, who used a tool called "Greyball" to avoid contact between drivers and authorities: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B0...
My initial reaction was astonishment that the engineers would happily implement this. And maybe that is what happened. But the alternative possibility is that product and senior management assigned different parts of the feature to different teams e.g. one team develops a pattern recognition system to detect users' professions, another team develops a spoofing system for use in demos, etc...
Why would you be surprised that they'd implement this? It's their job to implement things.
They were using it to evade law enforcement while flouting regulations. It's highly unethical and almost certainly illegal.
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> * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue"
“Research”
They have done such research before, Google published this at a time when developers were all "100 ms more or less web load time doesn't matter". Since then webpages has gotten much more focused on performance.
https://blog.research.google/2009/06/speed-matters.html
The dog slow load times of ad infested AMP pages would suggest otherwise.
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Researching how best to fuck with your competitors.
Next: researching regulatory capture?
This doesn’t add up.
In order for someone to slow down the by browser they need someone to have coded the following:
- UA Detection
- Branching for when the flag is on or off
- a timeout that only runs when these two things are true
That takes an engineer to do the work. Marketing and product managers are not writing this code certainly.
If they’re abusing a differ t flag, then the real question I have is what the flags purpose is and why is it screening Firefox.
Either way there is an intention of UA checking and throttling based on the UA and that takes an engineer to do it
Not so hard to believe tho. I work on a product that has parametrized feature flags. This means that, from a web interface, someone can say things like "activate feature X, on machines running operating system Y, at version Z, and are running product version W with license type Q". This is not a hard thing to build, and once you have it you can mix and match filters without being a software engineer or knowing how it works behind the scenes.