Comment by lucideer
2 years ago
I think this is a good example of corporations being made up of people, rather than being contiguous coordinated entities as many of us sometimes think of them.
An engineer doing "good engineering" on a feature typically depends not only on them being a "good engineer" but also on them having some actual interest in implementing that feature.
I would imagine that in a well coordinated company engaging in this kind of thing, the order wouldn't be "slow down firefox", but something along the lines of "use XYZ feature that firefox doesn't support and then use this polyfill for FF, which happens to be slow". Something that doesn't look too incriminating during any potential discovery process, while still getting you what you want.
That's assuming a degree of engineering competency at the product decision making level that is usually absent in companies that are structured as Google is, with pretty strong demarcations of competencies across teams.
Nah, that's got a risk profile. They could implement whatever your strategy is in the next release. You aren't going to necessarily get the longevity of the naive approach.
Plus a Firefox dev would discover that more easily as opposed to this version which they can just dismiss as some JavaScript bug on YouTube's part
that's the beautiful thing, you make the polyfill contingent on the browser being firefox rather than probing for the feature and then you forget to remove it once they implement the feature
1 reply →