Comment by foob
2 years ago
I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's literally gotten to the point where I keep a Chrome window open and use it exclusively for Gmail, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Maps.
It's pretty obvious from the outside that supporting Firefox is not a product priority for Google. It also seems clear that it's in their best interest to have users choose Chrome over Firefox. My guess is that this likely emerges from a lot of very reasonable sounding local decisions, like "prioritize testing on browsers with the most market share," but it is convenient how those align with the anti-competitive incentives.
These sounds like classic MS behaviour. It is kind of thing that ought to addressed in anti-trust case.
I've posted this here on HN numerous times over the years, and it's been a while since I last posted it:
Google is the new "Microsoft", they embrace, they extend, then extinguish. Look at their email offering, messaging offerings, they built on top of XMPP, then they pulled the plug eventually. Android is Linux based, but insanely proprietary, the app store is not open by any means, you're fully at their whims to get your apps on there. Chrome is basically the IE of old, implementing proprietary things or APIs that are not yet standard for Google products, and pushing out competing browsers.
don't forget the old Microsoft is still here. We have two Microsofts now!
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A few weeks ago I posted on here about the maps lag, and it literally felt like it was fixed after the comment got some attention.
There's 100% targeted de-optimization for firefox users and the burden of finding it is on the users it seems.
Not to diminish the other sketchy stuff Google's doing, but I think the maps lag issue might actually be Firefox's fault. Whenever it happens to me WebGL stops working across all websites and restarting the entire browser fixes it. It's almost like when Firefox has been open a long time it just forgets how to use graphics acceleration.
The thing that bothered me is it didn't always happen, at one point there was performance parity, and things changed in a way that specifically worked worse in firefox.
Which means:
A) Firefox had bad webgl implementations(I didn't experience what you did, but I wont say it doesn't happen) and google added features that regressed the experience on other browsers.
B) Google knowingly made performance worse on Firefox, regardless of webgl implementations.
C) Google leverages its own browser to only test on their browser, to influence the market to have to use googles browser in order to use their services(not the same as the IE/Windows monopoly lawsuit, but sure smells like it).
i believe for anything non-Chrome? Even Vivaldi has issues with some Google products.
Recently, play store images don't load (about 60% - 80% missing per app) in Firefox.
It is fascinating, how the simplest things on websites can be made arbitrarily involved, convoluted, over-complicated. And how those over-complications can then serve as a credible deniability.
You're basically looking at testing being done on Chrome (because it is Google's, and because of its large market share), Safari (because it runs on a large percentage of completely exclusive platforms where the customer can't switch, and because of its large market share), and Edge (because there are still many corporations that do "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" and lock down browser options to just Microsoft's offering).
At this point, Firefox is very much an also-ran on two axes: market share is tiny and nobody forces it on their captive audiences. We may as well ask why Google isn't optimizing testing on Opera, or Samsung Internet.
(There is also the issue of under-the-hood engine. Since so many browsers have converged on a few core and JS stacks, testing on one exemplar of that stack has a tendency to suss out bugs in the other stacks. Firefox still being its own special snowflake in terms of JS engine and core means it has more opportunities to be different, for good or for ill. So there's a force-multiplier testing the other browsers that one lacks testing Firefox).
Spotify web doesnt work good on Firefox.
Need to call out them.
I'm basically forced to use Chromium on Linux.
Using Google sites with a VPN on Firefox has been really annoying for the past couple of months as well.
Gmail has recently become extremely slow for me in Safari on a well specced M1 max
Same here on Firefox, for both my laptop running Windows 11 on Alder Lake, and my desktop running Ubuntu on Zen 2.
I had the same Gmaps issue, I disabled LocalCDN for the site and panning etc worked again. Apparently the addon must be fixed to account for whatever they were doing.
I use Firefox across Windows, Mac, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu. I've not seen any specific issues with Google sites at all. I only really use Docs, Maps, and Youtube with any regularity but I've not really seen any of these issues.
Yea, I also haven't noticed any speed issues, but I do use noscript exclusively on Firefox.
bigquery console in ffx has like +120 latency potion
dupe?
It's clear Google is only testing for chrome engine and safari: which comprise 97% of the browsers being used. Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the market?
As I said, the decisions are locally reasonable. However, if not supporting Firefox potentially exposed my company to scrutiny over anti-competitive behavior, then, yes, I would absolutely invest in testing procedures to mitigate that.
It's also worth emphasizing that it isn't difficult to support Firefox. I'm pretty sure that many of the sites that I visit do so largely by accident. I do a fair bit of web development, and Firefox/Chrome compatibility has never been an issue in the slightest for me. You almost have to go out of your way to choose Chrome-specific APIs in order to break compatibility. How does virtually every other website on the internet manage it—from my bank to scrappy startups with junior developers coming straight out of bootcamps—while Google with all of their engineering talent and $100+ billion cash on hand just can't seem to make it work?
Serious question - does anti-competitive behavior even apply to open source? Also, it's the open source chromium, not necessarily the browser Chrome, that dominates the browser market. The largest players in the industry, except for Apple, have lined-up to support chromium. Firefox is going against the grain. Is it Google's job to help them with their mission? Loosely speaking, in anti-competitive scenarios you have to show how a significant faction of the consumers are being harmed. You're going to have a tough time with that one.
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> Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the market?
I don't think you get to make these kind of cost cutting decisions when you're a vertically integrated mega-corp who also owns the browser with 65% of the market.
In most companies, when 3% represents an in-fact huge number because you have a very successful product, you absolutely do test for that 3%.
It’s tiny companies that may ignore 3% as too expensive to worry about.
Here’s another way to answer that question: do Vimeo, Twitch, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instagram, TikTok, etc. say “let them use Chrome” or do they manage to do entry-level browser testing? The cost increase is nowhere near 50% and clearly they aren’t willing to write off millions of users – only the company with a direct financial incentive does that.
Yes, Firefox’s market share has been declining but that’s substantially because Google spent billions of dollars marketing Chrome and promoted it heavily on YouTube, Gmail, Search, etc. Deciding not to test or optimize fits neatly into the same pattern.
_I_ would in their shoes because I'm not just in it for the money and I care about the craft.
But clearly I am not them. :-) Mathematically it doesn't make sense for Google. It might make sense from an anti-trust perspective...
It's hard to argue anti-trust when all these browsers are based on Chromium - which is maintained in part by Google, Microsoft, Opera, Vivaldi, Intel, ARM, and Canonical plus several volunteers.
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At a company at the scale of Google or Facebook, yes. 3% x N billion people = a central European country or two.
Isn't that a good deal? 50% more testing in a way that can surely be parallelized to some extent does not seem a very steep price at youtube scale.
This is exactly the same situation that web developers faced with Internet Explorer 5 and 6, and it sucked for end users!
Since they throw me "Google recommends Chrome!" adverts in my face for various of their services, even when using a chrome-based browser it's not a case of only testing for Chrome/Safari. It's active work against others.