Comment by _9yre
6 months ago
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Chrome or on these APIs.
I think the explanation is quite mundane. An example usage: open google meet, start an empty meeting (an “instant meeting”), click the “…” menu, click “troubleshooting and help”.
There’ll be plots of various stats, including CPU utilization. I think meet will also helpfully suggest closing tabs if your machine is overloaded during a meet call, too.
It’s very helpful, I check it from time to time.
Edit: now that I think about it, I’m not sure about the suggestion to close tabs is actually a thing. I’ve only actually used the stats view.
> I think the explanation is quite mundane
> There’ll be plots of various stats, including CPU utilization. I think meet will also helpfully suggest closing tabs if your machine is overloaded
This is not mundane at all, it's a perfect example of giving your product an unfair competitive advantage.
If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.
No wonder every other meeting provider pushes you aggressively into using their desktop app, Google Meet's desktop app is just Chrome!
Example of why this is not mundane https://x.com/fedekauffman/status/1811019707165856259
At least other video conferencing tools don't lag like Meet, so users don't need to debug ;) I think this has to do with all of them using H.264 while Meet uses VP8/9.
Having had the dubious pleasure of trying to use Meet from various Apple devices, Meet didn’t lag because Meet couldn’t produce video at all. Maybe I only operate at the wrong edge of the Meet ecosystem, but it did not compare well to anything else out there.
(I’ve tried Safari, I’ve tried the native app, and I’ve even tried the phone bridge (!).)
Achtually its AV1 which is even worse. but saves a bunch of bandwidth
As a result of a flaw in the protocol itself or in its implementation?
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> If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.
I had to re-read this a few times; did you accidentally omit a word?
> If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack aren't, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.
I fully agree with you, though; it's anticompetitive for them to use Chrome to give their other products an advantage.
Insert "aren't" after the first "Slack".
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I believe this is the point, rather than being mundane. Other video conference tools are not able to offer this debugging option - which you have pointed out is useful.
The user could easily install an extension that provides the same debugging capability. Most users don't care, so they won't need it.
Then why did Google build it into the browser?
Defaults are powerful.
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You have a competitor, Zoom. They have an in-browser version. Can they use this API for troubleshooting performance issues? No? The European regulators might be interested in that.
Perhaps this is one reason why Meet performs well in the browser and Zoom doesn't, meaning Zoom users use the native app if they want reasonable performance (particularly with many people in the meeting).
Apparently, this system statistics API is generally available to extension developers. The underlying issue is that they bundle a hidden "Hangouts Service Extension" with Chrome. Zoom, Teams, etc. would have access to this API through a Chrome extension, although they wouldn't have the advantage of having that extension pre-installed.
Mind you, Zoom does everything in their power to steer users away from their web client and toward their ~~malware~~ desktop client, so I don't think they're too upset about the status quo.
Are there any sources that the zoom desktop client is malware?
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Very cool that Google built an anticompetitive browser that offers such useful features only to themselves.
Very cool of you as a Google employee to say the quiet part out loud for us.
Are customers better off or worse off?
Worse off. I have to use Meet for work, and I'm forced to run Chrome for Google's shitty software to run acceptably.
Edit: And for some reason I have a Chrome profile even though I never created one and never "logged into" Chrome. Another thing that's been forced on me by Google's product team.
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Trying to be generous, the only reason I can think for why customers would be worse off is that Google is literally the only one who can be trusted with this kind of power. Not Zoom, not Microsoft, not the user whose data is being transmitted, etc.
But even that does not explain why the existence of the API was not disclosed. Do you agree that that looks bad for them?
Then there is the fact that Google is far from being a company people trust. They should be rushing to be transparent about their decision, if there is a good, persuasive reason for it. They could use the good press. Instead, they made a secret API that can read privileged system information, locked it so that nobody else could use it, and then never told anybody about it—all while claiming to be secure, and privacy-focused, and definitely not abusing their browser monopoly.
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Worse, by having less alternatives to choose from. This is why anti-monopoly laws exist.
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Monopoly leveraging is illegal, not mundane.
Are features like this available to other websites outside of Google? Say, could Zoom also add a feature like this?
A level playing field for competition? This is Google we're talking about.
If Zoom makes a chrome extension, then yes.
Will the Zoom extension also be installed by default?
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That is incorrect. Zoom would have to modify the browser source code to enable the API on their domain.
Beside the point, but I don't think Chrome extensions have access to those hardware details.
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I agree it is very useful! This is also how I discovered this in the first place.
But that is not at all my point. The point is that google.com web properties have access to an API and a browser capability that is not available to it's competitors. Google only allows reading CPU info for itself.
The reason the data is not available for everyone, is because it would be a huge tracking vector. Same reason we don't allow webpages to read the device hostname, or username, or Chrome profile name. Google exposes this to google.com because it trusts itself. That poses this antitrust issue though.
And they do the same thing with YouTube by slowing down the initial load in other browsers. Google is evil, and this is the least of it.
"don't be evil"
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Changing Firefox's UserAgent to Chrome's, results in a speed-up. Because when the useragent isn't Chrome, YouTube checks for feature availability, whilst on Chrome, they just assume it is all there.
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Oh wow.
This explanation was the first I read of what this actually does (yeah, yeah, I didn’t read the linked article first) and that’s a lot worse than I expected.
So helpful that no other website and no other browser can use it?
Looking forward to seeing this comment in discovery
The monopolists' first step towards unfairly dominating a market always seems pretty mundane.
if we are guessing I would drawn my guess from the hyper controlled access to android play services, which do much more than what you are guessing.
my guess would also include some nifty debug info from FLoC ;)
Yeah a whole lot of things really do seem mundane... once you have already accepted the fact you are tracked down to the cpu-percentage-usage-in-time level
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This isn't a mundane explanation though: this is exactly the example Luca gives in the original thread. It's anti-competitive, because it's functionality only available to Google Meet. Google is using its browser monopoly to advantage its other products.
They are just trying to make their products better. Anti competitive behavior is generally perceived to be about doing things that put the company in question in a better position without improving the product.
Ask yourself the question - are customers better or worse off because of this?
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Don't you find it hilarious how people who work or worked at Google happen to think that things Google does are "mundane", even when other people think they're outrageous? Hilarious coincidence, really. Can't stop laughing.
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Yeah, crazy to think that Google of all companies would track people in unexpected ways :eyeroll:.
Your post is evidence that the scrutiny Google gets is actually helping matters. Companies, especially powerful ones, should default to not tracking personal data any more than necessary. I'm glad to hear that at least one department took that seriously.
Exactly. In a world with sufficient anti-trust and privacy enforcement Google would instill into their employees a fear of even thinking about pulling stunts like this. Instead we have Googlers and ex-Googlers running defence for it claiming they see nothing wrong.
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Even if you take the mundane explanation -- that this was just to allow Google engineers to troubleshoot user issues with Hangouts -- you still have a company using their market power to give their product (Hangouts) a benefit that no other product (Zoom, Teams, literally any other WebRTC video conferencing solution.) gets to use.
I hope the anti-trust regulators notice this one.