Comment by fsflover
1 day ago
Thank you for the interesting insight. This is more or less what I expected.
> suspicions were plausible but incorrect
The suspicions were not about the evil will of the engineers. It's the will of Google itself (or managers, if you want), which plays the main role here. This is exactly what causes the following:
> engineering teams continued to be resource-constrained
It reminds me a bit of Boeing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19914838
The resource constraints had nothing to do with intentionally not funding "support a competing browser properly", though, and everything to do with just not funding engineering and test work at all except to build Shiny Idea That Got A Promo.
Despite its size, Google does shoestring engineering of most things, which is why so much is deprecated over time -- there's never budget for maintenance.
So I mean in some sense yes, there's valid criticism of Google's "will" here, but that will was largely unaware of Firefox, and the consequences burned Google products and customers just as much or more in the long run. Nightingale looked past individual instances to see a pattern, but didn't continue to scale the pattern up to first-party products as well.