Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail."
Even though it's good for Microsoft resource and focus wise, it's bad for the consumer. Supporting Firefox will become more important, like back in early 2000s.
If you’re asking why they didn’t think to design the fast path to deal with Byzantine faults, it’s probably because why the hell should they?
Makes you wonder if that was just a really good PR campaign all along.
This does not make the rule less dumb, but it is clear.
Am I seriously underestimating the eng cost of such a patch, or is there some unwritten rule that browsers aren't supposed to mess with the HTML that a page serves?
But that's not enough, apparently, so it was also "when you browse with chrome or firefox, we give you notifications saying you are draining your battery faster and should move to edge"[1]. This predates the stuff talked about in this article.
That's also like the start of these tactics. I'm sure Google and Mozilla asked Microsoft to stop doing that, "to no avail". Meanwhile, the complaint here is basically "they made our annoying and stupid notification not true". Having dealt with these tactics repeatedly, i can't work up any indignation over this. The only one i feel even mildly sorry for is Mozilla.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12369326/microsoft-windows...
Edit: I'll expand. You work for a company the bundled Chrome as a default install with many other toolbars and utility programs. You sell a line of computing products where Chrome is not only the default, it is literally the only browser than can be installed. Chrome is the default browser on the world's most popular OS (Android). Multiple Google properties have refused to work on other browsers and displayed a popup asking people to switch the Chrome (Inbox is the one I remember most vividly). Here's a link to people trying to figure out how to get Chrome to stop asking to be default every time it opens: https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/59843-how-stop-goog... As you can see it's not exactly an easy task. All of this, and probably more, and you're here talking about what Windows does? C'mon man.
That comment would be equally as worthwhile and useful if you had started it with some other form of bias to justify it like "Wait, a woman who is black ...."
If your comment starts with some form of "well you are an x so ...", it's probably not actually addressing anything other than your own interesting biases against people.
Or you know, just dismiss whatever you want with bias and claims of whataboutism. I guess that works too!
Despite your claim of whataboutism, i'm instead showing the author is incredibly conveniently eliding large parts of actual history in trying to make their point. You may want to argue those shouldn't matter (or make it worse). That's at least a more valid argument than you made.
I would argue if you asked most people they do in fact matter because the world is not an abstract idealist paradise.
The internet definitely never has been in the past, so saying it isn't in the future is not particular interesting.
It's no different than any other form of bias, even if it seems more socially acceptable here.
If you want to argue with what I actually wrote, happy to have that discussion. Otherwise, not interested, sorry.
Maybe you want to walk that statement back a bit? Wow.
What? I am so lost. The complaint is that video acceleration is being disabled, perhaps intentionally, resulting in loss of battery life. That is a bad thing for users, regardless of this whataboutism nonsense. If there was some reason the empty tag was added, Google PR is free to let us know. The fact that they did not is quite telling.
How can you support something blatantly bad as this unless you work for that company? Oh wait...
And Chrome is full of dirty tricks of it's own. For example they paid Gigabyte to add Google Chrome to show up as an 'update' to system software.
http://puu.sh/CjVYU/804038501f.jpg
So lets stop this, which company is worse thing and work towards fixing bugs and making users happier.
I tend to agree with the point made in a different part of the thread that arguing against people based on the company they work for is not productive. People are more than just cogs in a machine and have a right to be regarded as such, even if it's just for the sake of argument.
The correct question for DannyBee might be How can you support something blatantly bad as this even if you work for that company?
I'm sure there are plenty of Googlers who would have a problem with deliberately adding a misfeature to a site to slow down a competitor's browser, plenty would fix a bug like that if it were reported and it was really just a bug, etc. Those guys aren't all in leadership positions...
My guess is this dev had to debug a reported issue “youtube is slow”, and after realizing it is difficult to patch (likely because of shitty code in edge), started pointing fingers. No. That is called a bug, plain and simple. Maybe try fixing your browser implementation so a single empty element doesn’t destroy video performance...
Edit with one more thought: I also feel youtube’s response in not removing the element seems completely justified. Youtube has features to implement and deadline to meet. Why should google have to throw dev resources at fixing problems stemming from microsoft’s bugs with no benefit to themselves? M$ should be the one footing that bill, again, by paying their own devs to fix problems of their own creation.
What incentive does Chromium/Google ever have to fix an issue that only affects Microsoft users or non-Chrome users?
I elaborated more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703568
The monopolistic action would be to design a new protocol then keep it proprietary and secret so your competition can't have services or browsers that are as fast. That's not what happened.
HTTP2 and HTTP3 are decided by committees and it isnt Google who controls it.
While I dont know whether the MSFT engineer's claims are true or not, but even with some benefit of the doubt, having an empty <div> cause such an obvious performance degradation sounds to be like hyper optimized for an implementation rather than actual breakthrough.
That was then, this is now. What happens when Google implements its next protocol in Chromium? With Blink's market share, would they even bother with committees anymore? At this point, they could more or less get what they want out of it without the extra bureaucracy.
They didn't bother for SPDY or QUIC. They were implemented in the browser, like many others features, before any committee. It's the committees though that decided to base their works for HTTP/2 and HTTP3 over theses.
The danger isn't on what they implements, because that's already something they do (and all others browsers do), but based on what they DON'T implements. What if they ignore HTTP3 and only use a new protocol they made?
And the ban hammer deletes everything from Gmail to Google docs to Google drive.
There is no other company that I despise as much as Google. Not even Facebook. FB had a customer support call me when my account was blocked due to invalid credit card in ads. Amazon has excellent customer support for buyers and sellers.
Google just deletes everything and doesn't even bother providing any support for it.
The day Google dies, I will be opening up a champagne and celebrating.
there are whole industries who have called for and worked with google on implementing those bans.
weirdly enough they paid for the first campaign, but removed their card details afterwards.
FB nags me on my wall to update my credit card info for a failed payment of ~20$, a year after I wrote two emails to them explaining the situation.
When I've tested under Edge, specifically, stuff that should work often didn't. It got better each release, but the pace was almost as painfully slow as IE was before it.
The repository is controlled by Google, it’s their project. Whatever Google wants in Chromium goes in.
The only path forward in a case in which Microsoft disagrees would be a fork. However a fork would do nothing to Chrome’s market share. Microsoft failed to gain any traction with Edge and that won’t change after they start building on Chromium.
This is also similar with Android, an ecosystem that Google managed to control even if there’s a lot of incentive for the phone makers to fork. The reality being that no fork would succeed for as long as Google is pumping money into the project, because it benefits from the network effects of their app store and of their flagship apps.
This is why open standards are important, with open source being in fact an orthogonal issue.
However, I don't think Blink will stop getting better just because MS starts using it, or Google stops. Worst case, we see a fork. Also, now Edge can at least be available outside windows. I do think the biggest mistakes MS made are as follows.
- Tethering Edge releases to Windows Updates.
- Renaming IE to Edge instead of updating and hiding old ie better
- Making it Windows 10 only
The Google of today has essentially removed the founders and become a search for profit. Once they split the company 'for accounting purposes' it meant the google part of alphabet was going to be run for increasing profit almost exclusively, which mean just what we are seeing now.
This is what most corporations at scale actually do and what they are. Constant battle in a hostile environment.
Google/alphabet is likely under threat of anti-trust and a whole host of other legal actions, eg possible pending monopoly charges, and likely criminal charges in multiple ways where they bent a rule for whatever reason. Lawsuits for other reasons we don't even know about. Lots of other speculative actions pending or in progress. Who knows what else. This is all part of the legal framework. An allegation is created and tested to see if could stick. If it can it gets thrown at the target.
Every other corporation at that scale is fighting these kind of battles every day. I'd actually be surprised if they weren't.
For those who think I'm talking only about google, you can substitute Facebook, J&J or any other large corporation across any industry.
they did. Microsoft already dropped EdgeHTML & announced they'll be using Chromium under the hood, although maybe the author didn't know or forgot to mention that here..
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-...