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Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

If Google were truly behind open web standards then they would have nothing to fear and no need to promote one standards conforming browser (Chrome) over another (Edge, Firefox or whatever). This just shows that the ultimate desire of all these corporate backed browsers is some degree of vendor lock in, which is why they feel the need to advertise their browser when their competitor's is almost 99.9% identical in functionality and a drop-in replacement.

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These are different teams within Google, and it's kinda not fair to say that Google is not truly behind open web standards.

Their whole web developer advocate team is behind open web standards, and pushes it forward everyday. The engineering team actually working on Chrome is behind those standards, and pushes it forward. They work closely with other browser vendors. and try to make everything work everywhere.

Then there is the Chrome marketing team which has to goal (OKR) to increase the reach of Chrome. They might still support the open web, but their goal is to get more users using chrome.

it's kinda not fair to say that a large org should have enough internal coordination to align incentives and coordinate between different teams? It sounds reasonable to start with, but really gets to the whole making-excuses-for-them kind of thing if you think harder, no?

Google is very bottom-up and hence super uncoordinated, that is a part of who they are. Leaders sets some vague goals, but lower rung people still have a lot of freedom in how they go about things. The last time Google did some large scale coordination we got Google+, I don't think they want to try to repeat that anytime soon...

When leadership acts unethically, the employees who stay tacitly approve. You can't tell me that Google engineers are hurting for opportunities.

Okay, I get it, but in that case the marketing is doing engineering a disservice when they implement needlessly aggressive and redundant advertising of Chrome on properties and user agents which ought to be almost 100% identical functionality in Chromium based (if not web standards compliant) browsers. To put it plainly I can understand if Google promotes Chrome when there is a genuine technical feature on one of their properties that needs Chrome to function, but in most cases this is not so, which means the marketing is not for technical reasons but merely to capture more market-share for its own ends, which would make sense if they were selling their browser but that too is not the case, so why? I mean, the ultimate aim of all companies are to grow and profit, but the playing field is neither infinite nor the audience stupid, so they should take care not to keep damaging their reputation.

> marketing is doing engineering a disservice

I've never seen a company where both marketing and engineering agree on something. Marketing thinks we are a bunch of nerds and we think marketing floors have a much less density regarding neurons per square meter (so, in way we are both right).

By the way, marketing always win. They are closer to upper levels, the credit for success is (supposedly) theirs. They suggest all the bad tactics, technically and commercially. I can bet that a move like Chrome suggesting to ditch Edge is purely their idea, approved by upper levels and executed by engineers that can't say no.

Do they even know that Edge is Chrome based?

Good question. Probably all they know is that Microsoft released a competing browser and just asked the engineering team to do them a tool for showing annoying messages to the users based on the browser. I am sure marketing doesn't know/care if it was done with Chromium, 1994 Mosaic or matchsticks.

This is Google we are talking about. I would imagine they started working on competing strategies even well before Microsoft announced officially they are going to use Chromium.

You people seriously undermine the tech awareness of marketing teams, of Google no less.

This reeks of smug engineering superiority.

I promise you the marketing team does serious competitive intel and probably knows more about the competitive landscape than the engineers themselves. That's true at my place of employment (also a bay area tech company), and I'd be shocked if it's not true at Google.

> so why?

Presumably so users get Google as their default search engine, which translates into more revenue. Google isn't running a charity with Chrome.

I'm out of the loop. What is "OKR" in this context?

"Objectives and Key Results", that is how Google organize their priorities. Every level of management creates OKR's for and every employee can see the OKR's of their team, the product, the org and entire Google and are supposed to align their efforts with this.

The upper OKR's are usually things like "Product should make XX% more money", or "Become the foremost user-choice for task X". The lower OKR's are usually just things like "build feature X".

"Objective and Key Result". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR

This is a naive view of how things work in big corporations. They work hard on many levels to make sure different teams are aligned under the strategic interests of the company as a whole.

Sure, different teams might get in the way of each other now and then. But not at a strategic level and the managers don't let the veer too far off the main course. Unless I miss my guess, Chrome isn't just any product to Google. It had great strategic importance to them just like Android. I'm not sure if the main purpose of Chrome's existence is to drive open Web standards.

Those are "oopses", as someone who used to work at Mozilla called it in some article. If MS were to phone Google about it, they'd hear "oops, our mistake, we'll fix it asap."

And it'll happen often. An oops every few weeks. Every oops bleeds users to Chrome. Everytime a googler says "just a mistake" and they might not even be trying to be dishonest at it.

It's Google's corporate structure that enables this.

i think they take their lesson from industry experience of microsoft embrace and extend strategy to take open standards and lock users into their proprietary extensions. as an example do you not remember IE?

EDIT: because of microsoft decades long behaviour, they have good reason to be wary

Yes... but their whole spiel was that they were the anti-MS. But now they are becoming a more insidious version of the MS they railed against.

I don't get why you're being downvoted. They're just out-microsofting Microsoft :-)

are they taking open standards and putting extensions on them that are proprietary so users can only access certain services with chrome? if not, then they are not doing any microsofting of any kind

Google don't need to keep their in-home standards proprietary. For them it's enough to pump as much different features into Chrome as possible. No one except them can implement those standards simply because no one have development team of comparable size.

Then they just going to state something like: our service dont support Firefox because Chrome-only feature X is not fully implemented.

Right, Google is going the "regulatory capture" route of standards, where they're the only place capable of meeting the standards they wrote.

This is just not true... What Google is concerned about is decades of bad behavior by Microsoft. Prior to the last decade Microsoft used embrace, extend and extinguish very aggressively to take control over nearly 96% of the desktop market and web platform via IE6. It's only fair the same developers who worked on Netscape, IE, Mozilla and now Chrome should be a little concerned with the history and motivations of a company such as MS. There is a reason people refer to them as M$. All that said, I think the world has changed and IMO Edge migrating to Chromium rendering engine is a really great thing and most likely these fears are mis-placed since the incentives are more aligned for MS to want to benefit from the web platform with Azure and Bing driving more $$ to the company now days... So maybe MS can be aligned with Google and focus on a better web platform.

If Google is only trying to stop the evil Microsoft empire why are they also trying to gently smother Firefox? It seems clear that Google wants to own the platform, which is perfectly understandable but doesn't fit in with the narrative of Google fighting to maintain the open standards of the Web.

Google did the same "embrace, extend and extinguish" play to Java on mobile (Android) and to Firefox on the web (Chrome): "hey, we love you, all on the same boat... Well, I guess we are a bit better now... Alright, now we call the shots".

Anybody worrying about '90s Microsoft should be much more wary of Google by now, and anybody working at Google pretending this is not going on is simply deluded.

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