Google isn’t happy with Microsoft over online news
theverge.com
theverge.com
An Australian law was based on the premise that it was unfair for Google to reap benefits from sending traffic to AU media sites. The law also forced search engines to firehose user data (w/o implementing privacy protections [1]) to Australian media interests (eg: Rupert Murdoch).
Google said, "Ok. We'll comply with the law, forgo those benefits and stop sending traffic." Oddly, this did not satisfy the interests behind the law.
Microsoft stepped in and said "We're totally down with this law" - including, apparently, the egregious gift of user data to AU media interests.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200817/22554345133/googl...
Any framing that posits that Google is benevolently "sending traffic" betrays that it should be discarded at the outset. Google (like Facebook and most other "make money on your content" empires) desperately tries to send as little traffic as possible to anyone, which is why they have AMP, scrape content and provide a dubious "expert engine", and provided a news dashboard where they summarized every news site.
I see this same ludicrous argument made re: Facebook. When Facebook temporarily blocked news, downloads of news site apps rose dramatically. It turns out that they weren't helpful whatsoever to anyone. They are a desperate suckerfish just trying to live off of the creation of other people.
This is not to say that Murdoch's news empire isn't bad as well, but no country should sit back and watch while Google and Facebook siphon money out of the countries.
Has a second-mover service ever overtaken a first-mover via on this strategy within in the Anglosphere? Or even within "the west"? (Xing vs. LinkedIn maybe? But everyone I know has both...)
I want better journalists for example - although I also don't have a good solution in mind for the economics problem that the internet gives journalism.
If people want to watch Fox/read yellow press, that is not the journalists fault.
It's crass but youtuber friendlyjordies shows how terrible the aussie press is on a weekly basis
In the UK the royal family is put on the front page the same day the home sec is rulled to have broken the law with corrupt contacts
In the US no one reports Cuomo's covid failure until he got me too'd
The idea that Google is the one who gets to know who you are despite not creating the content that they are exposing to you is absolute nonsense.
Google is not the gatekeeper to the internet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/business/media/australia-...
It's more (1) than (2)
I could be wrong, but aren't these summaries published voluntarily as semantic metadata or a feed from the media sites?
Instead it is structured almost exactly like a newspaper front page, right down to the damn weather report.
I find most of these arguments against Google to be reasonable, inc complaints of monopoly. Personally I strongly mistrust Google and have mostly divested myself from their offerings.
What I see Google did here was to vet the law's claims of fairness (Google gets money from our content so we should too) by stopping that arrangement. Once done, that particular unfairness was ended and the purported aim of the law was satisfied.
The grumpyness following Google's action confirms the law's intention is to create a new stream of tax revenue that AU Gov would grant (for now, anyway) exclusively to AU media entities.
I could potentially be behind a tax->news. Maybe. If it were constructed with more wisdom than this law is. I can not support this law because of it's shoddy construction (firehosing user data? srsly?) and because it's supplied purpose (ending unpaid usage of content) isn't truthful.
A larger issue may be that snippet laws seem to serve to further entrench Google's position by making news orgs dependent on Google for their operating revenue. This seems highly problematic.
It also grants new control over news funding to the AU Gov. If that control can be misused - to forward (AU Gov or 'partner' Gov) agendas - modern history tells us it will be.
Lastly, once this is normalized, who should pay next?
Law text: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
That can be how regular programming works (using live statistics), but ML is all about very expensive offline training, the model doesn't change as you execute it.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_machine_learning
Microsoft used to run smear campaigns (remember Scroogled?) when they hired Hillary Clinton's strategist. This last case shows they don't even care if it means everyone can be sued for not paying for a hyperlink. Say whatever you want about AMP or Google reader or whatnot but when was the last time Google spent their money on smear campaign and negative ads on a rival?
Microsoft's corporate tactics have remained the same.
Loves Linux but blocks Linux by user agent. Nice.
They changed it tho when we contacted them, so I guess there is some love, at least they were willing to change (when it impeded their own developers).
Don't trust Microsoft!
The fact that people might consider trusting ANY corporation is sad.
Reminds me of Office 365. If your UA has Windows in it, all of a sudden they offer SSO authentication as if Linux can't be set up for it.
Somehow, of all the abuses and injustices Big Tech commits, this one is way, way, way down on the very bottom of my list.
With a mixture of time passing and billions of dollars, it looks like they've successfully "cleaned" their image :(
P.S. Everyone is bitter about how the "older generation" handled things without the lens of modern values. I'm Gen X and we were angry all the time.
EDIT: phone changed east to easy. They are not equal.
I’m a fan of “the new MS”. Do I trust them? Not any more than a massive company.
But do I love all the open source software they’re producing now? Yes! Do I pretend that it’s because MS has seen the light and become penitent? No!
But at least this time when MS turns its back on their users, we can fork .net, edge, and vscode and go on with our lives. MS can’t unmerge their contributions to the Linux kernel or other open source projects they’re selfishly contributing to.
But they have shown that as a corporation they are comfortable playing nasty when it suits them.
It's fair to assume most of the leadership from '90s MS has moved on. So is your concern with the current leadership or the abstract concept of the corporation? Is it that "they did it once so they might do it again" the real worry? Do we assume the corporation has hysteresis and the executives of today will take similar actions to those of the past because of operating under the same "umbrella" named MS? If so how far back do you go with this record of bad or good deeds?
I see a lot of people sort of bragging with being old enough to remember evil '90s MS (so around 35+). How far back do you look at a company to judge them? I can think of a lot of companies who flip-flopped several times because the leadership changed and the market demanded it. So once they go bad do they stay forever bad?
Your worry should be MS's current leadership and their ability to execute in the future, not what Gates did 20 years ago. Similarly you don't judge today's Google by their actions of 20 years ago. Saying "I don't trust MS because Gates in the '90s" tells me you might be stuck on the actual name and that's the only aspect that will ever matter to you (a simple "if MS then Bad").
You've seen Google go from do no evil to whatever they are now. Apple from whatever they were to champions of user privacy. MS from whatever they were to embracing open source and such. None of it because corporations are sentient beings with intentions but because of leadership and market imposed necessity. If anything you (and I) are more rsponsible for what MS, Google, Apple, etc. do than those companies themselves. They do what we allow them and what we reward simply because their leadership acts in the interest of profits.
In my opinion, MS didn't really cede much power to the community when open-sourcing .NET, for example. It would still be incredibly painful for a company to unhook itself from Microsoft's version of .NET, and .NET is still influential for all the same reasons is was before, because of MS's position in the software industry. I think the move was just MS moving the framework into the current paradigm of software development. All(?) popular frameworks are open source these days: React, Electron, ... It just doesn't fit with the times to have .NET be closed source.
It think is interesting to think though about Google directly providing the source code base for its competitors, Edge and the other Chromium clones. Maybe the lasting message of US v. Microsoft was that if you open-source your software, you're less likely to be perceived as controlling. Or maybe your software simply becomes more influential if it's open source! Chrome being open source allows Google to be enormously influential as far as web standards go. It would probably be a lot less so if Chrome was closed source.
Original ideas of open source (free as in speech) are long forgotten.
It has been a huge boon for .NET as well. Serious contributions started pouring in almost immediately. Code from Mono being ported over; linux support. Fixes to really old issues that were not getting attention because .NET was essentially put "in a box".
C#, .NET and the CLR are pretty great tech that could have been a true Java alternative if not for the fact the vision for it was so narrowly scoped to Windows.
A big problem I ran into recently is that the documentation for some methods indicate they can throw a "PlatformNotSupported" exception but don't link to anything that lists which platforms/versions actually support the method.
Some new features like single file executables will break existing code in subtle ways, a common method of getting the application directory was to use Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location, when running as a single file executable that returns an empty string.
I still think it's a big improvement over the older .NET Framework stuff that I'm mostly using, but I can see why it isn't so appealing to the Java crowd.
You've got to be kidding. Microsoft isn't about to open source Windows, Office, or any of its crown jewels. They are only opening the source for bits that aren't profit centers and where widespread use would benefit them. And it is a trap... Think Oracle Java. As soon as they see an opening, they'll close it back up and fragment the user base between the open source and proprietary versions.
Red Hat is the known company that opensourcing acquired company's products.
That's a PR stunt. You should be Actually Concerned about how much Alphabet is spending on lobbying.
Lobbying only gets your interests on the table; it doesn’t get you a seat at the table.
If Google, Apple and Microsoft are all competing with each other and also doing business with each other in different markets, and they’re also all lobbying legislators, whose metaphorical bag of money is the winner and gets all of their hopes and dreams fulfilled when Congress starts meddling?
Well, not the citizens of the country, which is kind of the point.
Legislative bodies is where politics is supposed to happen, and legislators don’t live in a vacuum. We don’t elect them and send them up to the top of an ivory tower for two years to philosophize about policy with the occasional edict sent down. So how do legislators know what kinds of policies people actually want when there’s about 700K people in their districts (and 39M constituents if you’re a California Senator) unless people show up and say, “Hey, this is what I want from you, this is why I elected you.”
You get a mixed bag because legislatures are a mixed bag representing a larger mixed bag, and sorry, newspaper polls aren’t a good stand in for showing up and putting your name down for consideration. Your interests as a citizen are not identical to the other 699,999ish of your neighbors, and the guy or gal representing you is just one person of a larger body.
1. What does the politician think is best for the people he represents
2. What the people he represents think is best for themselves
3. What is actually best for the people he represents
Whereas it appears to be
1. What will get the politician re-elect (party line + avoiding even addressing any topics that will upset their base)
2. What will make the politician the most money (lobbying/bribes)
It doesn't seem like "what's best for the people the politician represents" even comes into the discussion a lot of the time.
^ Bear in mind, I know there are good politicians. However, just like in the rest of life, it's the bad ones that _tend_ to succeed, the ones that don't care who they hurt.
And your 3-point list scares the crap out of me because while it might look fairly reasonable to you, it looks to me like you’re looking at the government for a source of paternalistic love, something it can never provide.
Congress isn’t in the business of doing what’s “best”, they’re in the business of politics, which involves a lot of talking, a lot of positioning, a lot of negotiating, and a lot of communication with their constituents (whether you’re paying attention or not, a disturbing trend recently has seen Congressmen downsizing or not investing in their policy shops in favor of investing more in their constituent services).
The people they’re going to be negotiating with are the ones that show up, not the ones making wishes on a falling star on the other side of the country while scrolling their phone till death do they part.
I was more talking about things like deciding what the right tax rate is. The people might want low taxes, but if those taxes can't support all the things those people need (roads, etc), then low taxes are not what those people need.
> Congress isn’t in the business of doing what’s “best”, they’re in the business of politics
And I see that as a problem. The point of government is to make life better for everyone being governed. Making life better just for the large companies that can pay for it is not the way government should work.
If that’s all legislatures did, that would be nice. Unfortunately people can always invent a need where they perceive one.
> And I see that as a problem. The point of government is to make life better for everyone being governed. Making life better just for the large companies that can pay for it is not the way government should work.
Problem or not, you don’t have the “should” in charge, you have the “is”, so now you can only try to shape its scope: expand or contract governmental powers within a jurisdiction. That’s what it means to be a self-governing society, you don’t have to participate in the process, but if you don’t, you are intentionally limiting your own political power. If more people participate, they are also reducing your political power.
It’s not just large companies that participate either. Small businesses and constituents of all stripes do. If your participation begins and ends at the ballot box, that’s only a step up from a bystander because someone else is choosing who and what goes on those ballots you fill out. Whether you choose to treat your ballots as the tail end of your civic engagement or the face of it, that’s a personal choice, and I won’t tell you any choice you make is illegitimate, it just is whatever you choose to do.
1. Recognize human nature. 2. Plan for human nature; both mitigate it and incorporate it where possible. 3. Expect people to eventually break whatever you come up with because they’re people. 4. Take part in that system; don’t expect others to think of you on your behalf.
Legislatures and governments are made up of people, and any system which doesn’t recognize this is doomed to failure. You go through life doing what is best for yourself, your family, your community, why should you expect any different from people with more (or less) power than you? Why should they care about you if you’re not even there asking them to care about the things you care about?
Because they were elected to their position specifically to do what's best for everyone they represent. That is, quite literally, their job.
And yes, I care more about me and my own than I do for others. But I do care for others. Plus, caring for my own means I need to care for others because society as a whole must survive and be better tomorrow than it is today if I want the best for my own in the future.
All that being said, we do create laws to make sure people act in the best interest of "people", not "person", and that includes limits on what lawmakers and those that interact with lawmakers can do. They are part of that mitigation you spoke of. We can change how humans behave, counter to their human nature, via those laws and their enforcement.
Or all the nonsense going on in the EU? Or the political discussions to do as you suggest, breakup Alphabet, by people with the power, though not the moral standing, to do so?
Could you provide links for this part?
> Or passing disturbing crony-handout legislation like the Australian Parliament did to the clear detriment of specific companies? Or all the nonsense going on in the EU? Or the political discussions to do as you suggest, breakup Alphabet, by people with the power, though not the moral standing, to do so?
It's vague and confusing.
I've got my eye on them, but they aren't the same company under Satya.
I daily drive Linux and don't own an Xbox, but I'm also not a hater. I like companies that build things.
I'm surprised at some of their products that don't get enough criticism. Like Windows is still bad of course, you can't expect anything out of a PC with any 3rd party system software on it, but also Bing Maps is worse than Apple Maps, and nobody complains because nobody uses it.
I am surprised that MS seems to fly under the anti-trust radar nowadays and I wonder how much tax payer money goes into MS pockets via government contracts.
Most big tech companies have been investing to diversify their income sources. Whether those investments have had a massive return to take over their original cash cow is a separate concern. Google has been investing in hardware and cloud, Apple in building online services, Amazon in pretty much everything.
Note: I am not anti Duck Duck Go.
Not to mention AMP and whatnot.
For those out of the loop:
I'm disappointed they caved in and paid the danegeld, but the way Microsoft went "We fully support the extraction from the danegeld, and if Google happens to lose any market share due to its refusal to pay it, we would be more than happy to have these customers use Bing instead. We fully support this law that has no effect on us and actively harms our main competitor" is just disgusting.
I’m not a huge fan of the new rules, but it’s clear that they’ve scared Google to the point where their PR department is unable to moderate themselves anymore, a trend I’ve noticed with every large tech company when placed in a difficult position. Until you see more companies doing this I think it’s mostly safe to assume that any regulations you’re applying to them are toothless and just a cost of doing business.
That's rich coming from Google.
>"And it’s no coincidence that Microsoft’s newfound interest in attacking us comes on the heels of the SolarWinds attack and at a moment when they’ve allowed tens of thousands of their customers — including government agencies in the U.S., NATO allies, banks, nonprofits, telecommunications providers, public utilities, police, fire and rescue units, hospitals and, presumably, news organizations — to be actively hacked via major Microsoft vulnerabilities."
What does the Solar Winds hack have to do with news publishing regulation? Mentioning Bing here would have been logical but this poorly written run-on sentence is just pure mud slinging of the same type he is accusing MS of. Are there no corporate PR officers at Google who need to approve such posts prior to publishing? What an embarrassment.
Or it could be just the old google. We are good and you are evil mentality.
Edit:
> A person familiar with Google's thinking on the matter told Engadget that a big point of contention had been the fact that Amazon implemented what was essentially a hacked version of YouTube on both the Echo Show and Fire TV. Rather than work with Google to build versions of its apps that work on Amazon's devices, Amazon has been trying to do it itself -- a move that cuts out features and also likely affects Google's ability to collect on some of the ad revenue that comes from its videos.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-05-google-blocking-youtube-...
Amazon has responded, and its response points to the unfair nature of Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it. "Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website," Amazon's statement reads. "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible."
> And that’s directly tied to Chromecast’s absence on Amazon.com. Since there’s no easy way of watching Prime Video, Amazon won’t sell it. But it’s Amazon’s own fault that Prime Video doesn’t work with Chromecast. Amazon has the power to make it happen. What’s Google supposed to do in this scenario?
> Amazon’s decision to remove popular, well-liked products from its store over this spat — or never sell them to begin with — is an ugly example of the company throwing its weight and power around. No one should be surprised that Google is crying foul. Is the company under any obligation to sell Google Home — the chief rival to its own Echo? Of course not. Them’s the breaks. But the Chromecast situation is troubling, and Amazon’s recent halting of sales for certain Nest hardware (with no real explanation) seems juvenile. Prime shipping is still a very powerful incentive, and Amazon is well aware of that.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16738752/google-youtube-a...
Amazon is nowhere near innocent in their feud
Amazon built the Fire stick to be compatible with Chromecast. Google then changed the Chromecast protocols repeatedly to prevent this.
Only after that did Amazon ban the Chromecast devices from their store.
Tell the whole story, at least.
That player interface page was very device specific (e.g. the current youtube page doesn't even work on Gen1 chromecasts with 50-60Hz videos), so Amazon couldn't use those, and only supported the direct links.
Which is not that unusual — youtube could just serve a dash manifest link that directly concatenates ad and video, or build their player page better.
Google actually did it to lock people in to their Chromecast implementation (a lot of third party implementations showed up in the early days), especially for fear of DRM being broken.
We could have had an entire open ecosystem with a single standard replacing mpd, sonos etc working with everything, were it not for those actions Google took (so as a consumer and open source dev, I'm naturally pissed).
I don't believe this is true. Do you have a source?
The only issue I have with Firefox + Youtube is that there's a memory leak somewhere in my addon setup that causes Firefox to bloat, but I haven't bothered to figure out which addon causes that because the impact has diminished greatly since I've installed another 16GB of RAM for other reasons.
No joke, it comes from birdsong hobbyists, when two birds were "competing" they would insert deliberately off and loud notes to intimidate and silence each other. They named those "slams" like a door slam.
That became the slang for the patter of street hawkers when they negged you or heckled someone else for laughs and attention, and eventually became slang for any kind of insult or put down.
Will they? Of course not.
At least Microsoft has the benefit of the institutional knowledge of having once been as dominant as Google is now.
Google are just as bad as MS. End of story.
- break compability or make their sites slow in other browsers, sometimes in so interesting ways that it makes it hard to defend as just incompetence. Edit, example: didn't they go out of their way to find a way to make YouTube crawl in Firefox while performing well in Chrome a few months ago? IIRC instead of doing it the new straightforward way that was supported everywhere they went with a solution that was so backwards that it was already deprecated in Chrome as well or something?
- make banners on the front page of the worlds most famous web property, urging people to change
This is quite ironic given all the "Google killed Microsoft's own browser engine" stories.
Google is much better at working than Microsoft.
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-yo...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
> make banners on the front page of the worlds most famous web property
Well, can't argue with that!
I do not think so.
But the ratio of these times vary per person.
Now Stadia Studios might not seem like a big deal, I mean who uses it? Not many people bought into it because no one trusts Google to keep anything alive.
Consequently, Google Cloud is great but I know that without question we picked AWS and Azure because of appearances of Google publically killing and not supporting their products.
People at Google absolutely do stupid things and damage their reputation.
In the original version of the legislation, google and facebook were required to pay up each time they served an <a> tag that pointed news.com sites. That's what google meant by "breaking the open web" - having to pay <a href> tax.
This was all fine by Microsoft. They apparently did some deal with Murdock in 2019 so appear to have been behind this all along. It's all echos of Gates era dealings.
But in many other respects, it's quite similar. A better baseline for comparison would be circa 2010, when Firefox was still popular enough, and "best viewed in Chrome" wasn't really a thing yet.
For a little while, outlook and 365 web didn’t work properly in safari because of the third party cookies defaults, so the suggestion was to use Chrome (rather than just adjusting cookie settings).
Add to that, back then Microsoft had no drive to move the web platform forward. IE was not getting better, which is why it was eventually eclipsed by Firefox and later Chrome.
They used the same techniques for Stadia, they bashed it while praising Xbox Cloud
The same with Team vs Zoom
And the same with AWS/GCE vs Azure
Hmm
The first comments here are people bashing the Microsoft of 20 years ago..
And this one... "The Verge sounds very Pro-Microsoft" - for no other reason than to perpetuate the bias here.
Why do we do this to ourselves people? This is absurd.
The Verge is very much in love with Apple, they're not in love with Google. That doesn't make them Pro-Microsoft. The verge DID hire a a fantastic Microsoft writer who knows Microsoft inside and out, so they're not Oblivious to Microsoft - but that doesn't make them "Pro Microsoft".
And for Christ's sake - NONE of what is mentioned here makes Microsoft bad. They're a business making products and building services doing what businesses do and its certainly not Balmer's Microsoft anymore.
Who cares what Google isn't happy with when its painfully apparent no one is is happy with anything around here...
Find a struggling newspaper to purchase for a song. That gets you a masthead and a basic editorial pipeline. Then, use strong salary packages to raid the content talent from the existing participants. Alphabet could do this with pocket change.
This is similar to the play the media titans use to capture sports broadcast rights - World Series Cricket in the 70s, SuperLeague in the 90s.
That is some pathological levels of projection.
It's that the endgame you'd have preferred? Ecosystem of apps because news web developers refused to make their ad and autoplay video ridden websites usable on the mobile devices?
Look at the trends and tell me if you'd have preferred to read all your content in an Apple News walled garden instead?
Google: We will defend you but we'll also strangle you while at it.
Google has probably done more of this single handedly since the advent of Chrome than Microsoft has.
Not that I’m absolving MS of any wrongdoing either, but google has definitely been far more malicious, and for them to pretend otherwise is unscrupulous at best.
I was an asshole to my parents in the 90s as an angsty teen. If my parents held on to the 90s like I could never change, grow or be something different my family would be torn apart.
Perhaps you just need to grow up yourself.
Companies have a character and a culture that is retained which is why we often speak of them as contiguous entities because like the ship of theseus is an referant to a entity with a certain history and characteristics so to is a company.
An ill chosen analogy merely doesn't highlight the characteristics that are alike. Yours seems to be chosen to deliberately highlight irrelevant characteristics in order to misdirect. I suggest you stick to talking about the facts.
I suggest you realize that "facts" (behaviors) are contextual and like people, companies change.
I do however, think that google, having more reach and influence makes them somewhat worse.
I’m not too versed in the Australia news thing, but is this statement true?
None of this would've been an issue 20 years ago when 90% of the web was noncommercial, but now it destroys an entire industry.
If they are never going to get the traffic anyway, why be listed?
Interesting.
https://twitter.com/YouTubeCreators/status/13693446469089361...
A few years ago someone's video of white noise got claimed, because white noise is apparently copyrighted too.
10 hours of Jason Turner's livestream got demonetized because literally 5 minutes of it was a bunch of random ads from the 80s
I have a feeling AMP is really dead and now they're looking for ways to get news back after forcing so many people to embrace that terrible tech.
I filed a bug and nothing much has happened...
https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/24621
It appears that the current excuse is GA4 isn't ready for primetime? makes no sense...
We're not sampling chocolate here - think how propping up old media with mandatory charges actually helps us and the open web?
Mozilla has a habit of taking a decent, slimmed down browser (Phoenix, for those who remember that era), adopting it as their primary because their previous became a bloated mess... then taking the new fork, making it unwieldy and forcing people to create yet another fork to reign it in.
Tell me again how this is Google's fault.
They simply made a better browser.
Chrome was better for me for about 15 min until it crippled uBlock origin - at the same moment Chrome took action against non-Google advertisers, that Google didn't like.
Meanwhile my memory issues with Ffx decreased while Chrome's grew; I've no memory issues to speak of at all now. Ultimately, FFx plugins wound up helping craft a positive browsing experience on Ffx, that can't really be duplicated in Chrome.
Now I use Chrome to open up a single, overseas website because their native translation really is the best. Firefox (95%), Opera, Brave even Edge all see more use, however.
Please don't rewrite history with things that aren't true - Chrome was significantly better browser for a long time with significantly better developer tools which made tech people prefer it early.
But chrome did the impossible, they shifted the Moms and Pops and most unbelievable, the absolute holy grail, the corporate desktop.
Remember: IE6 was the best browser for a while, the problem was it did things slightly different and people targeted IE instead of the web, exactly as they target Chrome instead of the web today.
IE6 was a broken implementation of the standards of the time.
And Microsoft decided that web browsing was done and did not update their browser.
It was a scheme for vendor lock-in.
My career started in the IE 6 era and even then people tested in at least 2 browsers.
At most I’ve been lucky to have 1 team member who cares about this stuff. Maybe other companies are better but this is my experience the past 5 years or so.
Do test in Firefox (and Safari). If it works in FF it mostly works everywhere, but Safari has some quirks I think.
In fact as long as I test my code in Firefox I haven't been caught with something that didn't work in all browsers any of my customers supported the last 4 or so years.
There are a few Chrome-specific things one shpuld
I don't think many web developers who have really lived through the IE 'glory days' would say the current situation is even nearly as bad.