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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

That's a rather funny claim coming from google, considering we are now back in the same situation as we were 20 year ago, when people were designing websites to work 'best' on microsoft's IE browser. Now a lot of things are being designed to work 'best' on Chrome.

At least Microsoft has the benefit of the institutional knowledge of having once been as dominant as Google is now.

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This story is not directly related to chrome.

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.

Chrome is tangential to the story, but Google calling Microsoft out for trying "to break the way the open web works" is super hypocritical. Its the pot calling the kettle black.

This is not true at all. The web is at a much better state than 20 years ago. There may be some thing going on that are not ideal, but the it's a night and day difference. I don't know why this gets so many upvotes.

It's in a better state because Chrome, at least, is actively developed, whereas IE was lagging behind.

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.

It can be really stupid too, I’ve had sites not load and suggest that I use “modern browsers like Chrome” when I’m trying to load it in Safari or Brave. So I think we’re back to dumdums literally checking user agent.

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).

I can't tell you how many times I have problems with a site in Firefox because they only designed it for chrome now, sites owned by google are the biggest offenders.

oddly enough, most of the time I hit issues with stuff not working on safari, but fine on firefox or chrome. I just had a bill pay request from someone using 'bill4time.com' service. Broke in safari, worked in chrome. I seem to hit these situation perhaps once a week or so, where moving to chrome or firefox generally 'fixes' it.

AWS is particularly bad with Safari. For some reason, AWS asserts that U2F doesn't work on Safari so I have been forced to remove 2fa from my account. Yay. And AWS Amplify never loads on Safari either.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Today I develop mostly on Chrome, but I don't dread testing for compatibility on Firefox or Safari. The standardization is quite good across vendors.

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.

Well, considering that microsoft essentially designs their websites (see also: teams) to only work on chrome, that is rich.

Has Google been breaking the web with non-compliant implementations of web standards?

More like it's been using its dominant browser market position, and "Essential" nature as a search/cloud based services operator, to wag the dog of the web standardization process.

Which Google-pushed standards were most at fault for making websites break on Firefox?

Have a read: https://mobile.twitter.com/johnath/status/111687124330162585...

Google are just as bad as MS. End of story.

Deliberately breaking the performance of YouTube on Firefox is fine, because it shows how the non neutral net degrades into a television show with lots of commercial breaks. No way to opt out while trying to do work on your personal computer using the information shared on our Internet. None of that, if it's up to Microsoft and Google.

They

- 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

I'm using Firefox and the only service that I have to use on a regular basis that does not really work in Firefox is actually Microsoft Teams.

This is quite ironic given all the "Google killed Microsoft's own browser engine" stories.

I find Excel in Firefox to be quite broken.

Google is much better at working than Microsoft.

You're nitpicking. The situation is a night and day difference compared to 10-20 years ago.

The YouTube thing was back in 2018:

https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-yo...

> break compability or make their sites slow in other browsers

"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!

Do you really think the individuals at Google are stupid?

I do not think so.

Everyone has the power to be stupid at times. Maybe other people have the power to be brilliant times.

But the ratio of these times vary per person.

Of course they can be. For example Stadia.

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.

They sort of killed DNT.

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