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> native client, Dart, etc.

You forgot SPDY, WebRTC, etc. This is nothing like ActiveX. These are open-source technologies and other browsers are free and invited to implement them. They're trying to push the web forward.

Sure they're free and open source. But they aren't STANDARDS. You seem to be unable to look objectively at the situation. While ActiveX was closed source, by extending the web with non standard technology the end result will be the same, open source or not.

But they are adhering to standards as well, more so than anyone else for that matter, point to an instance where they're not. Also it takes ages for stuff to get standardized, are you suggesting that no technology should be applicable until it's the standard? I see no issue in introducing new cool tech specially if it's opensource.

I agree, they do a great job following the standards. I love that. What I don't love is when they break away. That's my whole point - work with the standards body to get your new cool tech introduced. Don't just go rogue and do whatever you want, that's when problems arise.

"Breaking away" as you describe it sounds like innovation to me, and pacing innovation to standard bodies would kill it. I can't think of specifics but surly most of what is considered the standard today was once the experimentation of one company or one lab.

Really? When Microsoft "broke away" and created ActiveX, you were in support of that too because it was innovation? Or how bout Adobe and Flash?

ActiveX and Flash were certainly innovations. One of them didn't pan out[1] and the other did and lasted for quite some time.

You realize that if not for Flash, sites like Youtube wouldn't have been possible at the time that it was released?

[1] ActieX didn't pan out for the web as a whole - it fared well behind the walls of enterprises.

If Microsoft made ActiveX open and easy for other browser manufactures to implement in a cross-platform manner, I would absolutely have been in support of it. They didn't, so I wasn't.

Standards bodies move slowly. Non-standardised innovation across browsers is absolutely to be encouraged, as long as it is done in a manner that allows others to implement that innovation too. This sort of innovation is what helps us decide what is worth being made into a standard.

Maybe not ActiveX, but when Microsoft created XMLHttpRequest in their javascript engine, that ended up being pretty significant and great for how the web works today.

What problems arise? Why should "standards bodies" affect what features Free Software has? Why allow anyone to release any software at all?

I would agree with you if their breaking away weren't open sourced.

The problem is when they run off and code something and implement it in Chrome, and then when design problems are found in it during the standardization process they say "well it's deployed in too many units already to fix now", effectively reducing the pool of outside experts in the standards orgs to a bunch of rubber-stamping copy editors.

Any examples?

I hesitate to point at examples because I like all the people involved and feel it's not worth making look like more than they are. But I do think there is some basis for the sentiment. So if you are interested, you could study the process by which the HTTP Origin header came to not allow double quotes. There will always be a natural tension between those shipping code and a standardization process.

I think people complaining about this are upset about the network effect, rather than Chrome adding new features. Say you love Firefox. One day, your favorite website decides to switch entirely to SPDY, and you can't use Firefox anymore. It's natural to blame Google for this, since they invented SPDY and put the client into production. But really, it's that site's developer's fault for using nonstandard features.

This happens all the time; Firefox adds non-standard CSS transforms, Microsoft adds non-standard Javascript functionality, and Apple adds proprietary video codecs to Safari. When your web app depends on these things, you hurt your users. But it's your fault for using nonstandard features; it's not Apple's or Google's or Microsoft's fault for making their browser support them. If this upsets you, consider software in general. To use Facebook, you have to use Facebook. That's nonstandard! To use an Emacs extension, you have to use Emacs. That's nonstandard! And so on.

Google and Mozilla are especially innocent, since Apple and Microsoft can easily steal any features they want from Chrome and Firefox. They're the only ones out in the open, and for that, I think they deserve to try new things for the web. If they stick, the other vendors can easily support the new features.

first you say "One day, your favorite website decides to switch entirely to SPDY, and you can't use Firefox anymore. It's natural to blame Google for this, since they invented SPDY and put the client into production. But really, it's that site's developer's fault for using nonstandard features."

then "Google and Mozilla are especially innocent, since Apple and Microsoft can easily steal any features they want from Chrome and Firefox. They're the only ones out in the open, and for that, I think they deserve to try new things for the web. If they stick, the other vendors can easily support the new features."

How would these features stick, if developers using them are to blame?

By degrading gracefully, of course. It's why you can read GMail in IE6, even though the experience is a lot better in Chrome 17.

It is not automatically easy to use an open source implementation of something just because it is open source. This is a very common misconception. If Google had wanted it to be easy for other browsers to use the open source implementation of NaCl, they would have used the standard NPAPI, not the Pepper API. Instead of being designed for interoperability, NaCl is locked to Pepper, a proprietary Google technology.

> It's natural to blame Google for this... [b]ut really, it's that site's developer's fault for using nonstandard features

You talk as if blame is a conserved quantity. Just because it's the developer's fault for doing something, doesn't necessarily mean that it's not Google's fault as well for enabling them to do so.

When Google makes these technologies, they are aware of how they will, or can, be used, and that it may involve some fragmentation of the web. Aware of these consequences, they went ahead and released the technologies anyways. In my mind, that entails them a degree of responsibility for the consequences.

It's also difficult for me to take them at their word when they say "we think this problems an acceptable cost to move the web forward," because they also happen to benefit from this fragmentation. I don't think they're being intentionally duplicitous, I just don't think it's possible for anybody to make fully rational decisions in such a situation.

> Sure they're free and open source. But they aren't STANDARDS.

So? "Standards" only means that some group has blessed them. In particular, it doesn't imply that you're free to implement them.

What can you do with "standards" that you can't do with those projects, as they currently exist? What can't happen with standards that can happen with those projects?

Remember, no one is obligated to follow or conform to "standards".

Wow, you're just being contrary to be contrary aren't you? While no one is obligated to follow standards, they certainly help adoption. Without standards we wouldn't be able to just buy a consumer electronics device and plug it in to our standardized plug with standardized voltage would we? Standards are part of our daily lives and without them we would not have progressed nearly as far as we have.

Further more, the reason standards are nice here is because a 3rd party is the one who blessed the technology, not the biased producer of the technology. And changes to that standard need to go through the standards body and the producer is not the single owner.

Your point is true, but so is parent post.

Standards doesn't mean "no innovation". While the electric outlet may be a "standard" devices that use the electricity shouldn't necessarily be "standard".

ie if I want an innovative lamp to plug into my standard electric socket, that is okay.

Standards have a place and so do innovations. If Google is releasing all of their innovations which have broad applicability as open source projects, I see no reason they should slow down so that slow-moving, non-innovating standards bodies can catchup.

> Wow, you're just being contrary to be contrary aren't you?

Not at all. I'm pointing out that they don't have the properties that you're asking for in this case.

> Further more, the reason standards are nice here is because a 3rd party is the one who blessed the technology, not the biased producer of the technology. And changes to that standard need to go through the standards body and the producer is not the single owner.

Suppose that Google submitted all of those projects to a standards body, got them approved, and then made an incompatible change to their implementations. How does their status as a standard matter?

They are proposed standards. See my comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3456815.

Standards don't appear out of the ether, fully formed and ready to be implemented. Properly developed standards are built precisely the way Google is building them: with a publicly available proposal and a reference implementation in widely used software.

Let me make a point with an example. If Apple were to add a tv-streaming protocol to Safari (and opensource it). Would you consider it Google's duty to also add it to Chrome?

EDIT: I know my example is a bit far fetched, but it had to be something that is not in the interest of google.

No, I wouldn't consider it their duty. OTOH, the last time that Apple promised an open spec protocol (Facetime) I would have expected Google (or someone) to provide a high quality Android implementation. Apple didn't follow through.

I don't personally have a problem with the standards that Google has advocated. Dart is unlikely to succeed, IMO, but I would like to see NativeClient (or something like it) picked up by the other browsers.

You example is "far-fetched"? I hope you're being sarcastic :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Google's implementations in Chrome are virtually always released as open specifications.

Dart: http://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/ SPDY: http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol WebRTC: http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html NaCL: https://developers.google.com/native-client/reference/pepper... (C API definition)

In addition to open specifications, as the parent pointed out, they also have open source reference implementations. At least in the cast of SPDY, support has already landed in Firefox. Characterizing this as equivalent to ActiveX shows an ignorance of either the original browser wars or Google's modus operandus these days.

WebRTC is a real standards-track technology. If you look at the draft you linked, none of the four editors even work for Google.

In the other cases cited - good luck making an independent interoperable implementation just from Google's "spec". The same would go for WebM and Dart.

Uh, the SPDY spec is excellent (and is IETF standards-track). The WebM "spec" might be something of a joke, but the fastest decoder right now is a third-party, independent implementation.

NaCl and Pepper are well documented (NaCl extremely so), it's just that other browser vendors (namely Mozilla) don't like Pepper's chrome-centric design and don't agree that NaCl is a good choice for the web. Dart is still being designed last I heard, but it's in a pretty similar spot; just because no one else will touch it doesn't mean there's not a decent spec for what is finished.

>They're definitely on the "extend" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish.

When you provide even a little evidence that this is their plan, this may be taken seriously. As it stands, they are still a huge champion of open standards (hardly a "phase"), and have raised the price on two of their more expensive services (app engine and maps) - both of which only affect developers, not end users.

As it stands, your fears are FUD and nothing more.

Just look at Chrome. On one hand, Google claims undying support for web standards, and on the other they're adding a bunch of non-standard features to their browser trying to get people tied in. This is very similar to MS and IE6 + ActiveX

What are these non-standard features? Are they open sourced? How hard would it be to fold them into another browser, especially one built on Webkit?

Dart, native client, Gears was in there for awhile.

Gears seems like a perfect example. It predated the HTML5 local storage when Google found such a tool useful. Now the standard's caught up and Gears has been yanked in favor of the standard. Dart and NaCl could conceivably lead to evil, but I like the history shown with Gears/HTML5.

Dart is not in any release of Chrome. You can download a special experimental Chromium release with Dart support but it is not in the nightly.

There's no reason that you can't both support standards and also offer non-standard technologies. The problem comes when you _don't_ support the standard but offer your own, non-standard implementation.

As it stands, they are still a huge champion of open standards

As long as it doesn't encroach on their business. For example, given the enormous popularity and similarity of feature set among web ads, why hasn't there been a successful ad campaign standard that would make transfer and interchange of ad campaigns seemless?

This is a space that is in dire need of an open standard and Google is the company in the best position to make it so. This is something I've seen multiple companies struggle with -- it's a real problem. But of course, this is Google's bread and butter. When it comes to being open about things they make no money from, that's one thing. When you instill those same "values" against your bottomline then I think you're being serious.

Their browser has features that no other browser supports (native client, Dart etc).

It's funny that you think these are bad things.

Innovation happens by trying new things and pushing them out. If it sticks, great, if not, then it will die out.

A ton of the technology today that we consider as 'standards' didn't start out that way.

When Microsoft created XmlHttpRequest, were you complaining then that they were pushing out non-standard features that other browsers didn't have?

Give credit to Google for trying to push the state-of-the-art in web technology forward.

When Microsoft created XmlHttpRequest, were you complaining then that they were pushing out non-standard features that other browsers didn't have?

In fact a lot of people did complain. This was the embrace, extend, extinguish attack that people had. Honestly, an absurd claim back then as well. I would think that you would try to make existing products so much better that you run your competitors out of business (or they improve so much that they stay competitive).

But we have a culture where certain companies can do no wrong, while other companies can do no right. It's almost like asking a Republican in South Carolina about accomplishments by Obama -- doesn't really matter what he does, he'll be attacked. The dev space isn't so different.

When Twitter pulled out, Google didn't have a way to do social networking results. Facebook presumably turned down their offers. This is one of the big reasons why Google+ was built to begin with.

Most of the comments simply points to flaws in your arguments. I advise you to think carefully about the issues raised before calling them "apologists" and "not objective".

And I've tried to honestly reply to every comment that points out a flaw in my argument. I did think carefully before using the word apologist, but I've had too many downvotes to really believe that people are thinking critically. What I'm saying is NOT that Google is evil, but rather they're increasingly heading in a direction I don't like, for the reasons I've outlined.

"Oooh, false dichotomy. Because you used big words you must be right." "You seem to be unable to look objectively at the situation." "Wow, you're just being contrary to be contrary aren't you?"

Seems like it has more to do with your attitude, don't you think?

>..but I've had too many downvotes to really believe that people are thinking critically

Did you stop to think that maybe you're getting downvoted for nonsensical and wrongheaded arguments? We get it - you don't like Google. You just don't have a valid reason for doing so. You're entitled to your opinion, but not your facts.

"I'm being downvoted so people must not be thinking critically."

Your comment is unrelated to the article. Fine if you have a problem with stuff Google is doing, but on this topic they currently seem a lot more right than wrong.

Did you even read the article? There are a number of quotes from people in the article that say what Google is doing here is definitely wrong.

Did you read the article? One of the quotes is from Twitter. The other is a question a reporter ask and the entire point of the article is to answer the question.

This is the article which I read:

Twitter: Google is blocking us

Reporter: Blocking twitter is evil

Google: WTF? Twitter told us (and they really did) to block its links!?!

So to summarize: You agree that my comment was on topic, since clearly there are some who believe Google is in the wrong. Just because YOU don't agree with them doesn't mean my comment was off topic.

I think it is important to point out that Google seems to be saying they are willing to talk w/ the other networks about getting in the same position, but as of now those talks have not happened.

Would Google have G+ suggestions AND Twitter suggestions presented in the same way if they still had an agreement w/ Twitter?

Would the G+ suggestions be wrong if they still had the Twitter suggestions?

Apologists? I thought the term was fanboy - at least that's how an Apple "apologist" would be labeled here.

The level of trust on Google that some people have is really astonishing. I think the problem is, for all their "do no evil" mantra, as they need the feel to keep growing (in other areas, as search is already theirs), I can't believe they will always choose the "do no evil" path.

What I think is a big problem is, how much Google will be able to do before its public perception starts to change?

This meme about Google turning into "old bad Microsoft" is a result of false dichotomy.

Search+'s effect on the results page is peripheral, manifesting on the right pane and search suggestions, the main results are largely the same and there is a handy toggle to switch modes.

Their browser is opensource, NaCl is opensource, Dart is opensource, the Microsoft stuff never was opensource.

They started charging for the Maps API because some German mapping company complained to the EU that they can't compete with free.

Oooh, false dichotomy. Because you used big words you must be right. See my below comment: Open source does NOT equal standards. They are different.

Further, the picture in this article: http://mashable.com/2012/01/10/google-launches-social-search... clearly shows your Google+ results directly on top of your normal results.

See my comment regarding standards: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3456594

At the top it shows the number of public and private results, and the picture cluster always was there, they just added social relevancy to it.

The fact that they are opensource has very little to do with it. They are trying to push certain technologies into certain directions under the cover of opensource.

They are still in single control of the spec. This is not true with standard bodies where several companies can agree on it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3456594

They are trying to push certain technologies into certain directions under the cover of opensource.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Firefox does it too, right? Not everything works well via the standards model; first you have to experiment and test before you can write a good spec. That's what Chrome is; Google asking, "how can we make the web better"? (SPDY is a good example of this.)

Ultimately, Google is like Microsoft in a lot of ways. They have a "platform" (the web via Chrome) that lets users use platform-specific applications in a variety of places. Apple is too; their platform is OSX and iOS. To provide the best user experience, you need to control the platform. Google is the only company that lets the Free Software community have the platform too.

You already disclose your employer in your profile, but you're probably going to want to do it in posts as well.

As a counterpoint though, I would argue that Google Chrome using Google services (seemingly exclusively) for its sync functionality kind of looks like a business decision more so than experimentation with poorly defined standards.

Yeah. I try to write as though I don't work for Google, because I know what the future looks like a few months out and am not supposed to tell anyone.

Honestly, the culture of Google is very "write software for the sake of writing software". I promise you that anything that looks evil is a mere accident; sometimes programmers don't consider the ramifications of their actions. Google doesn't want to know who your friends and family are to sell your information to credit reporting agencies; they want to know so that when you type "photos" you get photos that are actually relevant to you. (Similarly, Google wants to know your travel history so it can tell that you prefer Oneworld carriers, and when you search for flights, display results in the order that's most relevant to you.)

There's no way to prove this, though, and that's what's so frustrating. Come work for Google and you'll see :)

FWIW, I was actually pretty well convinced of this by reading Steven Levy's In the Plex.

sometimes programmers don't consider the ramifications of their actions.

And the google higher ups don't do anything about this because in the long run it makes them more money.

Aren't the higher ups at Goolge also programmers?

Yes, that's true. Google's goal is to organize the world's information for you. To organize it, they have to collect it. This makes them money because there's a lot of information out there, Google has a nice interface for searching it, and people will pay them (via their eyeballs currently) for that tool. The more information Google collects, the more convenient the product becomes, and the more value is generated. When you generate value, you generate money.

"Don't be evil" is not just marketing copy.

Even if the programmer's intentions are purely about code, and even if we assume management right now is entirely benevolent, data like that is hard to take back. If it is handed over to a Google that wanst to provide "photos that are actually relevant to you" right now, it will still be there if Google morphs into one that "sell your information to credit reporting agencies"

Overall I am a fan of Google's products and current policies, and I think some of the criticisms are overhyped. But with that said, I do think a "Google is benevolent, take our word for it..." statement should be taken with a grain of salt and an eye on possible futures.

> sometimes programmers don't consider the ramifications of their actions. Google doesn't want to know who your friends and family are to sell your information to credit reporting agencies

I bet the execs and product managers realize the ramifications. If all of them profess to not realizing the ramifications, the following old quote probably applies.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23510.Upton_Sinclair

I like that Google does this and think it is in the best interests of the Internet and most people in involved. By creating opensource implementations and testing them we can move things forward faster; rather than letting people tie up standards in committee for years or creating something that can't be implemented well.

> They are trying to push certain technologies into certain directions under the cover of opensource

This is kind of a ridiculous statement, I'm sorry. The very definition of opensource precludes any kind of cover. The critical piece of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is the extinguish, and by being opensource that isn't possible.

Google is pushing technologies in certain directions, as other commenters have noted, but it lacks a threat because the second Google does something evil with their proprietary tech, it either gets forked or replaced.

That's completely false. You, as a programmer who wants to fork Chrome, do not have the advertising power and reach that Google has. You do not have the Google.com home page. You do not have the ability to air ads during the Super Bowl. You do not have the Google brand. Instead, you have a pile of source code and a compiler.

Despite what people would like to think, technologies do not generally win because of their technical superiority (although Chrome is a damn good browser). They win for innumerable other reasons unrelated to things that engineers do.

The fact is, open source or not, Google has total control over Chrome. The fact that somebody with vastly inferior resources could fork it is not a credible threat to that control.

What about a competitor with comparable resources? Not really challenging your claim, I'm actually just curious. Why don't Google's competitors just use Google's own OSS against them?

Say Facebook acquires Rockmelt, which is based on Chromium. Rockmelt as an independent browser isn't much of a threat, but with Facebook's resources (money, engineering, publicity), they could easily bake in their own social stuff on top of an already amazing browser.

Same thing with Amazon/Kindle and Android.

Well, yeah, those competitors could (leverage Google's OSS against it).

But an open source community, outside of some company control, not as easily if at all.

Take for example Mozilla/Firefox.

Well, didn't it do very well, and in many places, won over IE? It did. But it did it:

(1) Starting with the branding/product/code made by a huge (at the time) company (Netscape).

(2) Having mostly people from said company working on the Mozilla version.

(3) When Netscape died, it almost took Mozilla with it.

(4) Firefox revived the interest in the browser big time, but Firefox lives on a $100M a year Google subsidy.

Would Firefox still be worked at a competitive pace without Google's money?

I seriously doubt it.

Because browser wars are expensive (look at how much money Google had to throw at Chrome to make it the #2 browser), and browsers are hard -- finding people who are qualified to work on browsers is not easy.

""" The critical piece of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is the extinguish, and by being opensource that isn't possible."""

It's entirely possible.

A project that's open source but has 90% of the dev team, and especially the major players working for a parent company, it's not a "community" project.

And being a community project is what people most want when they root for open source software.

For one, the parent company, by simply hiring tons of developers, has the say in how the project is run and what it's roadmap is.

On top of this, it's extremely difficult or almost impossible to fork such a project. The fact that you have the LEGAL/LICENSING capability to fork it means nothing. What's important is the TECHNICAL/COMMUNITY viability of a fork.

> This meme about Google turning into "old bad Microsoft" is a result of false dichotomy.

I'll repeat my "mantra" here: Google, and almost every known web company is very close in terms of interoperability. It's false that they embrace openness and it's incredible how "our community" is so blind. When you run an application in your own machine, even if it's the closest one (i.e: Microsoft) you can reverse engineer it, but you can't reverse engineer the cloud. So, when Twitter is talking about APIs they are lying because if you, for example, try to analyze your social network with more than a few levels you will soon crash with their API call limit. If you want to automate Google searches taking advantage of their huge index, it will be impossible, they don't sell that service. They only make some things "open" if they don't clash with their business. In the case of Microsoft we can reverse engineer everything that's not in the cloud (Hotmail doesn't matter!)

I've written more about this in some of my articles at:

http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/

http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/

Wow, three downvotes in a row and without any reply...

It wasn't me, but it was a little OT.

It's not OT, it's talking about interoperability. Twitter and Google issues are only a single case between a whole web community that want to integrate their applications with mainstream services.

After rereading up the chain, I see that someone did use the interoperability argument, so yeah, not OT.

You have 200 karma and are complaining about "Google apologists" when your allegations of "extending" of "embrace, extend, extinguish" are new features in Chrome and charging for APIs like Maps (saw yesterday's article, I see). Come on.

What on earth does his karma have to do with anything?

He has a relatively new account, he makes unfounded accusations and terribly stereotypical FUD about Google, is rude to people who write him replies in comments and then edits his comments mocking the "Hacker News community" because they disagreed and he wasn't able to explain his stance. The karma was a shot across the bow.

Google and Apple are the new IBM/Xerox/Microsoft: big, slow and monopolistic, in their own ways. It's the cycle of life!

There, I said it. Let's get downvoted together!

So hard to give up gmail habit though...