In such cases, I tend to go with "never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence".
Most things that people assume are malicious often are usually prioritization issue. FF market is small, engineering resources are scarce (you may think they are vast, it's google after all, but you need to think of the "impact" engineer has to drive for promotion, which FF barely clears if anything).
Monopolists shouldn't have the benefit of doubt. If it acts in a way that seems like dominant market position abuse, the default position should be assume that's the case, and act accordingly.
At Google's scale, the easiest way to harm Firefox's market share is to simply not test changes on Firefox. Let Mozilla keep their browser implementation-compliant with Google's interpretation of the spec, not the other way around.
Corporations are not people.
Fair enough, Apple videos playing nice with Android cast devices is also trouble.
Trillion dollar company with probably <100K eng, spread over hundreds of products/features/etc, who also have to go through performance reviews and have to show impact.
So yes, my choice words are very intentional in this case.
leadership to prioritize their browser -> leadership to prioritize the most popular browsers. Yes.
This should be considered malice rather than incompetence. I believe that's what others are getting at.
(On the other hand, perfectly reasonable to assert "If the rules say the market leader doesn't have to care about the welfare of others in the market, maybe those rules need to change").
"sort by revenue", or "sort by users" is not as deliberate in my opinion. But sure.
I think this is a fantasy we have about big companies, esp big tech companies, often until we work at one.
"But they have so much money, surely it wasn't just one guy working on this major thing" and "If they wanted to do it right, it would have been done right" and such.
But this time, I'll assume a mistake because the potential anti trust fallout isn't worth it.
Breaking youtube might also be a resourcing issue still - like making sure they control the release process without having to allocate resources to make sure what they do work for windows phone too.
Note: I no longer work at google.
https://mspoweruser.com/google-claims-edge-slowing-empty-div...
These claims aren't isolated. I think it's a bad look for Google to repeatedly make mistakes when they are currently under multiple investigations for monopolistic behavior.
"Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system."
We should aim to have incentives that produce the behavior we want, which is that YouTube should function the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome.
I'm "incompetent" at doing the laundry. Strangely it's ok because strangely I never get asked to do the laundry. What a totally coincidental benefit that I am not knowingly perpetuating at all.
I doubt anyone has something like "if firefox sleep (100)"
Did you know that the DOJ (in the US) recently ruled Chrome to be separate from Google, due to monopolistic practices?
>never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence
Really? If only they uttered this phrase during the trial the could have got away with it, dang!
I am no Google fan, and I left it for a bunch of reasons. There may probably places where they do have monopolistic practices - and I won't comment on them - but my engineering sense is the explanation is much simpler here.
>please do not use anything they build
I actually try not to.
That's not even related to what I said. I mentioned the issue here is less likely to be due to monopolistic causes.
Also see this reply from an eng that did work around firefox regressions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389526
It corroborates with what i said.