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Comment by pockmarked19 | Hacker News Reader

Spoiler: they aren’t.

Most Googlers use Chrome at work so it’s going to be better supported incidentally. The reason behaviors change when switching UA is because features vary across browsers and the UA ends up acting as a flag that turns features on or off. Not because someone is putting in a sleep() when they see Firefox. That would make for a very awkward code review.

When I was a Googler I exclusively used Firefox. Things were never so bad that I had to switch over to Chrome even with internal tools, though I suffered many hiccups due to this choice.

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When I was at Google, I had to chase around a major regression in only Firefox. Rendering of a part of the site worked great in Chrome, great in IE, great in Safari... Tanked to seconds-per-update on Firefox.

I was ultimately never able to find the root cause, and the issue went away with the next minor update of Firefox itself.

The thing is: for a junior engineer (who are often the ones who get assigned that kind of task because it's not high-priority to the product's feature list, which is the primary driver of success), that's a hell-project. Ultimately, it's a negative mark on performance review: "I spent a month chasing a problem with a browser used by 2% of our userbase and the end result is the problem fixed itself" is a terrible waste of company resources. And since Googlers get to choose what they think will be most impactful, it should be no surprise they avoid that choice every chance they get.

Google's whole self-management approach tends to optimize towards the center at the cost of the fringe.

That’s exactly how it is, and one of my biggest gripes was that the most impactful projects naturally tend to be the ones that carry larger risks. In an environment where you expect people to manage their own success as described in their own words, they are never going to choose the projects with the biggest potential impact, only the safest project with the greatest perceived impact.

That goes beyond ignoring the long tail of issues: it chokes out innovation.

So you're saying Google sends something different to Firefox causing performance issues yet when Firefox pretends to be Chrome, it works better. Seems sus to me.

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