Is Google crippling Firefox? | Hacker News Reader

Is Google crippling Firefox?

medium.com

165 pointsfivre60 comments

Google's HTML 5 media player uses Media Source Extensions (MSE) now [1]. This enables them to use adaptive streaming implemented in JavaScript using DASH JS libraries.

Unfortunately MSE support is not complete in Firefox so the MSE using HTML5 YouTube player doesn't work. This will be why Google would be serving Flash. I don't know if they continue to serve the non-MSE HTML 5 player.

MSE support in Firefox is in progress. Nightly builds can enable it by changing the 'media.mediasource.enabled' about:config setting.

Don't do this though because it will definitely degrade your YouTube playing. Due to an incomplete feature it waits for the entire video to download before playing. There's a patch for this that gets playback working but there are still issues with the adaptive streaming itself (because the implementation is incomplete).

Follow bug 881512 [2] if you want to track support in Firefox for the "Get YouTube working with MSE" issue.

I wrote a bit about this [3] a while back and will do an updated post, if someone else doesn't first, once YouTube support is stable.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/media-source [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=881512 [3] http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2013/08/20/progress-towards-media-s...

So Google pushed a new code/technology, supported only by Chrome.

This is not far from the "Google crippling Firefox" point of view.

MSE is actually really cool and makes streaming media over HTTP much more pleasant. I'm not surprised they want to keep the number of codepaths they have to support low. As the GP mentioned, MSE is coming to Firefox soon anyway.

ActiveX is actually really cool and makes [whatever new feature] much more pleasant. I'm not surprised they want to keep the number of codepaths they have to support low. Have we been here before?

Once they forked Webkit into Blink they took the bad path.

What does Blink have anything to do with this? Blink is completely open source as is Webkit?

The difference is that MSE is a W3 standard, as linked to in the original comment. It's not Google's own proprietary standard.

Ah, that is indeed a fair point; hopefully, Google will switch to capability checking instead of UA sniffing, once this is implemented in FF.

Hardly. The "new code/technology" is completely open spec/proposal and its implementation is open source in Chromium. In terms of "Google pushing it", the spec was co-edited by people from Microsoft and Netflix. In terms of "supported only by Chrome", this is strictly Mozilla's fault as there is nothing stopping them from implementing the spec today.

This article and a lot of comments here are really sensationalizing reality. Google needs to serve tons of video data efficiently so they are motivated to push things like MSE. Reading this as "Google crippling Firefox" seems really dramatic and contrived.

> I don't know if they continue to serve the non-MSE HTML 5 player.

They do. Just disable Flash and you'll get an HTML5 player, at least for some videos.

As for reloads, it seems it's not working.

The author makes a massive leap of faith between "I downloaded the pages with Chrome and Firefox user agents, and there was differences" and "can't understand the differences, therefore there's obviously malicious intent".

Cross-browser development, especially for cutting-edge, novel features on a massive codebase is hard. Not insurmountably, but it doesn't allow one to automatically attribute it to malice.

That was my first thought as well - the author makes an extremely poor leap in logic.

Indeed.

With this claim, you really need to figure out why and what. It's http and text, so figuring out what triggers the different behavior is feasible and needs to be done before throwing out allegations.

Yes, he lost me completely there. I was expecting he would at least provide his data (the diff'ed portion) so more knowledgeable people could pitch in. Instead I got no data and a sweeping conclusion.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r7ghhhq1ys3l5am/firefox_youtube.ta... for what it's worth, several different copies of the same video across different browsers/browsers pretending to be other browsers

My guess is that it is probably not overtly malicious, but that people at Google are just responding to incentives. There are simply more incentives for Google to get things working 100% right in Chrome.

It is not to say that it is ok, though, as it could result in more people switching away from Firefox -- which is not a good thing for the web.

I, an enthusiast Firefox user, had to stop using Hangouts in Firefox because it could get excruciatingly slow (while fine in Chrome). Again, not saying it's Google's fault; it may be the case that with my configuration, Firefox is just generally slower than Chrome for the kind of fancy code that powers Hangouts. But they certainly did not try to make it run well for me, for lack of incentives. Many people (especially lay) would have responded by switching to Chrome. I responded by deactivating gmail chat and switching to Skype.

This is true about incentives, but it's also how pretty much all bad stuff in the real world actually happens, rather than black hatted evil-doers twirling their mustaches (though there's a bit of that too).

Some consider "incentives matter" to be a good two word summary of economics, it would be great if people bore that in mind when dealing with corporations, rather than treating them like local sports teams.

Though I think in this case, Firefox and Google actually have their incentives pretty well aligned, with each other and the general public (generally "make web video better"), it's just a matter of timing.

Re. author's "I noticed that Youtube would not provide the HTML5 player to Firefox even if requested"...

Tried to repro, Linux Mint 16, Firefox 28:

1) Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UloBiVGtAP4

2) Flash-based video served

3) Go to http://www.youtube.com/html5

4) Click "Request the HTML5 player"

5) Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UloBiVGtAP4

6) HTML5-based video served

Edit: using a less annoying video as test case.

For me following these steps using Ubuntu I get the Flash player both times. Did you get a preroll ad both times you tried it? They use flash (except for the MSE player). If you didn't get a preroll you may have got the HTML 5 player.

I got the pre-roll ad, yes, which was also served as HTML5. I tried clicking more videos from the front page, so far all HTML5.

Interesting! I wonder what the difference is.

I just noticed that if I switch to "https://", Flash-based videos are now served. Back to "http://", same video served HTML5. So this is it, "https" is the culprit (for whatever reason)?

Edit: On Chromium, "https://" or "http://" I get served HTML5.

So, could it be that Firefox somehow doesn't provide the proper cookie value telling the site to use HTML5 when using "https://" (I did set HTML5 pref with "https://")?

Edit: A cookie named "GED_PLAYLIST_ACTIVITY", used for "[e]ncrypted connections only", is used on Firefox only. I don't see this cookie on Chromium on an encrypted connection. So, there might be a link with the presence of this cookie and the serving of Flash-based videos.

I can confirm this is the behavior I'm seeing on Firefox. However, it's important to note that YouTube seems to force https if you're logged in, meaning logged-in Firefox users ALWAYS get the Flash player. I've resolved this for now by installing the YouTube ALL HTML5 add-on ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h... ).

Chromium/Ubuntu. Forcing HTML5 player gets me mostly: "video not available".

I think is Media Source Extensions support which is "not working" for Firefox see http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2014/03/media-source-extensions

While I respect what the author is trying to do, it is a pretty huge leap to make such conclusions. This is the kind of thing you file a bug report for and get a response from a Google dev about the issue.... not start a potential browser flamewar without enough fact.... [especially if you say you saw a JS error but don't say what it was....]

So two features of a site run by Google are not working as expected on "third-party" software and the conclusion is, that Google is doing it with malicious intend? Thus could I conclude that if something at medium.com is not work properly on all browsers, they are trying to cripple that one browser?

To the author: Next time think a bit more critical about the topics you're writing.

Where can I download medium.com's web browser?

To fix this problem for now there is an add-on that forces HTML5 playback in Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h...

I can confirm that this extension works perfectly. I haven't had any issues watching YT videos in Firefox (without flash) ever since installing this.

I can confirm same behaviour on fedora 20. No HTML5 with flash installed, have to remove it to get Firefox to access the HTML5 player

Well, I had to test this. Using Firefox 28. Went to Youtube front page. Click top video available. Got served Flash-based video. Went to http://www.youtube.com/html5 to request HTML5 to be served. Went back to front page, clicked on top video. I was served a HTML5 video. Linux Mint 16/Cinnamon here.

Honestly this is probably just a bug, if this post gets seen by the right people I'm sure it will be fixed.

While that might be true, Google is now becoming big, aggressive and "evil" enough for people to start asking these questions.

That was unthinkable only a few years ago.

That was unthinkable only a few years ago.

No it wasn't. People have been publicly accusing Google of malice for years.

The bug, which is in Firefox, not Youtube, has been open for nearly a year. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=881512

Although I disagree with a lot of Google's policies (with respect to privacy, etc.), the claims made by the author here don't make much sense. It's pretty clear that the author and many of the people commenting don't understand how web development for multiple platforms works. Using a new web standard technology (http://www.w3.org/TR/media-source/) that isn't implemented by all browsers and providing a polyfill for non-compliant browsers isn't "crippling" the other browsers. It's considered best practice. If websites only used technologies that are available in all browsers, the web would never move forward.

Consistency in video support is almost non existent. So serving variations for every platform is frequently better simplified. Rather than come up with every possible test we simply broke it up into two categories, those that need flash (HDS) and those that don't (HLS). I'm sure there are some browsers that would work for HLS that are getting served HDS and flash, but they still work, and we got fairly wide compatibility without having to spend too much time maintaining compatibility lists. This might not be the best way to run a video specific site like youtube, but being a moving target, I wouldn't be surprised.

I am having troubles with Safari.

Here's interesting insight: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/35817/youtube-why...

I can't quite put my finger on it, but whenever I access maps.google.com from Firefox running on my Arch Linux... I am unable to zoom or search or do anything. It just shows me the world.

When I open the same URL in chromium however, everything works perfectly.

Just my 2 cents.

I suspect something got broken for ads. You can call that "crippling" if you wish, I do, but other opinions differ.

I've noticed YouTube doing a lot of work to try to run ads even when blockers and stuff are trying to stop them from running.

I loathe watching YouTube videos on iPads nowadays.

Google is really the new monopoly. They've bundled a new non-standardized technology into the platform and then brow beat everyone else into implementing it by having the rest of the "planned economy" (aka Google Apps) use it.

Chrome is the new IE. Javascript is the new Flash. History repeating itself again.

No. Mozilla are doing a perfectly good job of that on their own.

Would it be so surprising? Google has been doing this for years to other browsers. Blocking based on UA, using features not supported by other browsers (and showing those features to those browsers), manipulating users to downlaod Chrome...

Firefox was just way too big piece of the income to poke it.

Or IE11 in this case :>

This is just FUD. Google has typically provided full functionality to all modern browsers — fallback versions being served to older UAs only. Typical advanced features Google uses are things like SPDY — this differs from the old-fashioned Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguish in that they are almost all standardised features, in a variety of stages of implementation among different browsers.

And users aren't "manipulated" into downloading Chrome - that's a weasel word.

cough Opera cough

What about www.google.com on Firefox for Android? It has been crippled for quite some time.

In what way has it been crippled?

Well, uglier featurephone-like webpage, no swiping menu from left, no card-like results display, etc. Now it's better than months ago but still quite a different experience than stock android browser or chrome.

Maybe it's me being naive and not tech-savvy but I used to think one page should look the same on different browsers.

Actually, it isn't. There is at least one case where Google deliberately blocked a (mobile) browser from accessing its maps service: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-admits-it-was-blocking...

There is also a debatably bad faith block on Microsoft's well-designed Youtube app on Windows Phone that it put out a while ago. This app failed to live up to some rather unreasonable demands from Google, so they banned the entire thing wholesale. (note that there are other Youtube apps on the Windows Phone store, such as Metrotube, which are not blocked)

Google isn't the "do not evil" white knight in shining armor it used to be. It is much closer to the old Microsoft these days.

In our last test, IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality. As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users.

Frankly, a perfectly justifiable reason to perform a redirect.

There is also a debatably bad faith block on Microsoft's well-designed Youtube app on Windows Phone

Isn't this sorted? IIRC, this was down to Microsoft not complying with terms of use wrt. the implementation of ads.

Google isn't the "do not evil" white knight in shining armor it used to be. It is much closer to the old Microsoft these days.

Google are not, and never were, a "white knight" - they're just a better-than-average-at-openness tech company. If those examples are the worth you can highlight, then the comparison to Microsoft—who, if you remember, actively tried to eliminate Linux!—is beyond preposterous.

Frankly, a perfectly justifiable reason to perform a redirect.

I can't say with any certainty what things were like at the exact time of the block, but I just popped open Google Maps with a Windows Phone (which doesn't have most of the latest large updates, just some hotfixes from like 6+ months back) and pan, zoom, etc. all work just fine and is very smooth. And this is one of the earlier phones. On top of this, all they did was redirect back to google.com, without any message as to what was going on. (e.g.: your browser does not work well with Google Maps yet, you can do a local search from our main website for now) The whole thing just... smells kind of bad to me. Regardless of whatever statement they might have made.

Isn't this sorted? IIRC, this was down to Microsoft not complying with terms of use wrt. the implementation of ads.

I believe in the big kerfuffle that went on, Microsoft was basically saying "Work with us and we'll comply", but Google basically didn't give them any APIs or anything to work with in order to make a compliant app. (I think they even ended up finding some private APIs in order to make some stuff work) I think, in the end, the reason it got banned was down to some clause in their terms of use that required them to use web technology in their implementation, which would have horribly crippled the app, and was not particularly feasible to implement in any reasonable amount of time. Not because Microsoft refused to display ads.

Unfortunately, I can't really give a good response to this. Part of what I might be able to say is private related to my job, and part of it is just a general feel for what the company is slowly turning into, rather than any specific enumerable list of things I can point to. There are things I can point to, such as how they handle Youtube and the content creators on it, or how they handle dealing with Microsoft, or customer support, the automated systems which hurt those that provide value for Google, etc., but I don't think any of it can live up to the level of "tried to kill Linux" that Microsoft was at a while ago. But I think that they might be starting to head in that direction, and that a lot of people who actually view them as a sort of "white knight" (see lots of comments on HN for examples of that when it comes to Google, or news, etc.) will gladly welcome that.

I guess I did have a few things to say in response. Agree or disagree with me as you will, this is entirely my own opinion.

I think, in the end, the reason it got banned was down to some clause in their terms of use that required them to use web technology in their implementation, which would have horribly crippled the app, and was not particularly feasible to implement in any reasonable amount of time. Not because Microsoft refused to display ads.

There are already public APIs for building a full fledged Youtube client:

Youtube Data: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/ Youtube Playback: https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference

The issue was that Windows Phone 7 & 8 webview didnt support inline video playback, so they couldn't use the public playback API so were asking for access to Google's private APIs. Google declined

This has been rectified in Windows Phone 8.1: http://www.wpcentral.com/windows-phone-81-improved-youtube-e...

So they can now use the public API to build their client.

Background image on Google search was blocked by UA, search by image was blocked by UA. Gmail, google homapge and youtube all showed message convincing user that they should switch to Chrome. Various applications used features not supported by all major browsers.

Opera used to be routinely blocked on Google properties years ago - Google Adwords as well as Google Analytics. There was no fallback, just a block message. When you changed the user agent, the site worked ok.

I'm not sure about today, but it was definitely a real thing.

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