"A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail."
I was a browser dev. I do not work for google, and in general have a rather low opinion of the company and its ethics. But... c’mon, that quote is stupid. Every web dev knows there is an infinity of strange reasons to add divs in odd places. The idea that this is a stealthy tactic targeted to slow down edge is ridiculous. Edge will patch the issue in a general way, and that will be that, and now Youtubes source would be stuck with the unnecessary complexity. Even if youtube’s devs would be okay with this, there are so many better ways to force youtube users over to chrome..
My guess is this dev had to debug a reported issue “youtube is slow”, and after realizing it is difficult to patch (likely because of shitty code in edge), started pointing fingers. No. That is called a bug, plain and simple. Maybe try fixing your browser implementation so a single empty element doesn’t destroy video performance...
Edit with one more thought: I also feel youtube’s response in not removing the element seems completely justified. Youtube has features to implement and deadline to meet. Why should google have to throw dev resources at fixing problems stemming from microsoft’s bugs with no benefit to themselves? M$ should be the one footing that bill, again, by paying their own devs to fix problems of their own creation.
I wonder if this edge developer's moral indignation also extends to the repeated aggressive "move to edge" tactics. I'm sitting on my windows 10 laptop, where we went from "hey i can switch my browser at will" to "hey we buried it", and then also "when you try switch, it tries to convince you to stay with edge in the hopes you will get tired of trying to switch the defaults".
But that's not enough, apparently, so it was also "when you browse with chrome or firefox, we give you notifications saying you are draining your battery faster and should move to edge"[1]. This predates the stuff talked about in this article.
That's also like the start of these tactics. I'm sure Google and Mozilla asked Microsoft to stop doing that, "to no avail". Meanwhile, the complaint here is basically "they made our annoying and stupid notification not true". Having dealt with these tactics repeatedly, i can't work up any indignation over this. The only one i feel even mildly sorry for is Mozilla.
Wait a guy who works for a company that uses the world's most popular website (the google search homepage) to aggressively proselytize it's own browser is complaining about Windows prompting you to use Edge? For real dude?
Edit: I'll expand. You work for a company the bundled Chrome as a default install with many other toolbars and utility programs. You sell a line of computing products where Chrome is not only the default, it is literally the only browser than can be installed. Chrome is the default browser on the world's most popular OS (Android). Multiple Google properties have refused to work on other browsers and displayed a popup asking people to switch the Chrome (Inbox is the one I remember most vividly). Here's a link to people trying to figure out how to get Chrome to stop asking to be default every time it opens: https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/59843-how-stop-goog... As you can see it's not exactly an easy task. All of this, and probably more, and you're here talking about what Windows does? C'mon man.
I am so unbelievably tired of the hacker news "you work for company x and therefore your opinion is tainted and you aren't allowed to have personal opinions" crap I don't even know where to begin. It's just another form of worthless bias being used to dismiss arguments.
It's no different than any other form of bias, even if it seems more socially acceptable here.
If you want to argue with what I actually wrote, happy to have that discussion. Otherwise, not interested, sorry.
Hey. This is a pattern of argument that is explicitly forbidden by the site guidelines. Please stop asserting, overtly or implicitly, that people are making arguments because they're shills for this company or that.
Beyond that: I've read every 'DannyBee comment on HN for the past several years and I assure you he has far stronger opinions about register allocators and the LLVM development process and open source licensing than he does about people criticizing Google.
He doesn't have a point. He has whataboutism. So I decided to address his whataboutism by pointing out that Google is honestly even worse at what he is talking about, and thus his whataboutism is in fact invalid. So in a roundabout way I did address his "point".
You certainly have an interesting perspective on what you did there.
That comment would be equally as worthwhile and useful if you had started it with some other form of bias to justify it like "Wait, a woman who is black ...."
If your comment starts with some form of "well you are an x so ...", it's probably not actually addressing anything other than your own interesting biases against people.
Or you know, just dismiss whatever you want with bias and claims of whataboutism.
I guess that works too!
Despite your claim of whataboutism, i'm instead showing the author is incredibly conveniently eliding large parts of actual history in trying to make their point.
You may want to argue those shouldn't matter (or make it worse). That's at least a more valid argument than you made.
I would argue if you asked most people they do in fact matter because the world is not an abstract idealist paradise.
The internet definitely never has been in the past, so saying it isn't in the future is not particular interesting.
>Meanwhile, the complaint here is basically "they made our annoying and stupid notification not true".
What? I am so lost. The complaint is that video acceleration is being disabled, perhaps intentionally, resulting in loss of battery life. That is a bad thing for users, regardless of this whataboutism nonsense. If there was some reason the empty tag was added, Google PR is free to let us know. The fact that they did not is quite telling.
How can you support something blatantly bad as this unless you work for that company? Oh wait...
And Chrome is full of dirty tricks of it's own. For example they paid Gigabyte to add Google Chrome to show up as an 'update' to system software.
> How can you support something blatantly bad as this unless you work for that company?
I tend to agree with the point made in a different part of the thread that arguing against people based on the company they work for is not productive. People are more than just cogs in a machine and have a right to be regarded as such, even if it's just for the sake of argument.
The correct question for DannyBee might be How can you support something blatantly bad as this even if you work for that company?
I'm sure there are plenty of Googlers who would have a problem with deliberately adding a misfeature to a site to slow down a competitor's browser, plenty would fix a bug like that if it were reported and it was really just a bug, etc. Those guys aren't all in leadership positions...
Microsoft was spamming users with messages saying Chrome or Firefox was draining their batteries and they ought to try Edge, and you think that justifies Google putting a feature in Youtube which actually drains an Edge user's batteries?
Maybe you want to walk that statement back a bit? Wow.
To play devil's advocate a bit, the rule was that third party Youtube apps needed to be written in HTML5. This by definition does not apply to the official app.
This does not make the rule less dumb, but it is clear.
Huh? Why does the empty HTML element do that? YouTube has a lot of not-empty HTML elements overlaid on the video too... I can't imagine a simple <div> alone is doing this, otherwise wouldn't the rest of the UI also do that?
This is standard practice, the system compositor has a fast path for video decoding and rendering. The fast path will not be taken when software composition is needed (eg, something is overlaid or blended).
If you’re asking why they didn’t think to design the fast path to deal with Byzantine faults, it’s probably because why the hell should they?
Yes, I understand that. However, empty divs are not an edge case, and I can imagine a lot of not-insane reasons an empty div might be on top of a <video>. The entire player chrome is within the video nowadays, and it often intersected in the past (the old seek bar for example.) If there is more to this story than an empty div, I would be interested to hear. Today's YouTube seems to put display: none on almost all of the overlays when the user is not hovered, and if that isn't good enough, I think that is a bit absurd. (Actually, there are some empty divs, but they're really just empty... Some contain display: none'd divs.)
It's not as simple as you make it sound. If they fixed one issue Google could put another. It's always easier to break something than to fix it, exponentially so.
Question about browser implementation: if the Edge team knew that this element's sole purpose was to mess with their performance, couldn't they just configure Edge to ignore that HTLM element when loading a YouTube page? Just strip it from the DOM completely, as though the element never existed?
To expand upon my original question, I get that adding in functionality specific to each website is not ideal. But the technical cost here (removal of one DOM element from one website) seems to be drastically smaller than the payoff (not getting screwed over in terms of performance on one of the world's most popular websites).
Am I seriously underestimating the eng cost of such a patch, or is there some unwritten rule that browsers aren't supposed to mess with the HTML that a page serves?
Because within hours of the patch Google would modify YouTube to break it again and Microsoft’s users would have to wait until the next Patch Tuesday - repeat ad infinitum.
How many one-off patches will be needed since the malicious website will just change something else as soon as the fix is deployed? And rinse and repeat.
If the intent was to slow down Edge, then this is just a cat and mouse game. Google can always ensure that its web properties are more efficient on Chrome.
That's why it's good for Microsoft long term that they pull out of the html rendering business- they know they cant fight Google in any meaningful way because, well, Google has the monopoly on many Internet services and are able to "optimize" for their own experience.
Even though it's good for Microsoft resource and focus wise, it's bad for the consumer. Supporting Firefox will become more important, like back in early 2000s.
This article has some good points, but I don't agree with it's treatment of the SPDY->HTTP/2 and QUIC->HTTP/3 process. In both cases, Google engineers identified a real problem, made a prototype solution, encouraged others to implement it, and ultimately participated as core members of standardizing what is in some sense a "v2" protocol built on the lessons of their initial experiments. The article presents the working group as fighting to de-Googlify the protocols, but the reality seems to be that Google was working closely as members of that committee, and the new versions were intended to be better for everyone.
The monopolistic action would be to design a new protocol then keep it proprietary and secret so your competition can't have services or browsers that are as fast. That's not what happened.
The whole article seems to have been motivated by the ex-MSFT engineer's comment, padded with some false impressions on how standards involve.
HTTP2 and HTTP3 are decided by committees and it isnt Google who controls it.
While I dont know whether the MSFT engineer's claims are true or not, but even with some benefit of the doubt, having an empty <div> cause such an obvious performance degradation sounds to be like hyper optimized for an implementation rather than actual breakthrough.
> HTTP2 and HTTP3 are decided by committees and it isnt Google who controls it.
That was then, this is now. What happens when Google implements its next protocol in Chromium? With Blink's market share, would they even bother with committees anymore? At this point, they could more or less get what they want out of it without the extra bureaucracy.
> What happens when Google implements its next protocol in Chromium? With Blink's market share, would they even bother with committees anymore?
They didn't bother for SPDY or QUIC. They were implemented in the browser, like many others features, before any committee. It's the committees though that decided to base their works for HTTP/2 and HTTP3 over theses.
The danger isn't on what they implements, because that's already something they do (and all others browsers do), but based on what they DON'T implements. What if they ignore HTTP3 and only use a new protocol they made?
The absolute worst part is their random bans for ludicrous reasons. Resold pixel? Ban! Art nudity? Ban! Hollywood photos in app screenshots? Ban! YouTube reports? Ban!
And the ban hammer deletes everything from Gmail to Google docs to Google drive.
There is no other company that I despise as much as Google. Not even Facebook. FB had a customer support call me when my account was blocked due to invalid credit card in ads. Amazon has excellent customer support for buyers and sellers.
Google just deletes everything and doesn't even bother providing any support for it.
The day Google dies, I will be opening up a champagne and celebrating.
lol'd at FB customer support.
sometime in late 2017 someone with a Pakistan IP has somehow made 2 pages about flowers on my FB account, created an ad account and ran 2 ad campaigns on them.
weirdly enough they paid for the first campaign, but removed their card details afterwards.
FB nags me on my wall to update my credit card info for a failed payment of ~20$, a year after I wrote two emails to them explaining the situation.
You can just close your fb account and move on with your life. Good luck doing that with google and its drive/docs/gmail/search/apps/phone/maps/contact manager/chrome
see, an article about their anti human support policies might've persuaded me. this article is just Microsoft accusing them of doing a less aggressive form of what Microsoft got in trouble for doing w/ IE 20 years ago.
Yes. But the Microsoft of today is a much different company than twenty years ago. They have completely different leadership. Is it fair to judge them still for then?
I'm not sure I agree with some of the conclusions. Webkit/Blink are open source, as long as MS contributes back, I really don't see the problem. Anyone can fork, experiment, enhance etc.
When I've tested under Edge, specifically, stuff that should work often didn't. It got better each release, but the pace was almost as painfully slow as IE was before it.
I think people attribute too much to Chromium’s open source nature.
The repository is controlled by Google, it’s their project. Whatever Google wants in Chromium goes in.
The only path forward in a case in which Microsoft disagrees would be a fork. However a fork would do nothing to Chrome’s market share. Microsoft failed to gain any traction with Edge and that won’t change after they start building on Chromium.
This is also similar with Android, an ecosystem that Google managed to control even if there’s a lot of incentive for the phone makers to fork. The reality being that no fork would succeed for as long as Google is pumping money into the project, because it benefits from the network effects of their app store and of their flagship apps.
This is why open standards are important, with open source being in fact an orthogonal issue.
I'm not against open standards... however, when Google was having issues with Apple in terms of priorities, that's when they forked off... if MS has the same issues, they can do the same. In the end, there can still be standards, and I understand that if it hits like 75% market share overall that it becomes a defacto standard. I saw it with IE6, and it was painful after a while.
However, I don't think Blink will stop getting better just because MS starts using it, or Google stops. Worst case, we see a fork. Also, now Edge can at least be available outside windows. I do think the biggest mistakes MS made are as follows.
- Tethering Edge releases to Windows Updates.
- Renaming IE to Edge instead of updating and hiding old ie better
- Making it Windows 10 only
Those were the worst mistakes that MS made, and to the last one, at least they made updating to win10 free for a couple years. I also, despite reporting, don't think the front end will resemble Chromium so much, I do think they will take some of their own UX lessons and tweak the front end while keeping the Blink engine in place. Also, swapping a lot of the synching services for MS equivalents, while keeping plugin compatibility.
The Google of ten years ago was the company we should have trusted the internet.
The Google of today has essentially removed the founders and become a search for profit. Once they split the company 'for accounting purposes' it meant the google part of alphabet was going to be run for increasing profit almost exclusively, which mean just what we are seeing now.
The google of old is gone. They operate at a scale and against competitors that are completely ruthless. It's not just profit. It's winning. Beating the competitor. Emphasis on "beating".
This is what most corporations at scale actually do and what they are. Constant battle in a hostile environment.
Google/alphabet is likely under threat of anti-trust and a whole host of other legal actions, eg possible pending monopoly charges, and likely criminal charges in multiple ways where they bent a rule for whatever reason. Lawsuits for other reasons we don't even know about. Lots of other speculative actions pending or in progress. Who knows what else. This is all part of the legal framework. An allegation is created and tested to see if could stick. If it can it gets thrown at the target.
Every other corporation at that scale is fighting these kind of battles every day. I'd actually be surprised if they weren't.
For those who think I'm talking only about google, you can substitute Facebook, J&J or any other large corporation across any industry.
they did. Microsoft already dropped EdgeHTML & announced they'll be using Chromium under the hood, although maybe the author didn't know or forgot to mention that here..
"A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail."