Google's backhanded tactics

As explained by former Firefox dev. Jonathan Nightingale

I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.

But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible." All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say "hey what gives?" And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks." Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.

I always suspected that those "an error has occured" messages on youtube when viewed in Firefox weren't freak accidents.

Doesn't surprise me.
Its all about the Benjamins

"don't be evil"

Facebook and Twitter are exactly the same.

Google is evil.

The best thing our society could do, is force Google to shut down, investigate its top echelon, impound all their servers, and then allow every user of Google to sue them when the depth of their malignancy and duplicity is discovered.

Have a search result get manipulated? Get some Google money.

Have your data vacuumed without your permission? Get some Google money.

Have your data sold without your permission? Get some Google money.

Their tentacles have encroached too far and need to be amputated. Those who have controlled them need to be dealt with appropriately.

Google is evil.

c3k said:

Google is evil.

The best thing our society could do, is force Google to shut down, investigate its top echelon, impound all their servers, and then allow every user of Google to sue them when the depth of their malignancy and duplicity is discovered.

Have a search result get manipulated? Get some Google money.

Have your data vacuumed without your permission? Get some Google money.

Have your data sold without your permission? Get some Google money.

Their tentacles have encroached too far and need to be amputated. Those who have controlled them need to be dealt with appropriately.

Google is evil.

Click to expand...

while we're at it lets just shut the internet down completely.. yes google isn't the roses and cupcakes they try to make themselves out to be but if you think getting rid of google will make the internet better then i have a rock to sell you..

They also really dislike you looking at youtube via firefox android and without their shitty app. After a week or so 'black nothing video, infinite loading' etc..

N4CR said:

They also really dislike you looking at youtube via firefox android and without their shitty app. After a week or so 'black nothing video, infinite loading' etc..

Click to expand...

eh ran into the same problem with chrome years ago so i've always used the app instead.. mostly just watch shit i'm already subscribed too which the app does fine with.

Should they have managed their business more like Yahoo? (other than investing in Alibaba in 2005)

Is that more fair while failing?

All big companies are evil, its a inherent fact, this was / are not not even limited to the capitalist world.
The ones that want to crown this achievement, most often do so by diving into the public coffers.
And here i am not even talking about general tax creativity, that belong under general evil.

BUT ! if enough people want to, even the biggest ( whatever ) can be brought to their knees.

I think people need to do everything that they can to stop using Google services... I am starting, myself, but in order to get rid of android I'd have to go back to a flip-phone or some other device utilizing another cartel member's OS..... which may be a good idea anyway.

I always thought "an error has occurred" was because I use add-block. That dam google trying to get me to watch adds or maybe they don't like firefox hard to pick which one.

Google is really turning into a bunch of shitheads. With all the garbage they allow to propagate on youtube and now becoming one of the government's biggest lobbyists I can only see negative things down the road. The worst story I read though was where they kept covering for that Levandowski douchebag. It's like Page and Brin have gone all-in on the SV kool-aid of disrupting industries at all costs.

sirmonkey1985 said:

while we're at it lets just shut the internet down completely.. yes google isn't the roses and cupcakes they try to make themselves out to be but if you think getting rid of google will make the internet better then i have a rock to sell you..

Click to expand...

Who said shut down the internet? Oh, YOU did.

Google is evil.

sirmonkey1985 said:

while we're at it lets just shut the internet down completely.. yes google isn't the roses and cupcakes they try to make themselves out to be but if you think getting rid of google will make the internet better then i have a rock to sell you..

Click to expand...

He makes a legitimate point and you come across as a demagogue here (not trying to be a dick just saying what I initially felt in reading what you wrote)

When Google "made the internet better" - they created a rather opaque business model (opaque until relatively recently when more information about how data is being collected and what data is being used has come out) in which they sell their own customers out to the highest bidder.... which I still don't know who Google's biggest customers are though I suspect some are probably governments around the world sucking up dossiers on their own people.

When you "make the internet" and in doing so rip away the privacy of hundreds of millions of users through lying (by omission) then you are "making the internet" on false pretenses - it is no longer "the internet" as we commonly know it but rather the "surveillance dragnet" in which anything you do in the presence of a smartphone can be monitored by unknown parties.

Think of it this way: How many people, do you think, would still be using their smartphones if a big message/audio recording came up every time they turned it on or walked near it stating something like:

"WARNING: By agreeing to be in possession of this device, anything that this device can "hear or see" with its camera and microphone will be recorded and stored, indefinitely, on both Google's and Google's affiliates' servers. Any device usage activity and any textual data (including but not limited to: texts, e-mails, chat logs, forum posts etc) sent from or received by this device will also be recorded in the same manner. IMPORTANT FINAL WARNING: This is a listening device utilized to collect comprehensive information on YOU, the user of this device, and anyone in the presence of this device; this information will be furnished to private and/or government organizations - Do you agree to these terms?" >> Accept/Decline

I've used Firefox for the past few years and never experienced an error on youtube (and I watch lots). However, it performs like a dog on Firefox and I have to use Edge on one computer since the video decoding is 4x as fast. I've reset Firefox and did whatever I could but never seemed to fix it.

Staples said:

Firefox for the past few years and never experienced an error on youtube

Click to expand...

I just had a good week or so where youtube videos would not filter according to date of upload, so when i did that the videos that came up on top was a mix of day / week month old videos.
BUT ! it did resolve itself again.