Google needs a new Chief Conspiracy Officer, because the current one isn't very good
This as a companion piece to my video "The REAL reasons YouTube is slow on Firefox"
There are people at Mozilla who believe in a conspiracy at Google that is currently trying to undermine Mozilla's Firefox browser and promote Google's Chrome browser.
If you watched that video, you'll get near the end and see me coming to a realization: this is not a good conspiracy; it does not make sense. Roughly, the conspiracy is:
Google tries to do things that will make Firefox appear worse to its users
Users will notice and switch away from Firefox forever - hopefully to Chrome
Nobody will notice that this is going on so Google can keep doing it until Chrome has 100% market share or whatever
(1) is important because Google needs to get people, presumably happy users, off of Firefox. In this conspiracy, they want Firefox to seem bad somehow. One of the ways that it's proposed that they're doing this is making YouTube videos 5 seconds slower on Firefox, but not on Chrome.
(2) is important because if users don't switch away from Firefox, and really if they don't switch to Google Chrome, then Google hasn't really accomplished anything for itself with this conspiracy. All Google will have done is annoy users or migrate users onto Edge or some other browser that they don't care about.
(3) is important because if people notice that Google is doing this then they would be concerned that law enforcement would step in and say "OK Google, what you're doing is illegal and antitrust and here's a billion dollar fine" which would totally undo all of the benefit that Google would get from this plan.
Individually each step of this plan sounds reasonable. The Chief Conspiracy Officer (CCO) in charge of sabotaging Firefox at Google would look at each step of this and say "yeah, that sounds like a good way to hurt Firefox".
The problem is the combination of step 2 and step 3. How is Google going to sabotage Firefox in a way that's so noticeable that users switch away, but so unnoticeable that Google never gets caught?
If you're confused about how this is supposed to work, then great! I brought you exactly up to speed on where I am! I don't understand why people at Mozilla thought that this was going to work! On the other hand, I guess it did take me thinking about it for 15 minutes or so to realize it was a silly conspiracy, so maybe they just haven't thought about it for 15 minutes yet. But once they do, they'll probably stop believing in it. (One hopes)
In the article, the Mozilla General Manager and Vice President of Firefox, and also Conspiracy Theorizing, proposes that the way that Google fixes bugs is also suspect.
The normal way that a tech company will fix bugs is:
The company will detect the bug (as a company). So, somebody will report it, one of the employees will notice it, a computer will explode and catch on fire and someone will say "hey that computer is on fire"
The company will usually turn the bug into some kind of ticket or put in a work tracking system of some kind and prioritize it. They'll say "you know, this bug is currently making our company illegal, it is high priority to fix" or "this bug only affects one person and that person stopped using our product so... lowest priority possible"
The company will fix the bug, hopefully. This involves lots of tearing out of hair, arguing with compilers, testing and retesting things.
The company deploys the bug fix to production somehow. Usually this takes time. A lot of companies have some kind of "push schedule" where all of these changes go out at once, so it will usually take until then for the bug to get fixed.
However, the nefarious way that the Mozilla guy proposes that Google is fixing bugs is... exactly the same process as this?
Except! He finds all the delays in the process to be suspicious when Google is doing it! I'm not really sure what he's expecting, but the way he describes it makes it sound a lot more sinister and the journalist writing an article totally bought it.
I'm not sure which of the steps in this process he proposes Google changes, but apparently Google fixing bugs in exactly the same way as every other tech company looks malicious from his perspective.
If you yourself have any insight into why Google fixing bugs in a perfectly ordinary way looks malicious please let me know because I'd be interested to hear it! Apparently this guy sees it. I just don't.
If you're interested in hearing a much more long-winded explanation of all of this and also just my personal commentary on it, please watch the video. I put a decent amount of work into it and I think that you'll enjoy it.
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