A busy week for corporate bullshit

After months of keeping low profiles while COVID-19 dominated the headlines, the tech industry has apparently decided to make up for lost time with a one-week barrage of bullshit to close out October. Because who doesn't want to slide into the busiest sales season of the year on a slick of one's own mess, and associated consumer ill will? What do you mean, "Nobody with any sense?"

Anyway, here's a roundup of my favourites from yesterday, complete with pithy snarky commentary.

Remember that Firefox is an option

I consume a fair bit of basically-free online content, and don't have anything against "paying" the creators of that content by having a little advertising accompany it, as long as those ads are not intrusive, or disruptive, or loaded with crypto-jacking (or other) malware. I only went nuclear on online ads because advertisers couldn't get their shit together.

So, when Google announced that their Chrome browser's selective ad-blocking functionality would be rolling out worldwide, I was cautiously optimistic. I was even considering switching back to Chrome from Firefox, just to see what sort of a web browsing experience I could have on Google's browser, now that I didn't have to be running multiple extensions in order to block the bad guys.

And then, Google had to go and break everybody else's ad-blockers. Because of course they did; Google sells advertising, and obviously they want you to stop blocking as many ads as possible. Which sucks; they're basically taking away consumer choice, just to line their own pockets. Even worse, though, Google aren't just breaking ad-blocking extensions; they're breaking a whole bunch of other stuff in the process.

As reported by ZDNet:

A planned update to one of the Google Chrome extensions APIs would kill much more than a few ad blockers, ZDNet has learned, including browser extensions for antivirus products, parental control enforcement, and various privacy-enhancing services.

[...]

The biggest of these categories would be extensions developed by antivirus makers and meant to prevent users from accessing malicious sites and for detecting malware before it's being downloaded.

Yikes.

Yes, Facebook's fiasco really did get worse...

Remember just yesterday, when Mark Zuckerberg was trying to explain their Cambridge Analytica dealing away as some sort of outlier, and talking about how, sure, in hindsight, they probably shouldn't have taken CA's money, but how were they to know at the time? Well, pretty much all of that was horseshit. CA wasn't any sort of an outlier, and the amount of data they received was not at all abnormal.

From The Guardian:

Before Facebook suspended Aleksandr Kogan from its platform for the data harvesting “scam” at the centre of the unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal, the social media company enjoyed a close enough relationship with the researcher that it provided him with an anonymised, aggregate dataset of 57bn Facebook friendships.

Facebook provided the dataset of “every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level” to Kogan’s University of Cambridge laboratory for a study on international friendships published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015. Two Facebook employees were named as co-authors of the study, alongside researchers from Cambridge, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Kogan was publishing under the name Aleksandr Spectre at the time.

[...]

“The sheer volume of the 57bn friend pairs implies a pre-existing relationship,” said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “It’s not common for Facebook to share that kind of data. It suggests a trusted partnership between Aleksandr Kogan/Spectre and Facebook.”

[...]

Facebook has not explained how it came to have such a close relationship with Kogan that it was co-authoring research papers with him, nor why it took until this week – more than two years after the Guardian initially reported on Kogan’s data harvesting activities – for it to inform the users whose personal information was improperly shared.

[...]

“We made clear the app was for commercial use – we never mentioned academic research nor the University of Cambridge,” Kogan wrote. “We clearly stated that the users were granting us the right to use the data in broad scope, including selling and licensing the data. These changes were all made on the Facebook app platform and thus they had full ability to review the nature of the app and raise issues. Facebook at no point raised any concerns at all about any of these changes.”

Kogan is not alone in criticising Facebook’s apparent efforts to place the blame on him.

“In my view, it’s Facebook that did most of the sharing,” said Albright, who questioned why Facebook created a system for third parties to access so much personal information in the first place. That system “was designed to share their users’ data in meaningful ways in exchange for stock value”, he added.

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie told the Observer that Facebook was aware of the volume of data being pulled by Kogan’s app. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use,” Wylie said. “So they were like: ‘Fine.’”

As I wrote yesterday, Facebook is the problem, here. They didn't just fall in with bad company, through no fault of their own; they jumped into shark-infested waters with a bucket of chum, ignored the circling fins (the warning signs that their own processes threw up), and raked in the money quite cheerfully right up until the moment when it became apparent that they were, indeed, bleeding heavily and about to lose an unknown number of corporate limbs. They didn't care when it mattered, and they didn't act when it mattered, and they damned well knew better at the time.

Don't call it a comeback

It's a little hard to believe now, but there really was a time when Mozilla's Firefox web browser was revolutionary.

Microsoft, having monopolistically driven their biggest competitor out of business (seriously, they lost the antitrust case after that one), was ruling the roost with Internet Explorer. Crucially, IE hadn't achieved market dominance by being a better product, and it actually wasn't that good; but Microsoft had successfully leveraged desktop OS dominance into a dominant position in the web browser business, and since IE's rendering engine was designed to be incompatible with other browsers, its dominance seemed to have achieved a self-sustaining state, sustained by web designers who were building web pages specifically for IE. The experience sucked, but there were no other options for Windows users, i.e. almost everybody. At one point, IE accounted for 95 percent of browser usage.

But then came Phoenix. Rising from Netscape's ashes, and bursting with innovative features like tabs and add-ons (yes, really), this early iteration of Firefox was simply better and more useful than Internet Explorer, and quickly converted a multitude of fans... to the tune of 32% of the browser market. Changing web standards, like HTML 4, spelled the end of IE-specific web page designs, and Microsoft was eventually forced to actually improve IE in response. It was too little, too late, though; the revolution had come, Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC web browser market was over, and it was Firefox that fired the first shots.

It would not be Firefox that reaped the revolution's richest rewards, though. Having made their name with breakthrough innovations, Mozilla... kinda stopped innovating. Google, meanwhile, having learned from Firefox's example, was bust building their own, innovative, new web browser. Early Chrome was not as good as the version of Firefox which was available at the time, but Chrome got better, fast, while Firefox stayed more or less the same. And now Chrome is 59.57% of the desktop browser market, and equally dominant on mobile, while Firefox holds only a 12.32% desktop share and 0.56% of the mobile market. Mozilla's former CTO declared the browser wars to be over, and Google to be the winners.

But that was way back in June, and this is August, and apparently Mozilla's current leaders are plotting a comeback, according to this piece on c|net:

Hundreds of Mozilla employees met a very different version of the Firefox mascot this June as they packed into a Hilton conference room in San Francisco for an all-hands meeting.

Gone was the blazing-orange fox snuggling a blue globe, the image that’s represented Mozilla’s scrappy browser since 2003. Instead, Firefox Senior Vice President Mark Mayo opened the event with a drawing of afox in menacing mecha armor, named Mark 57 — the same way ever-improving Iron Man suits are named.

The message isn’t subtle: Firefox 57, a massive overhaul due November 14, is ready for battle. Its main rival is Google’s Chrome, which [...] lured tens of thousands of us away from Firefox after it debuted in 2008.

But Firefox 57 could be the version that gets you thinking about returning — and maybe about saving the web, too. Mozilla began testing Firefox 57 on Wednesday, the culmination of more than a year of engineering work.

[...]

The top priority is speed. We all get subconscious pleasure with a browser that’s fast and smooth at loading websites, clicking buttons and opening and closing tabs. If your browser stutters while scrolling or makes you wait a long time for a page to appear, you’re more likely to dump it. Speed improvements in recent months already have had an effect, Mozilla says, stopping a steady stream of defections from Firefox to other browsers.

It’s too soon to tell how much faster Firefox 57 will be, but in one broad browser test called Speedometer, Firefox performance jumped significantly. Comparing the June 2016 version of Firefox with the version expected this August, Firefox performance increased 38 percent on MacOS and 45 percent on Windows, says Jeff Griffiths, Mozilla’s Firefox browser product leader.

So, that's the hype. Now for the reality check.

I have both Chrome and Firefox installed. So, out of curiosity, I tested both browsers, with the following results.

Google's Chrome:

Mozilla's Firefox:

Now, I'll admit that this is hardly an exhaustive or especially rigorous testing process, but even so... if this is 45% faster than Firefox used to be, then I hate to think how slow it used to be. With this much of a performance gap, Firefox would need to be three times faster to be worth making the switch from Chrome.

Worse yet, Firefox 57 will undermine one key feature that helped put it on the map: extensions. Again, quoting the c|net piece:

But another change in Firefox 57 will break a venerable part of Firefox — the extensions technology that lets you customize the browser. For example, with extensions you can block ads, protect your privacy, download YouTube videos, translate websites and manage passwords. Extensions were a key advantage back when Mozilla first took on IE in 2004, but Mozilla is switching to Web Extensions, a variation of Chrome’s customization technology.

The change paves the way for real improvements like a snappier response when you click your mouse or close a tab. But thousands of extensions will be left behind unless their authors build new versions for Firefox’s new foundation.

“This transition is very painful for extension developers, and many existing extensions won’t take this hurdle,” says Wladimir Palant, a developer with Firefox’s most-used extension, AdBlock Plus. Programmers had to start working with Firefox’s replacement before it was mature enough to use, he says.Google’s Hangouts extension is another casualty.

So, Firefox 57 is unlikely to be significantly faster than Chrome, it will have no mobile presence at all, and not only will it have no features that Chrome lacks (and that people want), Firefox will be actively undermining the one competitive advantage that it does have, namely its large library of available extensions. Instead, they'll allow Firefox to use Chrome's extensions, an obvious concession to Google's dominance in the browser marketplace... but if Chrome's extension library is better than Firefox's, why wouldn't users just stick with Chrome?

Seriously, with this as the pitch, how is Firefox supposed to mount any kind of a comeback?

Sorry, Firefox fans, but their former CTO was right. Barring some sort of miracle, the browser wars really are over, Google Chrome really has won, and neither Mozilla's Firefox nor Microsoft's Edge have any chance of changing the browser landscape.

No, Win7 users of Google's Chrome browser do not need to switch to Win10

Users of Windows XP or Windows Vista, however, may want to give Firefox another try.

From Digitaltrends:

Many reasons exist to upgrade to Windows 10, and for Windows XP and Vista users — which according to some data represent a bit more than 10 percent of all PC users — perhaps the biggest reason is for the night-and-day differences in support and security that Windows 10 provides. Google just offered another reason update to Windows, specifically that Gmail will reduce support for Windows XP and Vista, as Google announced on the G Suite blog.

While those users will still be able to access their Gmail messages, they will be doing so with the much less robust HTML version as early as December. The Windows version is actually a secondary cause of the reduction in functionality. More specifically, Google will be shifting all users running Chrome Browser v53 or below and it just so happens that the latest Chrome version supported on Windows XP and Vista is v49.

[...]

Google’s specific statement regarding the reduced functionality is as follows: “Gmail will continue to function on Chrome Browser v53 and below through the end of the year. Users who remain on Chrome v53 and below could be redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail as early as Dec 2017.”

As a Windows 7 user who's currently running Chrome v56, I can say categorically that this does not affect users of Win7 and up (unlike some reports that you may have seen), so 47.2% of Windows users will not be affected by this. Chrome, however, currently runs on 57.9% of all PCs, so there's definitely some significant portion of PC's Chrome user base that will be affected by this. It will be interesting to see whether those users stick with Chrome and accept the reduced Gmail functionality, or switch to Firefox to get a better experience.

The odds of them dumping Gmail, naturally, I rate at basically zero. Switching your email address is such a pain in the ass to do, I can't imagine that anyone will bother with it, especially since the main cloud-based email alternative is probably Hotmail, which Microsoft is presumably keen to marry to both Bing and Edge.

Edge browser adds features while losing users to Chrome, while Chrome gets battery boost

Here are two stories which are probably related.

First, from MSPowerUser:

Microsoft’s Edge browser has gained many new features with the release of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, including extension support, support for notifications, swipe to navigate, and much more. But it seems even the newer revamped version of Microsoft’s Edge browser couldn’t prevent the Redmond giant from losing browser share, as the combined user share of Edge and Internet Explorer fell 2.15% in August, ending the month with 32.54% according to Internet analytics vendor Net Applications. August marked the fourth month in the last six where the combined browser share dropped more than 2 points, and the second highest decline in the past 11 years. In the past six months, IE has lost more than 12 percentage points of its user share, and since the first of the year, 16 percentage points.

Google’s Chrome browser continues to benefit most from Microsoft’s decline, gaining another 3.02% in August to take a total of 53.97% of user share. Ever since Microsoft made the decision to end support for older browsers in January (all before IE11 and Edge), and gave users the option to either upgrade to the latest browsers or switch completely, they have experienced an unprecedented decline, with many users choosing to jump ship and board the competition.

Edge was missing several crucial features of modern browsers when Windows 10 launched, and ended up trying to sell itself on superior battery performance when new users didn't take to the browser. This was only a couple of months ago, and included anti-Chrome propaganda in Windows itself, warning users again Chrome because of its battery performance, which was supposedly much, much worse than Edge's. Several months on, though. it's pretty clear that features won out: Chrome had them, Edge didn't, and users are voting with their feet.

So it's probably not good news for Microsoft that Chrome is improving its battery performance, too.

From ZDNet:

Back in June, Microsoft hit out against Google by publishing test results which claimed that its Edge browser had the edge over Chrome when it came to power-saving on portable systems. Google has now responded by introducing new power consumption enhancements to the Windows version of its browser.
According to Google, the Chrome 53 release contains numerous CPU and GPU power consumption enhancements for video playback, along with other "big" performance and power improvements.
Google hasn't as yet published any test results to back up these claims, and I'm not expecting that Chrome will have closed the gap with Edge in one leap, but it's good that Google is addressing these issues.

The biggest loser in all of this may be Mozilla, whose Firefox browser has lost another 0.4% of the browser market, dropping to 7.69% (from a July 2006 peak of 25.1%). With Safari well back of Firefox, and Opera well back of Safari, it certainly looks like the fight for browser dominance is a two-horse race between Google and Microsoft, and Microsoft's recent efforts to attract people to Edge/Bing are either having no effect at all, or are actually hurting Edge's adoption rate by drawing attention to the popularity of both Chrome and Google.

After all, if people have to be bribed to use your product, how good can the product be? Also, the bribes themselves were pretty pathetic.

The Edge browser was supposed to be one of Windows 10's selling points: a truly modern browser that could finally outperform competing products like Chrome, and which was only available in Windows 10. But, like so many of Microsoft's claims about Windows 10, their claims about Edge have also proved to be more hype than substance, with the actual experience of using the product turning out to be mostly sub-par. Even as Microsoft slowly add modern browser features like extension support to Edge, Google are busy polishing their Chrome to be an even better browser, which makes luring users away from Chrome even harder... or, at best, not any easier, especially after making a lacklustre first impression.

First impressions... it turns out they really do matter.