This was a brilliant strategy. It allowed Google time to build Chrome at the same time slowing down : (1) explorer (2) Got decent data on CAC for browsers and what channels work and what don't.
Its interesting to see new era of browser wars playing out with Chrome firmly in the lead, but Microsoft attacking with Edge where ChatGPT on bing only available on edge browser and no where else. Would be interesting to see how Google would respond.
Chrome vs. Edge is not a browser war, they are both Chrome.
Speaking more broadly, the browser war is all but decided until the Chromes fail of their own accords.
The only non-Chrome browsers still in existence today are Safari and the Firefoxes (Firefox and its various forks). Safari is only relevant in iOS by way of Apple gatekeeping, and Firefox hasn't been relevant for well over the past decade thanks to Mozilla's utter mismanagement and malice.
They aren't both Chrome; they're both Chromium-based and use Blink and V8 under the hood. And Blink is just a fork of WebKit, which is Safari, so by your logic it's all Safari (it's not).
These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search. The war isn't over how CSS is rendered; it's over how many opportunities they have for surfacing their other products (search, email, identity and payments).
If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.
Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.
>This is incredibly wrong. They aren't both Chrome; they're both Chromium-based and use Blink and V8 under the hood.
So they're both Chrome. You can't have a war with just one participant.
>These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search.
They absolutely care about the rendering engine, because that's how you secure a monopoly and subsequently get to foist your default search engine and whatever other monetization schemes on more customers. Did you not learn anything from Internet Explorer and its victory over Netscape? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
There are many sites that only function properly in Chrome today, and that is to Google's (and now also Microsoft's) commercial interests. You can't have a browser war with just one participant.
>If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.
As far as Google is concerned, it's cheaper to pay Firefox to stay irrelevant than to compete on the market. Mozilla's flush with cash thanks to Google, but that also means they have no incentives to develop or not mismanage their products.
>Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
History also shows Mozilla today are more concerned about checking the right political checkboxes than delivering a good product that users want.
>(Source: I'm ex Mozilla)
I'm not surprised that (ex-)Mozilla would play the "Am I out of touch? No, it's the people who are wrong." meme almost to the letter, but that is probably neither here nor there.
>History also shows Mozilla today are more concerned about checking the right political checkboxes than delivering a good product that users want.
As a trans person, I am happy that my browser developers are on my side and not the side of the people who'd rather see me be harassed or bullied into suicide.
If I were a trans person, I would be insulted by large corporations draping themselves in such superficial, low effort, utterly incongruous lip service to my cause, using past and present prejudice against me as a marketing opportunity to sell more web browsers. Corporations love to passively attach themselves to causes like this. Social responsibility has become the responsibility of the marketing department, plus whatever minimum corporate change is sufficient to sell the sizzle.
This story has played out countless times, whether it's world hunger in the 1980s, third-wave feminism in the 1990s, global warming in the 2000s, or generic environmentalism (i.e. "greenwashing") in the 2010s. If they wanted to, corporations can be a force for good. The treadmill of causes du jour gives them a convenient excuse to not try.
For the sake of the trans community I'd like to think that this time they're being sincere. This time it's authentic. But I find it hard to believe. Maybe I'm too cynical.
Observing from the outside, the lip service is successful because it offers the illusion of righteousness to the weak-minded and stupid. The extremely online crowd love feeling being a part of a "cause" and not thinking about what the "cause" actually means. Until they're left out in the cold when the corporation shifts to another newsworthy cause to trumpet.
Some of the rabble go quiet, the rest double-down. They try to convince themselves and everyone else they weren't fooled. They want to believe they're still a voice in a worthy social cause, and not a pawn in a game that they don't even know how to play.
The question isn't whether a company genuinely supports trans people or just does it for the money. The question is whether they support trans people or oppose them. They're a company. They're driven by profitability and ROI first.
It doesn't matter that they're not sincere. It doesn't matter that they're not authentic. It matters that they help normalize pro-trans messaging, rather than normalizing anti-trans messaging, or doing nothing. Yes, it'd be nice to live in a world where you get to choose between the company that sincerely supports trans people and the company that merely does so for optics but still fires those sincerely opposing them, but that's not the one we live in.
To be honest, I think most of the trans community would be perfectly happy to have companies simply not actively funnel money into politicians who want them to stop existing. Alas.
There’s a lot I could take issue with about what you’ve said, not least of which being the absolutist “with us or against us” mentality which toxifies US politics. If you want to have a single issue dictate every one of the hundreds of choices you make every day, have at it, but I’m not going to pick a web browser based on which one pays the most lip service to one particular social issue.
But really, I just can’t get past the idea of “it doesn’t matter if they’re not sincere” when in the same paragraph you spell out exactly why that’s an absurd thing to say.
And indifferent is the right attitude. It is wrong for corporations to be treated as a channel of political power. This is a point we should be consistent on, we shouldn’t make an exception for when it seems convenient to us… because we certainly don’t like it when it’s used against us.
As a reasonable person, I am not happy that a browser's developers are more concerned about tangential, arguably completely unrelated, issues to their product.
You're confusing "more concerned" with "also concerned". I guarantee you that they can care about both at the same time, and I would LOVE to see an example where they prioritize trans rights at the expense of web standards.
The silence from Gregory Koberger is typical. The idea that Mozilla has zero malice, that it didn't compromise web standards in favor of social activism, meets the reality that they fired the creator of Javascript and ran his name through the mud.
As usual, we tech workers prioritize group identity over personal integrity.
Not meant to be silent, there's just no notifications on HN.
Ironic you're bothered Eich's name was "ran through the mud", but had no problem going out of your way to dig up and use my full name.
Everyone at Mozilla knew about his donation before he was promoted to CEO. Lots of people had opinions (and shouldn't they be allowed to?), but Mozilla officially supported him (this was his boss: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/building-a-global...). He was not fired, he stepped down.
Donating money to prevent people from getting married feels more in line with "malice" to me than people reacting to his donation, but hey, that's just my opinion and I haven't worked at Mozilla for over a decade.
Most importantly, though, Eich just proves that a single person left the company. I'm not sure how that indicates web standards were hurt or Mozilla's mission of a free and open web was compromised – like I said before, you can both care about the people around you and also care about an open web.
Are those the only two sides? In public support and signalling, or wanting you dead? I think I'd prefer neither personally, and for companies to just do their jobs.
As any person, if we start caring about the political or moral affiliations of the makers of every single product we use there doesn't seem to be an efficient, reliable source of such information. I can barely avoid a single company let alone all those I dont agree with.
Beyond a limited number of companies who go against popular opinion (possibly bcos their target customers are too), most are going to publicly support all the same socially acceptable stands. This doesn't mean there are some vile people employed in those positive companies or some decent, well meaning pepole working in the bad companies just for a paycheck. it's hard to judge with a simple look.
As a consumer you are free to support or boycott a product on any criteria that you like but question is how much of a realworld difference their placit support for your cause makes.
I get that, as much as a non trans can I suppose. But the product objectively lags behind. If the only reason to use it is because of some social project or issue, and not on technical merits, it won't be around forever (and I firmly believe Firefox will not).
Seems best just to leave politics out of business.
As a cat, I'd prefer for Firefox to stop integrating a Pocket chumbox and pinning sponsored sites on the new tab page, advertising Firefox VPN in their browser, increasing padding in the Normal tab bar at the same time they hide the option for Compact size, adding time-limited colorways you can't sync onto new computers added after the color scheme expires...
> Seems best just to leave politics out of business.
You literally can't, though. Business is inherently political. And even if the corporation itself may attempt to remain neutral and refuse to participate in any donations or fundraisers, the C-level executives and the shareholders who derive most of the excess value produced by the company are still people with opinions who have a lot of disposable income they can throw one way or another.
If you truly think business can avoid politics you should ask yourself why all the companies priding themselves in not engaging in politics are run by people who lean right-libertarian. It's hard to see the water when you're a fish.
OP is presumably talking about stuff like dictating the future of web development, not about who gets money as a result of users having a browser installed. It's a different definition of "sameness" than you're using, but not necessarily a wrong one.
(Whether the companies themselves care about this seems immaterial.)
Chrome has sign in with Google and Google Passwords, Edge has Microsoft Sync. Both features intended to bring users into respective walled gardens. If Edge gets more popular, they will try to Embrace Extend Extinguish the web platform, but currently that won't work as they don't have enough users, so their devs are working on engine adjacent things like the Developer Tools panel.
Literally every browser anybody cares about has a passwords/setting sync function. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi. I don't think spinning a basic feature as a dirty ploy is terribly useful, or honest.
Sure feels like a new-age browser war, where instead of trying to take control of the W3C, browser vendors are just trying to take control of everything ELSE (Windows nags you to use Edge, YouTube and Gmail nag you to use Chrome)
> The only non-Chrome browsers still in existence today are Safari and the Firefoxes
DuckDuckGo’s browser on macOS¹ is WebKit, as is Orion². They may not be very popular but neither are the Firefox forks. They’re both still in beta and under development.
Explorer didn't need "slowing down". It was in maintenance mode and being developed it on a shoestring budget around the days of IE6-IE7. Microsoft apparently decided that the web browser circa 2006 was essentially a finished product because they had "won" - IE had no serious mass market competition on Windows.
Somewhere mid-2000s Microsoft recognised web applications were an existential threat to their Windows Applications monopoly. Presumably after IE5 when they first introduced XMLHttpRequest as an ActiveX control (or was that infighting? It was released for online mail AFAIK). Did that have anything to do with the slow down in development of IE?
I want to see a new era of wars where web admins fight for web freedom and start subtly penalizing BigCorp web browsers, e.g. by showing annoying popups or slightly delaying loading times.
My favourite is AirWay Sim [0], a massively-multiplayer online airline simulation. Incredibly detailed business sim financially — with full financial statement generation - as well as operationally. One must decide on hubs, airplane types, fuel hedging, scheduling.. the list is endless.
I’ve spent a non-trivial portion of my free time in university building airlines in this game. Highly recommended.
I'll refer one that I don't see mentioned very often, that is my favorite business simulation game: Capitalism / Capitalism Lab (latest version). It has been around for about 25 years, the author keeps working on the concept.
This is a really amazing sim, and I'm surprised how under-the-radar it is. It's kind of Dwarf-Fortress-esque in how it has this slightly antiquated presentation, but hiding behind it is an incredibly deep sim, where the author keeps on adding new features.
I asked a similar question on the previous thread about SimRefinery. For my criterion of a ‘more serious’ simulation, the answers were Capsim and Capitalism Plus.
Government intervention and regulation of substance use has always been motivated by a much deeper agenda, generally economic in one way or another. The idea of taxing speech makes me uneasy.
If you watched people spending time with their friends, you could probably see the same patterns. Most human behavior is not productive. It's been that way for a long time.
At LinkedIn we heavily use Azkaban for this. (Open source: https://azkaban.github.io/)
Azkaban API can be used to launch offline computation jobs as necessary - Azkaban ensures monitoring, SLA alerting, failed restarts and other dependency management etc.
Azkaban really seems to strike the right balance between simplicity and featurefulness, I'll definitely give it a try! Plus it seems relatively simple to deploy & maintain.
The documentation often mention Hadoop and data jobs, have you also used it for non-data things? Would you by chance have some workflows examples?
Note execution environment for such jobs is Azkaban executor server itself, so you have to take care of resource management (eg. one job taking all RAM on the machine will affect other jobs running on the same machine)
$4 billion food delivery business! Thats pretty neat. Uber is showing signs that they can succeed in general logistic space also besides just taxi business.
Yeah it'll be interesting to see what happens with their new Freight business. That has the potential to be a real disruptor as I don't think any other tech companies have tried to tackle that space.
Wouldn't that just make them literally a hotel chain, with no disrupting difference to any any other? I'm fairly sure I can book a room online at the Hilton.
Even funnier, because most of the brands don't even own most of their branded hotels, they're usually franchised. Hilton/Marriott/Starwood/Choice/Wyndham/Accor collecting 5% to 15% is basically the same thing as AirBnB is if you're not using someone who actually rents out part of their home.
Concur with imjared -- Uber likewise went "full circle" and started adopting more "cab company functions" once they reached the appropriate scale: "Oh, hey, we might as well make money leasing the cars too!" "Oh hey, there's money to be made in payday advances!" [1]
With that said, (per imjared) Airbnb may have some comparative advantage in the ease with which they bring this spare capacity online via a nice interface; it could become a useful platform for allowing hotels to dump extra rooms for sale, in a way that's more pleasant for users to find.
[1] Lyft lets you get paid earlier for 50 cents IIRC.
AirBnB already owns the touch-point with customers who are looking for non-traditional places to stay. Some portion of those customers would also be open to normal hotels, and AirBnB could serve them by doing something as simple as adding another check-box in the "home type" interface. Once word got out that you can do both things in one place, there would be little reason to go through any other service and they would take an ever-larger share of all bookings. Of course, this is won't happen, because hotel operators, seeing this danger, will refuse to integrate with them. But that huge market opportunity is still there, they "just" have to build their own hotel capacity to realize it.
Correct but hotel booking process is quite diverse and all the means I have tried are fairly painless. You can call the hotel directly and book a room. You can check one of many online sites and book through them.
The article states that around $200 million is expected to go to a repurchase or secondary sale from current employees. This seems like a nice thing that airbnb might have to regularly do from here on out.
I suspect the question was asking why they would need more money? At some point you have to stop raising money, start making a profit and stop diluting shares by taking on more investment money.
Not just the future of hospitality... it's the future alternative to home ownership.
Think about it: You could literally wake up, do your morning routine, and then step out of the RV and into your workplace. You come back that night... and the next morning you step out into Yosemite Valley for some hiking. You just rent RV berths -- everything from campgrounds (Yosemite) to high-rises (in major cities).
My dream is that this gets built in a different setting: offices. Imagine self-driving desks in a giant flat warehouse without a single wall. You could pick a travel program where your desk would slowly roll around the perimeter, or just hang out in the middle. You could program it to maximize distance from any other desk if you wanted privacy. And of course the desks would be networked and their position could be overriden by a master controller that had access to the company calendar, so when it's time for the mandatory standup meeting your team's desks would automatically get together in a single spot.
... to a different RV. There's no reason for RV ownership; a self-driving RV can fulfill the sleeping / transportation roles for at least two people/families on different working schedules.
As someone who lives in an Airstream and works from home, I would have to disagree. In the context of this idea of 'the future of home ownership', the RV becomes the 'place for my stuff' in the George Carlin sense. Having my house (RV) drive itself to the next beautiful state park or national forest I want to camp in while I work or sleep or watch a movie would be amazing.
This is actually an insanely good idea, since it allows you to maximize your awake time, for enjoyment. When you are sleeping, the RV can take you to your holiday destination. Since we sleep about 8 hours a day, you can use that to gauge how far you can travel.
The only issue would be road infrastructures. Road maintenance would become a serious issue, due to the extra strain of having potentially 10s of millions of RVs on the road.
Last time I looked into RV cost of ownership numbers--which was probably when that blog post hit HN from the guy who converted a van into a RV--the RVs are really expensive to move due to fuel and wear-and-tear on the drivetrain. So even if self driving, it's probably not going to be Grand Canyon one day and Florida the next any significant fraction of the time.
This is pure monopoly play - I hope Lyft continues to compete and do not merge ... I hate to be in world where no taxi service exists and I am at the mercy of random surge pricing...
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