[cm2187]

If you own Google docs, ensuring it doesn’t break or show an incompatible banner on competing browsers is not an abstract or metric-less concept, it is very tangible and measurable. In fact that’s the sort of thing I would expect any of their engineer to do as part of the development, unless they have been told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is OK.

[blihp]

But likely few people, if anyone, in the organization have any serious incentives (i.e. bonus/promotion) to proactively prioritize that. On the other hand, they almost certainly have at least bonuses on the line to add X users to service/product Y or roll out feature Z (server or client side.) So people work toward what the company rewards[1] and everything else becomes a break/fix situation as it occurs and time permits.

[1] There are also almost certainly individuals/teams in the company who also try to take the path of least resistance and attempt to hobble the competition to help get there. These types exist in every company to varying degrees.

[cm2187]

I get your point but actually it should go the other way round. If the owner of Google Doc is really focused on own user base only, the incentive would be to make it the most browser compatible. By making it run on chrome only, google docs is potentially sacrificing its user base for a greater purpose.

[TeMPOraL]

Why? Remember that at this point, Google Docs is "sticky". Its audience is to some degree captive, and won't switch just because the document lags a bit on Firefox. What would they switch to? Office365, for which they have to pay? It wouldn't even solve their problem, as the document in question is a link they got from a friend, already in Google Docs. It's just easier to switch to Chrome.

Most of SaaS applications operate in this regime - they own user data, so they become "sticky" and non-substitutable very quickly. On the other hand, standardization of browser features makes browsers not very "sticky". This way, when a SaaS - any SaaS, not just Google's - works much better on Chrome than on Firefox, this drives adoption of Chrome by that much.

[frosted-flakes]

Online Office 365 is free and has more or less the same functionality as Google Docs.

[TeMPOraL]

Doesn't help you if someone else already made the document on Google Docs and asked you to collaborate on it.

[bluGill]

What is the incentives for the owner of google docs?

If it i make google docs great/dominate, then firefox, and safari are critical. You would ask hard questions and have deep discussions around dropping support for internet explorer. If someone suggested khtml (picking something old and poorly maintained) would work with just a little effort you would have a serious discussion around just how much effort that takes.

If the incentive is to make google great then things are different. Losing a few Firefox users might well be worth it if you can convert a few others from firefox to chrome. You might even go so far as to needlessly break firefox once in a while to drive your incentive.

I don't know how google is setup. I've seen companies setup both ways. There are downsides to both.

[pluma]

Google is not a product company. It shelves and sunsets too many apps for that angle to make sense.

Google is an advertising company. The goal of every Google product is to provide the company with more data, to make users give the company more of their data so that data can be mined for more data.

Controlling the browser or OS means having the ultimate access to the users the ads will be shown to. So if a Google app doesn't help harvesting data, it must be used to push the OS or browser. Google allows for a lot of indirection but ultimately if a product neither harvests interesting data nor helps push users to using Google products that do, there's no reason to keep it around.

[goalieca]

I don’t think this is true at all. From everything ive seen, large corporations favour shipping new products and new features. It seems rare to support existing customers unless there is a lot of money tied to it which is probably not the cases for Firefox users. This is doubly true since there is a known workaround to Firefox support: use chrome!

You can try and blame sales, you can try and blame “innovate or die” but also engineering always shares some blame too. Often it’s engineering who want to exploit shiny new tech or make new shiny thing and not do the inglorious work of maintenance and support.

[zwkrt]

Google of all companies should have cross-browser compatibility on all sites. They have the engineering know-how and employee base to automate testing even, I suspect. When Firefox is broken on a Google website it is hard not to feel some malicious intent.

[esrauch]

The thing that happens in practice is the site is expected to be rebuilt on short timelines and at the end you find that it isn't trivial to make it work on other browsers. And the engineers don't even have machines that can reach their development servers that can also run IE, and the version of Edge that can run automated tests is so old that it doesn't support flexbox.

So now some VP has to make a decision whether to launch the thing to 85% of the users that also are on the companies own browser and support other browsers in the future, or delay everything on that. It tends to go the way that locally makes sense.

[srouhaewaehy]

The engineer doesn't decide the schedule though. Usually their activity is controlled by having to do X tasks in time(X)-time(Y)=available_time, with Y being any set of reasons, political, financial, organisational that the engineers will accept as true.

Then as engineer what can you do? Either assume toxic Management (and switch Jobs) or do a subset of what you would usually do, and that means optimize for your own browser first and only work on bugs known to your management for the other browsers.

[zaphar]

Admittedly, when I was at Google, I only worked on three different products. However, while there I had no real deadlines. My work was done when it was done. Performance was measured in quality and impact. This was in fact a part of the culture that was communicated to my team on multiple occasions.

With that said, there is some indication from the outside that the culture is changing. It can be difficult to sustain culture over time, especially in the face of massive success.

[wolco]

I wish more companies came closer to this.

[walljm]

its not always possible to sustain that philosophy of work economically for all businesses. I'm not defending every case of it, just that there are legitimate reasons why speed is valued over quality in certain cases.

[josteink]

> unless they have been told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is a requirement.

Fixed that for you.