[RileyJames]

In respect to the destructive nature of continued support for googles monopoly over search, online advertising and their desire to ‘own the web’, yes, those issues sounds pretty minor.

They’re also sound like quite achievable goals for a fork.

[glenstein]

I wish there was a word for this process, because it repeats itself in comment threads over and over. People getting absorbed by debates over idiosyncratic details and gradually losing sight of the big picture.

Deciding that support for Firefox lives or dies depending on details about how long the text and the address bar is, is completely absurd. Because meanwhile, everything else is increasingly based on chromium which is developed by Google. Having the web depend on a single rendering engine where all the major trends and development effort and support maintenance comes from one company is catastrophically short-sighted.

[aerique]

Isn't it just derailing by Google astroturfers?

[glenstein]

You can hardly ever be sure when astroturfing is really happening, so all I have to offer is speculation. I feel that this is not Google astroturfing, because Google astroturfing takes on a different flavor.

This is speculation on my part and I want to be very clear about that, but whenever I see something that looks like Google astroturfing, what happens is they frame controversial decisions as technical necessities, like it's just an easier way of solving a technical problem. And they keep trying to reframe questions in technical terms, and try to turn questions of right and wrong into questions where they're simply elaborating on how the technology works, and it's a matter of you not understanding the technology. This was my experience in HN threads about AMP, for instance.

That's my sense of how that works. In this case, I don't think we're seeing anything other than the typical short attention spans.