I don't like Google. They're the technology equivalent of Coles, Woolies, and Rupert Murdoch rolled into one. Despite their cute and cuddly image, they're every bit as nefarious as Amazon and Facebook. They dominate in one field, and then use that dominance to leverage their way into an adjacent field, absorbing or extinguishing established players in the process.
At this point, they're a hairsbreadth away from capturing the world wide web. Note that this is not the same as capturing the internet (the physical hardware layer that the web runs on). They made a play for that, but Amazon beat them to the punch.
The only things keeping them at bay are China, which understands the threat that unchecked foreign mega-corps can pose, and Facebook, which still controls the world's most used family of websites, and a sizeable portion of the web's advertising infrastructure. Needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of either of these two entities either.
And then there's Mozilla. Makers of the Firefox web browser. The last viable web browser in existence that isn't just a re-skin of Google's Chrome. I'm one of the last people I know who still uses Firefox, and I so badly want to say that I'm in love with it … but by god, they're not making it easy for me.
Just recently, Mozilla released a major update to Firefox for Android … and it's fuckin' shithouse. The "opened tabs" window has been redesigned in such a way that you can only read the first few letters of each page title, meaning it's effectively impossible to tell what's actually in a tab without opening it. To make matters worse, the tabs automatically order themselves according to some sort of black-magic formula that I don't understand—and before you ask—yes, they also took away the user's ability to drag the tabs around and manually reorder them.
Downloading an image now pops up a giant notification that can only be dismissed by opening said image.
It's now possible to place the navigation bar either at the top or bottom of the screen. Both options are fucked. Place the nav-bar at the bottom, and it becomes inaccessible any time you have the "find in page" tool open; place it at the top, and any time you open a web page that has a floating header section, it becomes utterly inaccessible regardless of what you do. Yes, that means you can become completely trapped on a webpage, with no choice but to force close the browser and hope that the nav-bar reappears when you reopen it.
In theory, you can still speed up the playback of video and audio content, only now it sounds like you're listening to a robot having a stroke.
The ability to view the source code of a webpage has been stripped out, making the app far less useful for development purposes.
Oh, and if you use browser extensions, forget it. This update breaks compatibility with older versions, so you'll have to wait for your extensions to be updated as well. Joy.
I don't think Mozilla are a malicious company, and I don't think they have contempt for their users like some of their contemporaries do; but it's becoming impossible to pretend that the circus isn't being run by clowns.
Last year, they released an update to the desktop app, which broke things so badly that they had to hijack a little-known browser telemetry feature in order to push out the fix.
And after years of pouring money into retarded community outreach initiatives that have produced nothing in the way of tangible benefits, this year Mozilla laid off a bunch of employees, citing budgetary issues. And whom did they lay off, you might ask? Why, the engineers who work on the foundational technology that their products are built on, of course. The one group you could point to and say unequivocally that they were producing useful, high-quality output. Whom did you think it was going to be, silly?
It's hard to look at Mozilla's recent history and not get dejected. There's an obvious trajectory emerging, and nothing about it looks positive. And that's even before you take into consideration the fact that the bulk of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google paying to be the default search option in Firefox. As Firefox's market share shrinks, which is happening precipitously, so to does Google's need to prop up its competitor.
I do so hope they can turn things around. I just have no idea how they could possibly manage it from this point.
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