In that I fully agree, but the reason it has to be at a fast pace is because when Google adds things to chrome, developers will use them and don't have to care enough about market share. I think unless Firefox gains enough market share to matter, we'll be stuck in this race.
Chrome should be split, Firefox or its forks (if Mozilla continues to mismanage) should be able to receive funds from Google but Chrome should not be allowed to be paid for Google search engine placement at least for the next 5-6 years.
I'm sure many other players will play top dollar to be the default on a browser that virtually commands all the market. That'll let us discover the real price of search engine defaults because the Mozilla payout is partly due to antitrust reasons.
In that case, I think we'll also see a visible decrease in "bugs" affecting Firefox on Google's properties.
The whole affair and the blog post feels like proxy signal to potential investors from OpenAI that they have now developed/acquired tech that is worth enough to grab Apple's attention ?
Can you elaborate on the plausible deniability part.
Was your past employer trying to make best of the situation by hoping to fish for information about your next employer's projects via the consulting gig?
I said "never called them on their plausible deniability" to mean I never pulled off the veil of the conversation, so there's nothing to talk about in front of a judge.
FWIW both the company I was leaving and the company I was joining were startups selling dynamic seat pricing systems to airlines. Your call if that's a conflict of interest :).
It has been the opposite for us. It is now being weaponized by PMs and leads to add more work for developers and not less in terms of documentation and sign-offs.
Now stories automatically have additional 10 subtasks for documentation and tracking. These are created automatically through "skills" and the task of detailed documentation and updating those extra tasks is a chore. When complained, they just say "use AI". Every JIRA task these days feels like submitting a petition to the government bureaucracy.
PMs are happy because they did something new, leaders are happy for more tracking, developers are expected to be happy with "productivity gains" due to not having to write much code.
It can and will most probably turn to indefinite time depending on the answer to the question "will we have a viable alternative to jump ship before that happens ?".
We don't need anything to completely capture the market, it has to be just enough to make Google hesitate or make it hard for Google to do it for legal reasons. Like how Firefox is ideally supposed to be for Chrome.
Many alternative AOSP-based systems work fine today and do not have the new Android Developer Verifier (wow, already rolled out to 500M+ devices [1], though still dormant).
To be honest, it is quite scary that Google is able to remotely roll out an app like that to all GMS Android phones. Of course, we all knew that, but it highlights again that Google can remotely take away functionality that you had before, brick your phone, etc.
and now people install Remote Access Trojans just to let GPT and Claude think and work for them, granting them shell and a11y access. really? after seeing that, nothing surprises me
Yes, really. The obvious answer that security maximallists deny even exists is, who is doing it and why. In LLM case, users are doing it themselves to allow a way of computing they want and find useful, in spite of platform locks designed to deny users just that.
I mean, go tell Anthropic to prompt Claude to make it adopt Landlock in Claude Code instead of regex-based filtering. actually adopt it, not how Codex did, but with controls on the level of some third-party harnesses and Pi plugins.
> To be honest, it is quite scary that Google is able to remotely roll out an app like that to all GMS Android phones.
Are any commercial mobile phone vendors not able to do such a thing? Do remember that this giant kerfuffle is all over the seeming preparation for the apparent removal of a developer feature that iPhones have never had at all.
Wait till you hear that your OEM can remotely rollout full OS updates with full access to all your data and drivers... carrying Google software and most of it Google code.
Snarks do not lead to productive discussions. You also know that there is has always been an implicit social contract between users and vendors. The vendor rolls out updates as part of the service attached to the device (typically included in the purchase price) and that the vendor does not abuse the update mechanism to make things worse for the user.
If vendors use updates to restrict functionality that the user had before, puts existing features behind paywalls, etc. people are rightfully outraged, because it breaks the social contract.
It's just that the repeated offenses have made us insensitive. Imagine Debian rolling out some mechanism that only allows you to install software outside their repos with a 24 hour delay. It would destroy Debian.
Well, no. The low-trust society comes (partly) from corporations betraying the trust of consumers, not consumers recognizing that the corporations saying, "Trust us," are probably bullshitting them.
The initial assertion that there has "always" been a social contract is inaccurate.
I get the analogy but it's a false one. Google covers about 90% of Mozilla's funding. Firefox only survives because of Google, and that's so they don't hit antitrust problems.
> Firefox only survives because of Google, and that's so they don't hit antitrust problems.
Yes, that is what I meant. They should be hesitant to lockdown completely and (grudgingly even) allow alternative options and/or workarounds due to legal concerns like anti-trust.
Firefox was existing before Chrome, but in this case we either need a different OS or need an android based option like Graphene/3rd party stores gain enough marketshare to trigger anti-competitive laws.
No because the EUDI Wallet needs Google Play Services. People need to come to the realization that the EU has no interest in regulating the freedom of devices because the EU itself is benefitting from the closed-down ecosystem.
How many of those features were really organic, driven by actual pressing need and not driven by Google's needs.