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Google and the Perils of Monopoly
I’m a computer graphics developer who often writes web apps and, to that end, I always buy laptops with touch screens. But for many years I’ve been frustrated by one thing:
What is that black box? It’s a tooltip from a window behind the one I’m writing this post in. They pop up seemingly randomly; it’s not uncommon to have four or five of the stupid things. Google Chrome has had this bug for at least eight years.
For years, Google blamed Microsoft for the bug. About a year ago, I went through the effort of compiling Chrome (which Google develops as an open-source project) and debugging it. And lo and behold, it’s not a bug in Windows. Whenever you use a touch screen or a pen device Google Chrome sends a mouse move event to every single open window. This is what triggers the tooltips.
I posted my results to the relevant bug report (and also posted an angry message to their developers’ message group). Someone nicely responded and thanked me for the technical info I’d posted and said they would fix it. That was in January. Nothing happened.
This is ridiculous. Chrome has by far the largest browser market share (69%) and is integrated with Google’s other products. I have to use it for development. I have lived with these annoying black boxes popping up randomly for many years, and I will continue to need to use it whether the Chrome devs remove the offending line of code that’s causing this or not. That’s the power of a 69% market share.
Monopolies suck.
Published in General
Give them a few years. Great debug work.
Do you have any idea how many committee meetings they must have, to decide who to assign the fix to? And how they have to weigh the different candidates’ gender(s), and race(s), etc?
It must be hell working at google.
I’ll definitely never work there. I’ve been interviewed by Google a few times. For a while it was a weird yearly ritual; they would call me about once a year, put me through a months-long interview process that interfered with my work and other job opportunities, and then not hire me. This happened four or five times. The last time around I told them, as politely as I could, to never call me again.
I was never in a google-ish location, I suppose. But one time I did interview with a tech place that had a “tech quiz” they gave people. After I took it, I decided that it was so simple, I didn’t want to work there if that’s what they thought “intelligent” meant.
What was maybe scarier, I suppose, was that they probably found that most people couldn’t pass their simple test!
I do all my web design in Dreamweaver (shut up, I have to) and there’s a tooltip that pops up whenever the cursor moves in the design mode. If you shut off tooltips entirely it will still appear. It has been a known bug for years; complaints on Adobe boards go back a long ways. No one does anything about it, perhaps because there is no viable alternative to Dreamweaver that isn’t abandonware or template-driven. Yet.
That sounds like somebody is being trafficked. Isn’t there a phone number we’re supposed to call?
My tech problems have been a bit more… tech, it seems.
A couple examples, from my dealings with smaller/non-monopoly businesses:
In the past I did some software development using a PC-running cross-compiler for a Z80 CPU in an embedded environment (a video-effects unit, as it happens), using C. The compiler actually compiled from C to Z80 assembler code, which then ran through a separate assembler program and linker, to get to Z80 binary/machine code, which was then burned into an EEPROM for insertion into the device for testing… (And some of the code was in assembler to start with, for details of the hardware interface that C didn’t recognize.)
I happened to discover a compiler bug where in certain situations, it would create assembler code that wouldn’t process correctly. (It would omit an EXTERNAL declaration.) Fortunately Aztec/Manx Software wasn’t a very big outfit, so I was able to explain it directly to one of their engineers who recreated the problem himself. They got it fixed, and sent me a floppy disk with the update.
Even before that, working on multi-user minicomputer systems developing accounting and business management software for different companies, an “upgrade” to the compiler started causing problems. It wasn’t quite as simple to get through directly to the tech people at the manufacturer about that, but I was able to leave a detailed message for them. It went more or less “Tell the compiler people that programs compiled with the latest version of QIC behave as if TERM$ (and perhaps some others, I don’t recall now) have a working length of 3, but a declared length of 6.”
Anyone familiar with the systems would know immediately what that meant, and the implications. I like to think there was some forehead slapping and “D’oh!” when they got that message. Although actually The Simpsons hadn’t started yet.
Later on, I was putting a QLogic SCSI controller card into a system I was building to be my home media LAN server, and found that it wouldn’t work using drives larger than 8 gig, as I recall. I wanted to use a 36 gig, which was HUGE at that time. But trying to get it working with FreeBSD, it would get a “kernel panic” because of those drives. (Everything worked fine if I left the large drive unconnected.) Found out eventually that they hadn’t yet updated the program ROM on their cards to handle larger drives. After talking to someone at QLogic, they sent me an updated ROM chip to install on the card I was using, by FedEx which was surprisingly expensive at that time.
It’s pssoible someone has made a mod that fixes it. I use mods for most of my computer games, many of them made to improve gameplay issues the software companies don’t address . . .
He tried ordering pizza from 911. Help never came.