I'm curious, what does having control over the update process give you? Isn't it replacing one unauditable black box system for another?
Are you concerned about a regression and don't want to be in the vanguard cohort?
Google has two billion lines of proprietary code, conformant to their style guides and proprietary requirements. I can't imagine they'd poison their model with non-conformant third party source.
The article suggest that it was neither. That rather it was an engineering decision: the product did not have staffing to be properly maintained, and rather than staff it up, it was easier to turn it down.
Google is no such place. I've worked in several product areas, and while there is no formal one-size-fits-all process, generally engineers build products specified by PM written PRDs, often informed by UXR, designed by UX. At least for the last 12 years, it's not been a wild west of rogue engineers.
For Firefox to succeed, it has to differentiate. There are two meaningful ways it does, or will do, in the near future:
1. Mobile extensions: that's a unique value prop
2. Fight for the user: manifest v3, web environment integrity, and whatever comes next are degradations in user experience, and following a different path puts FF apart
There are build systems where this guidance isn't terribly valuable.
With Bazel for example, you typically have build files in each directory, and a test target for each test class in that build. But bazel allows you to select and run targets in a collection of directories, select targets recursively, or by a variety of other criteria. Your CI systems runs targets selected implicitly, while each build expresses the test targets explicitly.
Mozilla's office in SF, pictured in the article's first photo, is literally neighbor to Google's SF office, making that a particularly apt photo and headline pair.
We can assess the analogy on its merits, but random opinions are circulated in docs at Google all the time. From this article, 186,000 employees, therefore lots of opinions. This is a random employee who's made an analogy, not a leadership owned doc.
The way it's meant to work is tether acts as a market maker, always willing to buy and sell tokens at parity. Nobody would buy below that if they know tether is around. Tether, having issued the coins, should have sufficient capital to play that role. But if they spend too much of their capital, they lose the ability to fulfill their role.
I wrote myself a Chrome extension that does this, using http://l/foo style links, and using Chrome's sync to share across devices. Works well enough but limited to desktops.
Some large orgs maintain internal shorteners, like http://go links at Google.
I've been using Stadia since day one. It's a really terrific execution of cloud gaming. It would be a real shame if it did get shut down. I hope the rumors are false.