It's not nefarious on the part of the _developers_. They were given concrete goals. I wasn't privy to those, but it sure looks like those were: Must work in Chrome (Android) and on iOS, working elsewhere is nice to have but optional. They were also given deadlines. Then they proceeded, with no nefariousness, to deliver a product that works on Chrome and iOS and not elsewhere. I'm sure if they had more time or more people they would have made it work elsewhere too.

Then you ask yourself why the goals were set the way they were. Obvious guess at an answer: because they only want to target "mobile" and Android+iOS cover most "mobile" clients. Had iOS had less market share, I will bet the goal would have been Android-only (modulo advice by lawyers based on antitrust worries in that situation, of course).

No malice anywhere along here, but the end result is not so distinguishable from malice, sadly.

Also iOS support is needed for Chrome on iOS. Since the same engine is used for Safari and Chrome in that platform.

That's the other easy explanation as to "why iOS?"

I would like to see similar arguments given when Microsoft developers follow what their management orders them, but alas.

Note, not picking on you, just Internet in general.

Every single case is different, but with with Microsoft it was corporate policy to do so - "Embrace, Extend, (Extinguish)", and it was executed again (MS-DOS vs. DR-DOS) and again (IE and Frontweb) and again.

The old saying was "Windows is not done until Lotus won't run", and the DR-DOS case shows it might not have been an exaggeration

MS spent huge amounts to time and money making sure lots of programs with oddities and bugs worked successfully on Win XP - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

So? That's irrelevant to the discussion.

Google/Chrome also works hard to support "what's already out there", which is what you mention, but what we're discussing now is building on your supposedly-open-but-really-proprietary platform _against_ other players, whether that's policy or coincidental with constraints.

Microsoft spent effort making sure Windows itself WON'T run on DR DOS before that. They constantly ignored web standards after they won the browser wars (conveniently working well with Microsoft tools that produced non-standard markup, though) ... up until the moment they lost them again, at which point they started to pay attention to standards again.

With their last few releases, Google seems to be adopting this Microsoft style of evil. Some people defend that, and some don't.

Yeah, people who think individual developers at Microsoft were trying be evil just aren't thinking clearly. Now upper management, on the other hand....

btw, the Inbox team clearly didn't bother to contact Mozilla about the Firefox performance problem because Mozilla fixed the bug within a couple hours of it being reported on HN:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963