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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 16 2019, @05:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-was-an-accident dept.

Mozilla "Got Outfoxed" by Google – Former VP Accuses Google for Sabotaging Firefox

Former Mozilla VP, Johnathan Nightingale, has called out on Google for what could only be termed as anti-competitive practices. In a Twitter thread on a somewhat unrelated subject, Nightingale said that during his 8 years at Mozilla, Google was the company's biggest partner. "Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income," he tweeted.

However, that doesn't mean Google wasn't involved in some underhand practices. "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans," Nightingale wrote. "When chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn't cut ties, break our search deal – nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, 'We're on the same side. We want the same things.'"

"I think our friends inside google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other. But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers," Nightingale added.

Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible."

All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say "hey what gives?"

And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks."

Usage share of web browsers.

Previously: After 10 Years with Google, Firefox Switches to Yahoo
Netmarketshare Claims Mozilla Firefox Usage Drops Below Ten Percent
Mozilla CEO Warns Microsoft's Switch to Chromium Will Give More Control of the Web to Google
Is Google Using an "Embrace, Extend..." Strategy?
Google Denies Altering YouTube Code to Break Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Employee Sparks Outrage by Suggesting Firefox Switch Browser Engine to Chromium

Related: Firefox 29 is a Flop; UI Design Trends Only Getting Worse
Mozilla Teases Chromium-Based Firefox, Then Pulls Back
Can the New Firefox Quantum Regain its Web Browser Market Share?
Firefox 64 Will Remove Support for RSS and Atom Feeds
Microsoft Reportedly Building a Chromium-Based Web Browser to Replace Edge, and "Windows Lite" OS


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @03:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @03:42PM (#831089)

    i just looked into the 'sell user dns queries' because how the hell would they know what the network card was doing; why isn't the browser waiting for a response?

    then i saw--they encrypt the requests and send them to cloudflare--for your privacy and security, you as a user can't even look at what they are now sending to valued 3rd party partners! they totally bypass local hosts and any administrative blocks!! and profit from it!

    and now i see dns.google.com and others do it too!

    i bet the ability to disable it will be removed in a new version before long.

    soon edge, chrome(ium) and firefox all will encrypt lookups and send them to destinations of their own choosing by default. imagine all the iot stuff that can't get blocked soon. alexa in every device.. smart tvs that play ads that you cant block.

    the future sucks. for a few years it was cool though. i think i'd rather not have lived in the cool years, because it makes the near term feel so disappointing

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:43AM (#831439)

    Money ruins everything.
    The minute the Web went mainstream, it was just a matter of time until the ripoffs began.
    This is how amoral capitalism works.