SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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."
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
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @05:32PM (8 children)
I'm tired of Mozilla's bullshit. They tied themselves to their advertising slavemaster, reduce browser functionality at each step, made deals with ad and tracking companies, and they whine because they get fucked over later.
What we need is a browser for users not funded by any ad-affiliated assholes, but by us. It should get funding from us, work for us and our interests, and not try to have a gigantic half a billion buck cake from shitty advertisers and claim privacy focus, too, while fucking you over with Pocket, advertising tiles, various test ad and promo programs, forced updates, no Java toggle, less and less usefulness, and kindergarten-level UI for morons.
Mozilla has outlived its usefulness. Why the fuck isn't there a decent privacy/power browser for Linux except small valiant Pale Moon? Zillion Linux distros and we can't have a good team of devs, doing a browser for us? Needs real funding, so that's it. We should fucking pay for it.
But I am not a dev, so shutting up now.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:10PM (3 children)
It's not a desktop solution, but I use the DDG browser on my phone and I like it. It would be nice to see it for the desktop.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.duckduckgo.mobile.android&hl=en_US [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @08:25PM
the DDG browser is basically a wrapper around Chrome.
And it handles certain things like popup pages poorly (overwriting the content of the existing tab rather than opening it in a new tab). And the performance is somewhat lacking, perhaps because they are doing some security checking on each HTTP request.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @02:44PM (1 child)
what... does it do besides search? i have google blocked.
i use ddg for my desktop browser search bar as well as manually going to it for internet searches. for desktop searches, i have been using the built in search features, both gui and command line.. for windows consumer, server, and linux oses...
i have no idea what makes an application necessary for a phone to search the web, or what benefit an external search program could bring to a phone that opening the browser and going to the website doesn't do. unless stuff on the phone gets lost. then i dont know what to ask because I havent had that problem yet
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday April 17 2019, @06:25PM
Well, you could follow the link, but it blocks trackers for one. I also can't remember seeing an advertisement while using it even when going to news sites. Obviously it uses DDG as the search engine and helps to reduce google's data collection.
(Score: 2) by RedIsNotGreen on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:37PM (1 child)
If you're willing to deal with a learning curve:
https://www.qutebrowser.org/ [qutebrowser.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:10PM
Qute. It seems to be a keyboard focused wrapper around Qt 5's integrated Blink (Chrome) rendering engine QtWebEngine, or the older QtWebKit but that support is going away.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @09:12PM
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Advertisers infiltrated and/or subverted the standard bodies, and started rewriting Web standards to suit themselves. Navigating the purposely tangled web as an outsider has become a tedious chore. FOSS development model does not deal well with chores and tedium; advertising companies can hire developers to churn code despite that. Cue the lock-in; mission accomplished.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:37PM
And didn't improve any during the Mozilla years. Firefox was a 3rd party project, its popularity was in direct opposition to the Mozilla Browser package of the era, and had no XUL... until it became a Mozilla project after they offered the orignal developer a job and handed management of the project over to one of their own team, the originator becoming an underling and then finally quitting/being fired (I forget what happened to him?), either resulting in, or just after the compromising of Firefox's design to become an XUL 'lite' version of Netscape/Mozilla Browser Bundle, being a dog for a year or two until the javascript engine got JIT support (which was the primary reason for the speed being shit on the browser bundle, but the memory bloated happened in both, as can be seen from firefox versions 2.0 to current in the fact that browser versions eventually outstripped the memory requirements of Seamonkey, which is XUL based also, but has more configuration options and the entire browser suite included in less operating memory than firefox uses now, on the exact same gecko/xul rendering platform!)
As others have said, Mozilla deserves to fucking die, but not for a singular reason, but rather the sort of incompetence we normally expect from Microsoft, Google, etc, and the sort of executive salaries we see from the people at the top there (which seem to be inversely proportional to the common sense of the decisions executive staff make, Mozilla's are so high paid they make Marissa Meyer, Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and that last Intel CEO use like paragons of competence, given their earnings to corporate marketshare.)