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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @05:34PM (27 children)
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/mozilla.html [neocities.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:03PM (12 children)
Mozilla and Google Block Dissenter Browser Extension [soylentnews.org]
Info that some seem to have forgotten in that story.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by vux984 on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:41PM (10 children)
"See the slippery slope?"
No. That was NOT a slippery slope. That was a phased deployment of a planned change. It's done on purpose not to 'boil the frog' but so people have time to react and adapt without it being too disruptive.
"Just imagine - one day it might decide to disable your AdBlocks and NoScripts - and there will be nothing you can do whatsoever."
Fork it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:44PM (3 children)
Been done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox [wikipedia.org]
+1 Gab/Dissenter branded browser, possibly.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @07:07PM (2 children)
I can already imagine it: it's Firefox with that extension and every logo is a swastika instead of a fox. For freedom or something.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @07:27PM
...then only fascists will have freedom.
And then, universe will implode in a puff of logic.
Or at least, the "not toeing The Party Line is FASCIST!!!111" narrative will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @02:47PM
i have a jewish friend who named his daughter gabrielle, or gabi for short. a long time ago. so now, whenever i see gab.ai and the rightwing stuff on it and how 'freedom of speech' tends to mean 'we can be loudmouth jerks like rush limbaugh but without syndication or profits!', i keep thinking the site is a jewish forum and the mental dissonance caused by realizing that uh no its actually not a jewish forum... is very very hard to overcome!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @07:16PM (4 children)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15062491 [ycombinator.com]
How quickly we forget that the migration was slow, even uncollaborative. Andso left things behind because there is still no replacements and extension authors gave up in the end.
That is not what I would call planned, unless the plan is sabotage. A properly planned migration would be having the replacement and then, only then, drop support for the previous thing.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday April 16 2019, @09:34PM (3 children)
"That is not what I would call planned, unless the plan is sabotage. A properly planned migration would be having the replacement and then, only then, drop support for the previous thing."
Often you plan to change a thing, knowing full well that some stuff isn't going to work or even be possible anymore. Sometimes you plan to restore the functionality in the future. Sometimes not even that. Sometimes you accept that certain things will simply be lost.
"A properly planned migration would be having the replacement and then, only then, drop support for the previous thing."
It's like when they replace a bridge. You _could_ probably get the job done with zero road closures, zero lane closures, by twinning the bridge entirely, buying up neighboring properties, building everything out, resulting in a longer span because your building the replacement in a sub-optimal spot, and so forth. But perhaps that would cost orders of magnitude more than other migration/replacement/upgrade plans - and rules it decisively out as the best plan.
Sometimes compromises are the best plan.
And that assumed the existing bridge wasn't crumbling too; if you are migrating from something has security flaws for example, maybe building out a complete replacement first really isn't the best solution; rushing a secure but limited functionality replacement and dealing with the breakage due to the loss of functionality might be the more sensible plan.
And I'm not saying Mozilla made the best plan. They probably didn't. But like anything else, how many resources are you going to pour into the planning? At some point you'll have spent more time planning the thing, than it would have taken to just do the thing and deal with the gaps in the plan as they arise.
Perfect is the enemy of good; and you'll never satisfy everyone.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:19PM (1 child)
Some of us here, are coders ourselves. We know there is NO magic in reimplementing stuff. We know there is NO concrete to pour, NO properties to buy, NO rivers to span, in WRITING THE F*****G CODE.
Your fairytales are pitiful waste of ASCII.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday April 17 2019, @04:29AM
Consider you have a feature in Module X, that depends on Module A, and you want to replace it with Module Y that requires a partial rewrite of Module A. Consider also that both X and A have immediately pressing flaws and security issues; and that in the medium term you want to get rid of X completely.
The solution with least functional impact on the users (aka the best "proper plan" as defined by the poster i originally replied to), is to write Y, and rewrite module A to support Y, while providing all necessary backwards compatibility to support for X. Then deploy and test, and finally remove X. Then modify module A again to remove the legacy support for X.
The constraint of retaining all necessary back-compat for X substantially increases the time and complexity of rewriting A. It also maximizes the time the security flaws are exploitable. Perhaps some of X's flaws can be mitigated in the meantime, but that requires expending considerable resources on X, which you plan to discard.
A better path is to create a minimally functional Y that doesn't do everything you want it to do but covers enough to be usable; and make the minimal changes required to A to support it. This will allow you to get the secure replacement in place as quickly and cheaply as possible; admitting that its not a full replacement for X yet. Then phase out X, accepting the breakage caused by Y not being completely functional yet. Then with X gone, complete the partial rewrite of A without having to support X. Then expand Y to its final feature support level.
This requires fewer developer resources, is completed faster, closes the security holes faster, but causes a planned amount of breakage.
If you are a coder and can't see the parallels with construction, or the compromises and choices that have to be made then stick with coding and stay away from project management.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday April 17 2019, @12:47PM
If we're getting into bridge analogies here, it's more like "Yes, yes, we're gonna break that bridge down, just give us the money!" when being offered 20 silverlings from the "Association of Commercial Ferry Operators".
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday April 17 2019, @02:50PM
Has anyone thought to ask why they stopped allowing unsigned extensions? Firefox was a wasteland of malicious add-ons. There were active non-hypothetical attacks that stole a bunch of money this way.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:47PM
Which Mozilla is guilty of a lot of bullshit, eliminating the ability to install/run unsigned addons is an untrue one of them.
What they *DID* do is remove the UI ability to enable unsigned addons. The configuration options still exist in all firefox versions from 38 to 61 (I know because I use them regularly for uMatrix and uBlock from github, which is mandatory now for pre-Servo Firefox/Seamonkey versions, since Mozilla deleted all legacy addons from its addon repository.)
Having said that, they have made it so that installing *ANY* unsigned addon is mandatory insecure, because there is no way to whitelist an addon without disabling signing, and I believe whitelist capabilities (if someone has gotten the whitelist working, let me know.) As soon as you restart the browser with signing or whitelisting enabled it disables the plugins you manually installed as unsigned/whitelisted and refuses to allow them to run even though you installed them by hand.
Mozilla has done many retarded things, and while I agree this is one of them, the distinction between eliminating this feature entirely and making it a pain in the ass is important. Most plebs really shouldn't be running unsigned addons. The problem is with Mozilla clearcutting the addon library even before the ESR releases were past their final support dates, leading to many people unable to use addons on versions of the browser that still ran on their platforms. Mozilla has done a lot of other stunts like this with mandatory SSE2 support and disabling ALSA in favor of pulseaudio only in release builds. Both effectively optional features of the browser that could easily have been built as an 'unsupported build for legacy users' but which for arbitrary reasons were not to force us all to not only their latest and greatest browser, but the latest and greatest hardware platform some of us may be unwilling, or unable to afford.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by isostatic on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:15PM (13 children)
My eyes!!
OK, I gave it a go. First complaint: "Mozilla removed the ability to disable JavaScript from the Settings menu"
I type "about:config", and there it is "javascript.enabled"
Next one, extension signing. This appears to be "xpinstall.signatures.required", simply toggle to false.
Perhaps it has a point, but the author isn't making it
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:26PM (12 children)
The concern is that they've built a walled garden but they've generously put a latched gate hidden in a dark corner with a pinky swear promise not to lock it.
The good news is that firefox is open source, and the derivative projects suck much less.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:56PM (8 children)
Those choices were made because for the vast majority of users they are the safest defaults and Mozilla has a responsibility to be a good citizen of the Internet--and despite some rather serious missteps in the past I believe they are fundamentally a force for good. No one is perfect.
They give you the option to change these things, and like you said it's still free software. Defaults settings are almost never changed so they need to appropriate for users who are not savvy users of technology. If you're on this website you are probably not that type of person, so you chafe at these roadblocks that keep popping up. But I prefer having to jump through a few hoops to having to fix more computers because Mozilla handed everyone a loaded gun and trusted them not to shoot themselves.
There is nothing wrong with walled gardens as long as you're allowed to leave, and it shouldn't necessarily be easy to find your way out. Firefox is still better than any of its forks; but if you're the sort of person who refuses to run JS in your browser in 2019 and somehow still manages to be a productive user of the Internet then I can understand why you'd disagree.
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 16 2019, @07:08PM
I'm not sure I buy the concept of "productive user of the internet". After all I'm here talking to you instead of talking to my boss about groovy packaging conventions, or whatever my "current strategic business objective" is.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday April 16 2019, @08:03PM (4 children)
Indeed, if the OP was that bothered he could simply use the "Icecat" fork of firefox, which is kept in sync with upstream firefox. It's good enough for Stallman.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @09:46PM (3 children)
LOL that only works with Linux. What if OP uses a real desktop?
(Score: 3, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:33PM (2 children)
Then the OP is already using Linux, so there's no problem. Your point is...?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:51PM
the point you and isostupid won't get is the oldest one of linux desktop. Defaults means everything for the greater percent of users
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @02:50PM
wait
Windows 10 is, as stated by microsoft, not a desktop OS. It's the new approach of PC hardware servicing, maintenance, and remote control -- Windows As A Service.
It replaced the desktop OS that Microsoft is famous for. There are no Windows Desktop OSes after 8.1.
The person writing "use a real desktop" must be uninformed. Stating that the OP is already using linux sidesteps the issue of the fact he's actually wrong, because if he accepted the "upgrade", he technically doesn't have a desktop OS anymore.
(Score: 4, Touché) by jb on Wednesday April 17 2019, @06:24AM (1 child)
How on earth could anyone regard "allow running arbitrary code from any old untrusted source without asking me first" (i.e. javascript enabled) as the "safest default"?
(Score: 2) by julian on Thursday April 18 2019, @05:08AM
Because turning off JS today is equivalent to simply not using the Internet at all, for most people's needs. It's an unfortunate reality. I wish they'd include something like Ublock Origin with good filter lists by default. Ads are the number 1 way that malicious code gets injected; but I guess Mozilla can't afford to be that disruptive to the likes of Google et al.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:32PM (2 children)
Look what those pink-haired faggots at GitHub did to go out of their way to cripple the site for older versions of Firefox in favor of Chrome. Yeah, I know there are other ways to download repos, but it's a big pain in the ass when you're looking spontaneously for a specific niche. "Download" buttons have been a solved problem in web applications for decades now.
It's the same way that guns doesn't get blocked by law, but faggots find more and more ways to make owning them a pain in the ass. Same with being conservative and being on Youtube or Twitter or having a paypal account.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:26PM (1 child)
Do you extract your takes directly from the core of the sun, or do you make them this hot yourself somehow?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:31AM
Pretty sure they came from somewhere a lot colder, slimier, and smellier. And I am mystified as to how he fits them up there next to his enormous swelled head.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...