For a long time, Google results recommended using Firefox
Google was largely responsible for the market share that Mozilla Firefox had at the time. He was also largely responsible for his losing her. This at least is clear from the Twitter account of a former Mozilla executive, who joins those who accuse Google of sabotaging the Firefox browser.
I say that it adds up, because it is not the first to accuse Google of restricting Firefox access to its services.
At first, the relationship suited both of them. The Mozilla Foundation needed funding. Google needed users. Those were the days when Microsoft with Windows and Internet Explorer ruled the desktop, and Yahoo! he was the king of web services. If you installed Firefox because you were fed up with Internet Explorer, Google was the default search engine. If you went to Google it was difficult not to see their suggestions to install Firefox.
Until Google decided to release its own browser.
Before following the story, a clarification:
I don't think it's all Google's fault. The Mozilla Foundation was not interested in seeking alternative funding sources or creating complementary products. For extra-technological reasons they allowed Brendan Eitch, the creator of Javascript, to leave and they got into the adventure of the operating system for mobiles and televisions. His last big idea was to abandon the meritocracy for "inclusion."
Google oopses
Johnathan Nightingale was Vice President of Firefox. In a series of tweets he tells the story:
Nightingale recalled his beginnings at the Foundation
"When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome, and most of the people we talked to within Google were Firefox fans."
What happened when Google Chrome came out?
Things got complicated, but not in the way expected. They now had a competing product, but they didn't cut ties, didn't break our search agreement - nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, "We're on the same side." We want the same things »,
The former executive establishes a difference between the company and the developers:
“I think our friends within Google really believed it. On an individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things that we do. Their product and design people made many decisions in much the same way, and we learned by observing each other. "
But things started to happen.
“Google Chrome ads started appearing alongside Firefox search terms. Gmail and Docs started experiencing performance issues and selective errors in Firefox. Demo sites blocked access and falsely claimed that they were not compatible with the browser.
What was Google's response?
These are all things that can be done to compete, of course. But we were still partners in search services, so we asked what happens? And every time, they said, "oops." That was an accident. We'll fix it at the next release in two weeks. "
"And again. Oops. Another accident. We will fix it soon. We want the same things. We are on the same team. There were dozens of oops. Hundreds maybe? »
self-criticism
Nightingale also acknowledges Mozilla's lack of reaction:
'I am in favor of not attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence', but I don't think Google is so incompetent ...
… We lost users in each ops. And we spend the effort and frustration on that instead of improving our product. They got ahead of us, and by the time we started to realize it, a lot of damage had already been done ”,
This is not the first accusation made by someone belonging to the Foundation. In July 2018, Mozilla Program Director Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube's performance in Firefox.
It revealed that both Firefox and Edge were superior at loading YouTube content compared to Chrome, and to counter this performance issue, Google started using a JavaScript library for YouTube that they knew was not supported by Firefox.
In a similar sense it was pronounced a former developer from Microsoft Edge:
I recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to their sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up with them.
Linux users suffered from Microsoft's quasi monopoly on the desktop. Will we have to suffer another quasi monopoly on the web as we already have on mobile phones?