Firefox developers accuse Google of obstruction
A former Mozilla executive says Google has deliberately and systematically thwarted the Firefox browser over the past decade to help Chrome grow faster. In recent months, other Firefox team members have also made accusations against Google.
The new allegations come from Johnathan Nightingale, the past general manager and vice president of Mozilla’s Firefox division. According to him, Google used real sabotage tactics, for example by integrating small bugs in Google websites that only caused problems in Firefox. “Google repeatedly dismissed the bugs as ‘accidents’ that they would soon fix,” Nightingale wrote in a series of tweets noted by ZDnet. “There were dozens, maybe hundreds of incidents. And with every new problem, we saw Firefox users leave.”
When Nightingale joined Mozilla in 2007 and Chrome didn’t exist yet, he says there were a lot of Firefox fans working at the internet giant. “Everything got more complicated after Chrome came out, but not in the way you’d expect,” Nightingale says. “Google had a competitive product in their hands, but didn’t want to cut ties with us. On the contrary, they claimed to be on the same side and have the same intentions.”
Nightingale thinks his “Firefox friends” at Google did have good intentions, on an individual level. “Their product developers and designers often made the same choices as we do. We learned a lot from each other. But Google as a company is very different from the individuals who work there,” said Nightingale. After a while, he says, strange things started happening: “Google Chrome ads suddenly appeared alongside Firefox search terms, and Gmail and Google Docs suffered from slowdowns and other bugs in Firefox. On demo sites, users were then falsely notified that Firefox was ‘incompatible’. Now I also know that you shouldn’t confuse malicious intent with incompetence. But I never believe that they are incompetent at Google.”
It is not the first time that a member of the Firefox team has accused Google of malpractice. In July 2018 said program manager Chris Peterson that the internet giant purposely caused YouTube to perform worse in Firefox.