The AchieVer Posted April 16, 2019 Share Posted April 16, 2019 Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years Former and current Mozilla engineers are reaching their boiling points. A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption. He is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations in the past eight months; however, his allegations span far beyond current events and accuse Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users. OOPS AFTER OOPS Johnathan Nightingale, a former General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox group at Mozilla, described these issues as "oopses." "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome, and most folks we spoke with inside [Google] were Firefox fans," Nightingale recollected in a Twitter thread on Saturday. "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'," the former Mozilla exec said. "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 said. "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. "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.' "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said. NOT THE FIRST ACCUSATIONS And Nightingale is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations. In July 2018, Mozilla Program Manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox. He revealed that both Firefox and Edge were superior when loading YouTube content when compared to Chrome, and in order to counteract this performance issue, Google switched to using a JavaScript library for YouTube that they knew wasn't supported by Firefox. Chris Peterson@cpeterso YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/youtube-classic … YouTube Classic – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US) At this point, it's very hard not to believe or take Nightingale's comments seriously. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming the new Microsoft, and Chrome is slowly turning into the new IE, an opinion that more and more users are starting to share Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption. He is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations in the past eight months; however, his allegations span far beyond current events and accuse Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users. OOPS AFTER OOPS Johnathan Nightingale, a former General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox group at Mozilla, described these issues as "oopses." "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome, and most folks we spoke with inside [Google] were Firefox fans," Nightingale recollected in a Twitter thread on Saturday. "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'," the former Mozilla exec said. "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 said. "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. "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.' "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said. NOT THE FIRST ACCUSATIONS And Nightingale is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations. In July 2018, Mozilla Program Manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox. He revealed that both Firefox and Edge were superior when loading YouTube content when compared to Chrome, and in order to counteract this performance issue, Google switched to using a JavaScript library for YouTube that they knew wasn't supported by Firefox. Chris Peterson@cpeterso YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/youtube-classic … YouTube Classic – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US) At this point, it's very hard not to believe or take Nightingale's comments seriously. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming the new Microsoft, and Chrome is slowly turning into the new IE, an opinion that more and more users are starting to share Source
Priceless Cooch Posted April 16, 2019 Share Posted April 16, 2019 It's hard to feel sorry for Firefox. In fact I don't feel at all sorry for any of them. This is the essence of capitalism. People cannot have capitalism both ways. It is cut throat competition. There is no playing fair. Playing fair is fake. Morality has no place within its confines. Capitalism is amoral. Bring your best to the table and compete. Google can put whatever code it wants into its own website within the boundaries of the law. If Firefox cannot compete then Firefox will lose more and more and more users until it dies. That is capitalism. Win or die. No in between. Google is not on the same side as Mozilla. Never was and never will be. They are competitors. And competitors want to win and competitors always want the other side to lose. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thane Posted April 17, 2019 Share Posted April 17, 2019 21 hours ago, Priceless Cooch said: It's hard to feel sorry for Firefox. In fact I don't feel at all sorry for any of them. This is the essence of capitalism. People cannot have capitalism both ways. It is cut throat competition. There is no playing fair. Playing fair is fake. Morality has no place within its confines. Capitalism is amoral. Bring your best to the table and compete. Google can put whatever code it wants into its own website within the boundaries of the law. If Firefox cannot compete then Firefox will lose more and more and more users until it dies. That is capitalism. Win or die. No in between. Google is not on the same side as Mozilla. Never was and never will be. They are competitors. And competitors want to win and competitors always want the other side to lose. Your compartmentalizing all this shit into neat little boxes and rules when really there are no bounds. People can do and will do whatever they want. But if people want to live in more of a utopia, they have to realize good behavior shouldn't be limited to friends, family and neighbors. People need to include good behavior in their interactions with customers, employees and people in general on the other side of the planet too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator DKT27 Posted April 20, 2019 Administrator Share Posted April 20, 2019 Saying this from years. Can be noticed especially on mobiles I think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.