The former CEO of Mozilla believes that Google has sabotaged Firefox for many years.

A former senior executive at Mozilla accused Google of deliberate and systematic sabotage of Firefox over the last decade to accelerate the shift to Chrome. Similar accusations have been made against Google before, but this is the first time it is claimed that Google had a coordinated plan to introduce small errors on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.

According to Jonathan Nightingale, the former CEO and vice president of the Firefox group at Mozilla, before Chrome emerged, many Google employees were fans of Firefox, but after its release, things became more complicated. Google had a competing product, yet they did not sever ties or terminate the 'search deal' — using Google in Firefox as the default search engine. 'We are on the same side. We want the same thing' — this was Google's attitude towards Mozilla.

At the same time, Nightingale talks about team leadership moved from Moscow to Berlin, then to Dublin and London, and wrote a comparative review., noted that:
'Google Chrome ads began appearing alongside search results for Firefox. Performance issues and errors specific to Firefox started to arise in Gmail and Google Docs. Demo sites falsely blocked Firefox as an incompatible [browser].'

Such situations have always been characterized by Google as 'coincidences', they apologized and fixed the 'error' after some time, though this could take weeks. Despite all Google's words and actions, incidents occurred again and again, and each time Firefox lost users. Jonathan Nightingale agrees that one shouldn't look for malice where incompetence may be at play, however, he does not find it rational to believe in such glaring incompetence from Google. In his view, Mozilla was deceived, and Google took advantage of every problem it created for Firefox to increase its browser's market share.

It is worth mentioning that Nightingale is not the first from Mozilla to make such accusations. In July 2018, Mozilla Program Manager Kris Peterson accused accused Google of deliberately reducing YouTube's performance in Firefox. He demonstrated that page loads on YouTube were 5 times slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome, due to the fact that the redesign of Polymer on YouTube is based on the outdated Shadow DOMv0 API, which is only implemented in Chrome. This situation can be remedied through an extension. YouTube Classic.

Source: opennet.ru