Former Mozilla chief executive says Google has sabotaged Firefox for years

Former senior Mozilla executive He accused Google has been deliberately and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade to speed up the transition to Chrome. It's not the first time Google has been accused of this, but it's the first time that Google has been said to have a coordinated plan to introduce small bugs on its sites that will only show up to Firefox users.

According to Jonathan Nightingal, former CEO and vice president of the Firefox group at Mozilla, before Chrome was introduced, a lot of Google employees were Firefox fans, but things got more complicated after it came out. Google has a competing product, however, they haven't cut ties or broken the "search deal" of using Google as the default search in Firefox. “We are on the same side. We want the same thing, ”Google’s attitude towards Mozilla was expressed in a similar way.

At the same time, Nightingale, saysThat:
“Google Chrome ads have started popping up next to Firefox search results. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience performance issues and bugs specific to Firefox. The demo sites falsely blocked Firefox as an incompatible [browser]."

Such situations Google always characterized as "accidents", apologized and corrected the "error" for some time, at the same time, it could be about weeks. Despite all the words and actions of Google, the incidents happened again and again and every time Firefox lost users. Jonathan Nightingal agrees that malice should not be looked for where incompetence can take place, however, he does not consider it rational to believe in such blatant incompetence of Google. In his opinion, Mozilla was deceived and Google used every problem it created for Firefox to increase the share of its own browser.

It is worth noting that Nightingale is not the first Mozilla to make such accusations. In July 2018 Mozilla Program Manager Chris Peterson He accused Google is deliberately slowing down YouTube's performance in Firefox. It showed that YouTube pages load 5 times slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome, due to YouTube's Polymer redesign being based on the deprecated Shadow DOMv0 API implemented only in Chrome. You can fix this situation with the extension YouTube Classic.

Source: opennet.ru