Mozilla’s Google Experiences are a Warning for Microsoft (Premium)

Ex-Mozillan Jonathan Nightingale has penned a lengthy series of tweets in which he describes Google’s efforts to undercut the Firefox web browser. This could serve as ammunition for those who are worried about web monoculture now that Microsoft is adopting the Google Chromium codebase for the new version of Edge.

“I want to talk about Google/Alphabet and ‘amateur hour’ tactics,” Mr. Nightingale writes at the start of his tweetstorm. “I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time, Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90 percent of Mozilla’s income.”

As Nightingale describes, Chrome didn’t exist when he started at Mozilla in 2007, and Google was very supportive of the product. But when Google launched its own Chrome web browser, “things got complicated,” he says.

And this is the part that I think is most relevant to the Microsoft conversation around Chromium today.

“At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did,” he writes. “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. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as ‘incompatible’.”

This, I think, is at the core of the concerns over Microsoft’s adoption of Chromium. Sure, the engineers at Google are all for it, and they’ve shown their support by accepting all of Microsoft’s Chromium commits, and by working with Microsoft on porting Chromium to ARM64. But relationships between engineers do not mean that the parent companies have any relationship, good or bad. And corporate strategy will always outweigh what engineers, well-intentioned or not, want to do.

“Every time [we reported a problem, Google would] say, ‘oops. That was accidental,” he continues. “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.”

Many do believe, however, that Google is that malicious. And Mozilla’s experience is certainly not unique: Microsoft, perhaps ironically, also called out Google in the past for mysteriously breaking behavior in classic Edge as well.

“I think they were running out the clock,” Nightingale alleges. “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, to his credit, doesn’t completely blame Google for Firefox’s failures. But the point is made, and as with classic Edge, one has to wonder about the impact that Google’s strategy to undermine the browser played in its defeat.

Of course, Microsoft adopting a Google codebase for the new Edge puts it in a very different position than Firefox, which is still racing to keep up with both web standards and Chrome, the de facto web browser standard. By correctly bending the knee to web standards, Microsoft has decided that it can compete with Google in the web browsing space on features. All while channeling much of its best functionality back into Chromium, which will benefit Google Chrome and all other Chromium-based web browsers.

Could Google undercut Microsoft in the future despite the positive relationship that engineers from both companies enjoy with each other? Of course, and that’s the fear. That should the new Edge get too good, or gain share on Chrome, that Google might pull the plug. Might stop accepting Microsoft commits. Might “outfox” it as it did previously.

I don’t believe this is a problem. Any attempt by Google to lessen Microsoft’s participation in Chromium will only harm Chromium (and thus Chrome and other derivatives). Chromium is open source, and Microsoft is free to use it and to expand on it as they like. You can already see that they’ve done this to a large degree as well.

What Microsoft is trying to do, of course, is be a good member of the open source community and provide as much of its improvements as possible back to Chromium. That, I suppose, is an area where Google interference could occur. But that won’t ultimately harm new Edge users. And it may give Microsoft and its new browser advantages over other Chromium browsers.

Put simply, we need to be aware of the realities here, and of Google’s behavior in the past. But I’m sure this was top of mind when Microsoft made the decision to change codebases. And the software giant surely understands what could happen should its relationship with Google devolve further.

Thanks to Neowin for alerting me to the Nightingale tweets.