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 h...

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