17 ms·

Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years (2019)

304 points by hashhar 3y ago

mepian 3y ago
(2019)
Arubis 3y ago
I keep a Chromium browser kicking around on my personal machines basically for the sole purpose of using Google properties, particularly Hangouts. Firefox is fine on virtually everything else, but absolutely drags on stuff owned by the Goog.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  Have you tried faking your browser user agent to Google? I've seen it say "such and such doesn't work on any browser other than Google" and with one simple trick, managed to get things running on Firefox just fine. I wouldn't be surprised if any "degraded experience" is due to code that assumes Firefox is IE (like a very poorly written "else" code block) and just refuses to run optimal code that works fine on Firefox. I'm not going to use Chrome outside of work (I hate to say it but their dev tools are just hard to walk away from - please Mozilla, invest in your dev tools more).
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    This usually works out well for the sites just never bothered to test for Firefox and threw up the banner but it can end up going pretty poorly/silently-and-annoyingly-start-failing-halfway-through for sites that threw up the banner because they knew they didn't do feature detection and assumed Chrome or Chrome's behavior. I.e. "better than nothing if you are dead set on never installing Chrome" but, outside that, worse off than just going to your copy of Chrome for all but your most regularly visited websites that throw the "only supported in" banner.
- idle76 3y ago
  Yep, this is part of the reason I avoid google like the plague. Everything else works like a charm in FF, so why would I use an inferior product? Granted, I don't use youtube, but everything else has better alternatives away from big evil.
dmbche 3y ago
Isn't google the main source of funds for Mozilla?
- brenns10 3y ago
  Yeah. The money is there to ensure that there's an independent browser option to point at, if there's ever any question about lack of competition. But the products are all designed to behave worse on Firefox, to help keep usage in the single digit %s. Reminds me of Microsoft saving Apple back in the day. It's cheaper to prop up your competitors to avoid becoming a monopoly, than it is to become a monopoly and get broken up. Of course ideally, you don't want to support your competitor to the point of them actually becoming competitive, just enough to have deniability.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Microsoft never “saved” Apple and this myth needs to die. Microsoft invested $250 Million in Apple after it already had a multi billion line of credit. On top of that, Apple turned around and the same quarter spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets. It was three years and much more than $150 million in losses later that Apple became profitable. And that $250 million was also partially to settle a lawsuit over Microsoft stealing QuickTime source code for its own media player. This is separate from the look and feel lawsuit.
    - brenns10 3y ago
      Interesting, I admit to never studying that history and only hearing the story as told by others after the fact!
      - seec 3y ago
        There is a lot of narrative being built around Apple = good, Microsoft = bad. I, as an Apple aficionado, had to learn the truth piecemeal and understand that there really is a reality distortion field around Apple. You can't really trust much of what the fanboys will say. They say anything to make Apple look good and save face. I believe it comes from the cognitive dissonance of buying hardware that is so much above competitive market price, there is a need to build a lot of stories about moral superiority and things like that.
bsimpson 3y ago
As a Googler, I find this hard to believe. A more plausible explanation is that there's a very strong culture of using Chrome for work stuff at Google, and a general belief that automated tests can replace manual tests. These "oops"es are more likely the result of engineers doing most of their work in Chrome, and not noticing subtle changes in browsers they don't often use.
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  Rubbish. Back when user agents were used you could change the agent and get access to Google things that were faster in Firefox. It’s silly to assume they didn’t do it on purpose.
  - Zak 3y ago
    User agent strings are still used for this stuff. Today's Youtube delay is an example which I've verified myself.
  - throwawayxoog 3y ago
    I've added several of those checks to Google products; it's certainly never been for the reason you're suggesting. You get a bug that a certain feature is crashing Firefox, or slowing it to a crawl. You can't do feature detection, because Firefox reports the relevant features are supported. So you code up a less-efficient behavior that avoids the crash, and only use it for the Firefox user agent. Months or years later, Firefox improves the problematic behavior, and now performs much better when you switch the User Agent to Chrome and get the efficient path. Nobody at Google is paying active attention to that code anymore, so it remains in that state until someone notices. The idea of slowing down Firefox based on a User Agent check would be totally crazy to anyone I worked with at Google, and you'd be immediately reported to legal and HR if you tried to get such a thing through code review...
- brenns10 3y ago
  I think the very defense you're using is the problem though. It's fine if nobody uses the competing browser for work at Google. It is, however, pretty standard to have automatic tests for performance and functionality, and these need to be cross-platform. Having insufficient automated testing for Firefox to catch these sorts of issues is a structural, anti-competitive bias. Especially when these things clearly don't happen with Chrome. Couple that with the article's documented case of using a deprecated API from Chrome that's unsupported in FF. That's bias in the design, and that's something that leadership is either not catching, or making a conscious decision on. I'm sure it's couched in some statstic about which monetizable users are impacted or something. But at the end of the day it's an organizational, structural bias. And that's not to say this is necessarily illegal. I honestly wouldn't know. But I think you made a straw man to attack. The allegation isn't necessarily that there's an organization wide conspiracy of evil Googlers. Just that the organization and culture is designed to benefit Chrome and disadvantage Firefox, and that's happening regularly with user-harming effects.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Mozilla did more harm than google, like killing Servo and embedding Pocket, and let's not forget how they siphoned the money they made with their Google contract, they chose to fund their other questionable endeavors instead When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem
- CivBase 3y ago
  Mozilla has lots of problems and your complains are valid. But that does not excuse Google's behavior and it doesn't change the fact that Mozilla is the only viable alternative to Chrome and Chromium browsers for most people.
- liquidpele 3y ago
  This was my first thought too… They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    Ah yes, 'practical innovation' like Manifest v3? Encrypted Media Extensions? Web Environment Integrity? Google couldn't innovate if it tried. Like any other big business, they care only for control in a market.
  - dralley 3y ago
    >They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation. HN has a serious revisionist history problem w/r/t Mozilla. The memory problems, and the lack of multiprocessing, were both hamstrung by the Firefox extension model, which allowed nearly unlimited customization of the browser, at the expense of nearly unlimited ability to muck up the internals of the browser. It led to any poorly coded extension being able to cause all sorts of memory leaks, sluggishness, bugs and crashes. And yet techie types were screaming bloody murder when they started talking about "innovation" via transitioning away from the XUL foundations. They didn't care about performance or security so long as their XUL extensions kept working, they said. I remember those threads well. edit: oh look, there's one in this very thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686 Certainly they could have made more progress and faster, had they not had a huge existing community to transition, unlike Chrome who had a completely fresh start and far more resources.
jsnell 3y ago
Previous discussion from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586 (I'm kind of surprised it's just the one previous submission.)
Seb-C 3y ago
Funny, I was under the impression that Mozilla didn't need any help sabotaging Firefox by themselves. Or maybe it's also the fault of Google if they suddenly broke all the old extensions and never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back. Or when they disabled the extensions on mobile and did not bring it back despite their promise. Or when they break the user's habits by doing a useless UI revamp every 6 month and ignore the community's feedback.
- nneonneo 3y ago
  In regards to extensions: it is my understanding that WebExtensions were never sold as being capable of as much as XUL addons, because XUL addons could rewrite just about anything in the browser and cause just about unlimited breakage. The XUL API could not be flexibly improved, and critically held back some real security improvements like multi-process rendering. It was ultimately _necessary_ to redesign the API in order to make it feasible to evolve the browser without constantly breaking addons. Please read https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... for a more in-depth explanation.
  - Seb-C 3y ago
    I remember reading some ticket pages at the release, where they actually made promises about bringing the capabilities back in the future. But TBH I could not retrieve any link. I know this story already, but as much as I can empathize with this since I am a developer myself, from a user point of view they destroyed the ecosystem that was their strength. When I said "bring back", I do not mean XUL as a technology, I mean the functionalities that the extensions could use. I was on Firefox because it brought me something more, and because I appreciated it as it was. But now that they dumbed it down and made it like Google Chrome rather than focusing on their strengths, I do not have any good reason to use it. Because the many Chromium-based alternatives are better, more innovative, more reliable, and their UIs are stable and does not change every 6 months.
- dralley 3y ago
  >never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back They did. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831094/firefox-android-open-extension-support https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831094/firefox-android-...
ravenstine 3y ago
Let's pretend for a moment that it's a certainty that The Google sabotaged Firefox. Practically speaking, would things have turned out appreciably different from the way things are now? People today but especially back during the time that Chrome was released had an disproportionately positive view of The Google in terms of trust and delight from "innovation." If you asked any of them what they think of Mozilla, chances are they'd reply asking "Is that like Godzilla?"
- Zak 3y ago
  From Chrome's launch in 2008-2009 (depending on your OS) until Firefox's multi-process release in 2016, Chrome had a huge advantage: a bad page didn't crash or slow down your whole browser. I switched during that time period and took my time switching back. Someone less interested in tech or less concerned with privacy issues probably wouldn't have been motivated to switch back at all. I can't comment on whether Google did use sabotage to win, but they didn't need to.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
leoc 3y ago
Reminder again, again that 'Google' here amounts to two individual human beings, Page and Brin, who largely have full liberty to do as they wish with the company. It would be unfair to particularly blame them for some of the undesirable things that happen at Google: for example, problems that are somewhat inevitably the result of Google's somewhat intractably broken corporate culture, or problems that are genuinely too small to be likely to ever reach the ear of the Tzar. But this is another place where those excuses don't seem to apply.
aeurielesn 3y ago
> Slowly but surely, Google is becoming the new Microsoft, and Chrome is slowly turning into the new IE Honestly, Microsoft is becoming the new Microsoft.
- _ZeD_ 3y ago
  google is becoming (has already become IMHO) the old microsoft
  - beej71 3y ago
    Yes, but instead of a tech company, they're an advertising company. Fuuuuuuu--
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  just wait until they have unshackled AI
TheMiddleMan 3y ago
For years, when searching "Firefox" on the Google Play store, the only way to install apps on most Android devices, the first result would be a Google ad for Chrome.
- williamdclt 3y ago
  meh, that's the case for all sorts of apps, not only google things. Looking for "tinder" gives me a Hinge ad as first result.
  - regentbowerbird 3y ago
    That's besides your point but Tinder and Hinge are not competitors, they are both owned by Match Group.
  - acdha 3y ago
    True, but Google has a conflict of interest here and they really need to be barred from doing this in categories where they also compete.
  - bearjaws 3y ago
    Except Google is just moving money from right hand to left hand. If Firefox wanted to be at the top, they have to pay cash to Google.
upofadown 3y ago
>"I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. They might be that indifferent though. If everyone in an organization knows that there are no repercussions to being incompatible with a particular entity, they will spend no time ensuring such compatibility. Entropy will do the rest. Sometimes an anticompetitive situation can evolve without anyone taking an assertive action.
- yifanl 3y ago
  I made this comment years ago, but selective indifference is still malicious.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    > selective indifference is still malicious I don't think you can conclude that, at least not without playing with the definition of "malicious" which according to MW is "having or showing a desire to cause harm to someone." If a typical engineer at Google, who is under the gun on schedule and needs to ship, prioritizes getting stuff working on Chrome which serves the vast majority of the market, and never ends up testing on FF (which may not even be installed on their machines), that's not the engineer "having a desire to cause harm to [mozilla]". If you are arguing that the outcome is still the same, then I don't disagree, but even then still I think motivations matter for some things. Someone who accidentally hits a pedestrian and kills them is IMHO a different (and importantly different when it comes to meting out justice) situation vs a person intentionally aiming for and killing a pedestrian.
    - acdha 3y ago
      It’s not malice on behalf of that engineer. It is at the level of the managers who decided not to have adequate staffing, and who set the policy that unlike other companies they are willing to risk poor user experience to shift the browser market.
- glenstein 3y ago
  >Sometimes an anticompetitive situation can evolve without anyone taking an assertive action One example from TFA is checking a user agent and purposely adding a 5 second timer if it is not Chrome, which imo is hard to accidentally do.
etimberg 3y ago
I dunno, I use Firefox on my laptop and it just feels so slow and clunky compared to Chromium based browsers. It's been like that for years and doesn't seem to get better
- zqfm 3y ago
  This is anecdotal, but my experience has been the opposite. I briefly switched to Chrome some years ago because everyone else was and the dev tools were genuinely better, but as a user it felt clunky and slow, so I switched back to Firefox. They pretty quickly got their act together wrt to the debugger and such and so I only ever dropped into Chrome for work and to this day it's still clunky and slow. I never understood why anyone would want to stay with Chrome especially with Google ramping up their shenanigans.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Firefox has been fairly meh for me performance-wise, and tends to absorb memory over time. I kinda expected that with a few hundred tabs open. What I didn't expect was how sluggish Firefox (119.0.1) would become on a brand new machine with around 20 tabs open. By the time I restarted it today, switching to Firefox and acquiring focus took about 2 seconds. I've a grand total of 3 plugins (FB Container, Multi-Account Container, uBlock Origin) installed.
- linza 3y ago
  I feel the same. However, how much of this is actually one being faster/slower than the other, and how much is really just subjectiveness one could train away. And now: how much of this is due to deliberate sabotage.
- acdha 3y ago
  Uninstall your extensions. If you do a side by side comparison of clean installs, they’ll feel similarly responsive - Firefox uses less memory but the Chrome team closed the gap somewhat over the last year. Safari is still noticeably faster and lighter than both but that’s only to be expected since they don’t have cross-platform complications.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> [They accuse] Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.
mtVessel 3y ago
There was a period of time when sites pretty much worked everywhere. In the last five years or so, the number of sites that only work in Chrome was risen precipitously. It's either malice or incompetence, and I have no trouble believing either.
- nness 3y ago
  Gotta protect your ad revenue some how...
- nness 3y ago
  Gotta protect that ad revenue some how...
- isodev 3y ago
  Even Microsoft’s GitHub has all kinds of glitches unless you’re using a chromium browser. The general push towards a single engine is just undeniable at this point. Whoever controls the browser, controls the web.
  - rascul 3y ago
    > Even Microsoft’s GitHub has all kinds of glitches unless you’re using a chromium browser. What are some of the glitches? I'm curious if I've ran into any of them.
    - Thin_icE 3y ago
      Same, never found any glitch.
    - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
      ctrl-/ doesn't work in firefox for me (the shortcut for "Focus secondary search bar") But all things considered that's pretty minor
    - inferiorhuman 3y ago
      Given how bad the current Github UI is (and how sloppy the rollout was) I'm quite content to attribute it to incompetence rather than malice, but: Type a long blurb into a text input widget e.g. a comment on a pull request. The text just bounces up and down as you type. I've noticed this with whatever the extended support version of Firefox (macos 10.14) is and with the current Firefox (macos 14.1). To be fair GH renders widgets partially off screen with whatever version of Safari comes with macos 10.14 There is no more static text on GH so if you go back further than that (or have javascript disabled) nothing renders at all. There's no issue tracker (because why would there be?) but there was a discussion thread. Last I saw someone posted detailed steps to reproduce a search bug and the GH response was to lock the discussion thread.
gkoberger 3y ago
I'm surprised more people haven't noted this is 2019 article is here now because of OpenAI. Both Mozilla and OpenAI were for-profit companies fully owned by a non-profit of the same name, and dependent on a large corporation (Google/Microsoft) for a large majority of their finances. And both times, the large company ended up competing directly (Chrome/whatever's happening here) due to being slowed down, while still being the main financier of the original company.
rabbits_2002 3y ago
Google went from my most trusted tech company in 2010 to being just blatantly evil. I think it must be the new CEO.
- acdha 3y ago
  That’s shortly after they acquired DoubleClick in 2008 – note in particular how they haven’t managed to introduce a good new product since that time. I think that’s because the torrent of ad revenue meant that nothing really affects the price of your stock so all of the executive types are busy playing politics without real fear that users won’t like what they’re shipping.
- paul7986 3y ago
  No they were evil way before then .. they just were able to keep their rosy image for longer then should have been able to.
- nullc 3y ago
  Google was evil even in 2010. For example, in 2007 Google actively conspired with Apple to illegally fix wages industry wide, concealing their activity, and using the threat of spurious patent litigation to force hesitant executives into their illegal collusion. Even though I didn't work at one of the colluding companies, I got a ~20% step function in my income when the collusion finally collapsed and wages became more competitive across the industry. Considering indirect effects like this, the amounts stolen from workers in related industry probably amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    Complaining about the level of compensation at Google and Apple (even as far back as 15 years ago) feels like a very, _very_ first world problem.
    - greenyoda 3y ago
      Regardless of how much the employees were being paid, CEOs colluding with each other to not recruit employees from each other was a blatant violation of US anti-trust law.
MightyBuzzard 3y ago
[dead]
pipeline_peak 3y ago
Even if these conspiracy theories proved true, we all know Firefox didn't stand a chance lol
xd1936 3y ago
Just today, the /r/YouTube subreddit was discussing how Polymer adds an artificial 5 second delay based on user-agents other than Chrome. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
- accrual 3y ago
  Here is the JS that was found: setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
  - phkahler 3y ago
    That's pretty clearly anti-competetive.
    - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - DANmode 3y ago
        Make a technical or legal point along with your cleverness, will ya?
        0xbadcafebee 3y ago
        It's not "clearly" for nefarious purposes, because it's not "clear" at all what the code was doing or why, from just that one tiny snippet. By looking at the context of the code it was a part of, you see what it's really there for, which has a reasonable explanation. 30 seconds of looking at the thread linked above would have shown that, but that ruins the fun of jumping to the conclusions one wants to be true.
- rendaw 3y ago
  Being discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858
Tagbert 3y ago
Related story: “YouTube artificially slows down video load times when using Firefox” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858
throw7 3y ago
of course. most of my friends have switched to chrome just because of these "oopses" or niggles. switch to chrome and "it just works". it's not just google here... a lot of heavy javascript sites just don't care to make things work in firefox now. I keep chrome/chromium around for "broken" sites and to chromecast even. It is what it is.
- octacat 3y ago
  web experience is soo bad that there is not much difference between ff and chrome actually. Like clicking "Let me choose which info to share" on a cookie banner and it takes 5 seconds to load the next "config" window. ff with adblocker and cookie window blocker kinda helps, but now reddit, twitter and medium, and quora all want you to login.
FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
I've noticed serious performance issues with Firefox Android on certain websites, and this has always crossed my mind, but I've thought -- "nah, it's probably an innocent issue". Maybe not. Generally don't unnecessarily ascribe things to malice -- -- unless we're talking about a tightly-managed megacorp. Then the probability that one of their managers has engaged in whatever fuckery approaches one.
seec 3y ago
Firefox was never really good no matter what some tried to imply. It was always a bit crappy, slow, and sometimes ugly. I never understood the passion some people have for it. Sure, it had a lot of extensions but at the time where this was relevant actually using the extension would slow the browser so much it required an overkill computer to be worthwhile. I doubt Google had any need to pay any kind of attention for Firefox to be bad. They were doing that themselves very well already. Maybe the problem with Firefox has a lot more to do with their overpaid most likely hippie-feminist person they have as a CEO, no need to search for Google malfeasance when you have THAT type of CEO. Fairly sure she can create political bullshit out of nothing that would bring any org to failure. I hate the modern world. So hypocrite. We go look for answers on the other side of the planet when it is right there. But you can say it, because it is not politically correct. Seriously kill me already.
- glenstein 3y ago
  Before Chrome, Firefox had a market share of something like 30%, because it was light years better than IE. And its ability to support extensions was mind blowing. It didn't crash, which was important, it was fast, also important at the time, and was innovative and customizable in ways we take for granted now. Firefox was dominant and Chrome was the little brother, but then the turns tabled.
  - seec 3y ago
    I know but that was quite a while ago. And it illustrates exactly what I mean. They had 4-5 years lead on Chrome and they still fucked it up. They lost the browser war way before Google got so many dominant web properties. When Chrome got out, Youtube wasn't nearly as big and important, Google Docs was still pretty basic, slow and missing a lot of functionality. Nobody would have switched to Chrome just to use the Google stuff; but people did switch to chrome because it was better. That's it. I was a Mac only person at the time of Firefox release and it wasn't that much better than Internet Explorer for Mac. But Safari was pretty good, in fact at that time Apple was actually making Safari for Windows as well. I preferred it to Firefox, like most people I knew who tried both... Then Chrome forked the Safari open-source code base and improved it. Firefox lost because it was technically not as good and because of poor leadership. I believe they waste too much ressource on political bullshit, non-working consensus and whatnot. But most of the defenders are ideological zealots. Which is why I got downvoted because they cannot handle the truth. Nobody needed to sabotage Firefox, it wasn't very good in the first place.
r0ckarong 3y ago
So Google is employing the same tactics that Microsoft has used for the last 40 years. I'm shocked ... SHOCKED.

304 points by hashhar 3y ago

(2019)

I keep a Chromium browser kicking around on my personal machines basically for the sole purpose of using Google properties, particularly Hangouts. Firefox is fine on virtually everything else, but absolutely drags on stuff owned by the Goog.

giancarlostoro 3y ago
Have you tried faking your browser user agent to Google? I've seen it say "such and such doesn't work on any browser other than Google" and with one simple trick, managed to get things running on Firefox just fine. I wouldn't be surprised if any "degraded experience" is due to code that assumes Firefox is IE (like a very poorly written "else" code block) and just refuses to run optimal code that works fine on Firefox. I'm not going to use Chrome outside of work (I hate to say it but their dev tools are just hard to walk away from - please Mozilla, invest in your dev tools more).
- zamadatix 3y ago
  This usually works out well for the sites just never bothered to test for Firefox and threw up the banner but it can end up going pretty poorly/silently-and-annoyingly-start-failing-halfway-through for sites that threw up the banner because they knew they didn't do feature detection and assumed Chrome or Chrome's behavior. I.e. "better than nothing if you are dead set on never installing Chrome" but, outside that, worse off than just going to your copy of Chrome for all but your most regularly visited websites that throw the "only supported in" banner.
idle76 3y ago
Yep, this is part of the reason I avoid google like the plague. Everything else works like a charm in FF, so why would I use an inferior product? Granted, I don't use youtube, but everything else has better alternatives away from big evil.

dmbche 3y ago

Isn't google the main source of funds for Mozilla?

brenns10 3y ago
Yeah. The money is there to ensure that there's an independent browser option to point at, if there's ever any question about lack of competition. But the products are all designed to behave worse on Firefox, to help keep usage in the single digit %s. Reminds me of Microsoft saving Apple back in the day. It's cheaper to prop up your competitors to avoid becoming a monopoly, than it is to become a monopoly and get broken up. Of course ideally, you don't want to support your competitor to the point of them actually becoming competitive, just enough to have deniability.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Microsoft never “saved” Apple and this myth needs to die. Microsoft invested $250 Million in Apple after it already had a multi billion line of credit. On top of that, Apple turned around and the same quarter spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets. It was three years and much more than $150 million in losses later that Apple became profitable. And that $250 million was also partially to settle a lawsuit over Microsoft stealing QuickTime source code for its own media player. This is separate from the look and feel lawsuit.
  - brenns10 3y ago
    Interesting, I admit to never studying that history and only hearing the story as told by others after the fact!
    - seec 3y ago
      There is a lot of narrative being built around Apple = good, Microsoft = bad. I, as an Apple aficionado, had to learn the truth piecemeal and understand that there really is a reality distortion field around Apple. You can't really trust much of what the fanboys will say. They say anything to make Apple look good and save face. I believe it comes from the cognitive dissonance of buying hardware that is so much above competitive market price, there is a need to build a lot of stories about moral superiority and things like that.

bsimpson 3y ago

As a Googler, I find this hard to believe. A more plausible explanation is that there's a very strong culture of using Chrome for work stuff at Google, and a general belief that automated tests can replace manual tests. These "oops"es are more likely the result of engineers doing most of their work in Chrome, and not noticing subtle changes in browsers they don't often use.

throwaway2990 3y ago
Rubbish. Back when user agents were used you could change the agent and get access to Google things that were faster in Firefox. It’s silly to assume they didn’t do it on purpose.
- Zak 3y ago
  User agent strings are still used for this stuff. Today's Youtube delay is an example which I've verified myself.
- throwawayxoog 3y ago
  I've added several of those checks to Google products; it's certainly never been for the reason you're suggesting. You get a bug that a certain feature is crashing Firefox, or slowing it to a crawl. You can't do feature detection, because Firefox reports the relevant features are supported. So you code up a less-efficient behavior that avoids the crash, and only use it for the Firefox user agent. Months or years later, Firefox improves the problematic behavior, and now performs much better when you switch the User Agent to Chrome and get the efficient path. Nobody at Google is paying active attention to that code anymore, so it remains in that state until someone notices. The idea of slowing down Firefox based on a User Agent check would be totally crazy to anyone I worked with at Google, and you'd be immediately reported to legal and HR if you tried to get such a thing through code review...
brenns10 3y ago
I think the very defense you're using is the problem though. It's fine if nobody uses the competing browser for work at Google. It is, however, pretty standard to have automatic tests for performance and functionality, and these need to be cross-platform. Having insufficient automated testing for Firefox to catch these sorts of issues is a structural, anti-competitive bias. Especially when these things clearly don't happen with Chrome. Couple that with the article's documented case of using a deprecated API from Chrome that's unsupported in FF. That's bias in the design, and that's something that leadership is either not catching, or making a conscious decision on. I'm sure it's couched in some statstic about which monetizable users are impacted or something. But at the end of the day it's an organizational, structural bias. And that's not to say this is necessarily illegal. I honestly wouldn't know. But I think you made a straw man to attack. The allegation isn't necessarily that there's an organization wide conspiracy of evil Googlers. Just that the organization and culture is designed to benefit Chrome and disadvantage Firefox, and that's happening regularly with user-harming effects.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

Mozilla did more harm than google, like killing Servo and embedding Pocket, and let's not forget how they siphoned the money they made with their Google contract, they chose to fund their other questionable endeavors instead When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem

CivBase 3y ago
Mozilla has lots of problems and your complains are valid. But that does not excuse Google's behavior and it doesn't change the fact that Mozilla is the only viable alternative to Chrome and Chromium browsers for most people.
liquidpele 3y ago
This was my first thought too… They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Ah yes, 'practical innovation' like Manifest v3? Encrypted Media Extensions? Web Environment Integrity? Google couldn't innovate if it tried. Like any other big business, they care only for control in a market.
- dralley 3y ago
  >They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation. HN has a serious revisionist history problem w/r/t Mozilla. The memory problems, and the lack of multiprocessing, were both hamstrung by the Firefox extension model, which allowed nearly unlimited customization of the browser, at the expense of nearly unlimited ability to muck up the internals of the browser. It led to any poorly coded extension being able to cause all sorts of memory leaks, sluggishness, bugs and crashes. And yet techie types were screaming bloody murder when they started talking about "innovation" via transitioning away from the XUL foundations. They didn't care about performance or security so long as their XUL extensions kept working, they said. I remember those threads well. edit: oh look, there's one in this very thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686 Certainly they could have made more progress and faster, had they not had a huge existing community to transition, unlike Chrome who had a completely fresh start and far more resources.

jsnell 3y ago

Previous discussion from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586 (I'm kind of surprised it's just the one previous submission.)

Seb-C 3y ago

Funny, I was under the impression that Mozilla didn't need any help sabotaging Firefox by themselves. Or maybe it's also the fault of Google if they suddenly broke all the old extensions and never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back. Or when they disabled the extensions on mobile and did not bring it back despite their promise. Or when they break the user's habits by doing a useless UI revamp every 6 month and ignore the community's feedback.

nneonneo 3y ago
In regards to extensions: it is my understanding that WebExtensions were never sold as being capable of as much as XUL addons, because XUL addons could rewrite just about anything in the browser and cause just about unlimited breakage. The XUL API could not be flexibly improved, and critically held back some real security improvements like multi-process rendering. It was ultimately _necessary_ to redesign the API in order to make it feasible to evolve the browser without constantly breaking addons. Please read https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... for a more in-depth explanation.
- Seb-C 3y ago
  I remember reading some ticket pages at the release, where they actually made promises about bringing the capabilities back in the future. But TBH I could not retrieve any link. I know this story already, but as much as I can empathize with this since I am a developer myself, from a user point of view they destroyed the ecosystem that was their strength. When I said "bring back", I do not mean XUL as a technology, I mean the functionalities that the extensions could use. I was on Firefox because it brought me something more, and because I appreciated it as it was. But now that they dumbed it down and made it like Google Chrome rather than focusing on their strengths, I do not have any good reason to use it. Because the many Chromium-based alternatives are better, more innovative, more reliable, and their UIs are stable and does not change every 6 months.
dralley 3y ago
>never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back They did. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831094/firefox-android-open-extension-support https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831094/firefox-android-...

ravenstine 3y ago

Let's pretend for a moment that it's a certainty that The Google sabotaged Firefox. Practically speaking, would things have turned out appreciably different from the way things are now? People today but especially back during the time that Chrome was released had an disproportionately positive view of The Google in terms of trust and delight from "innovation." If you asked any of them what they think of Mozilla, chances are they'd reply asking "Is that like Godzilla?"

Zak 3y ago
From Chrome's launch in 2008-2009 (depending on your OS) until Firefox's multi-process release in 2016, Chrome had a huge advantage: a bad page didn't crash or slow down your whole browser. I switched during that time period and took my time switching back. Someone less interested in tech or less concerned with privacy issues probably wouldn't have been motivated to switch back at all. I can't comment on whether Google did use sabotage to win, but they didn't need to.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

leoc 3y ago

Reminder again, again that 'Google' here amounts to two individual human beings, Page and Brin, who largely have full liberty to do as they wish with the company. It would be unfair to particularly blame them for some of the undesirable things that happen at Google: for example, problems that are somewhat inevitably the result of Google's somewhat intractably broken corporate culture, or problems that are genuinely too small to be likely to ever reach the ear of the Tzar. But this is another place where those excuses don't seem to apply.

aeurielesn 3y ago

> Slowly but surely, Google is becoming the new Microsoft, and Chrome is slowly turning into the new IE Honestly, Microsoft is becoming the new Microsoft.

_ZeD_ 3y ago
google is becoming (has already become IMHO) the old microsoft
- beej71 3y ago
  Yes, but instead of a tech company, they're an advertising company. Fuuuuuuu--
red-iron-pine 3y ago
just wait until they have unshackled AI

TheMiddleMan 3y ago

For years, when searching "Firefox" on the Google Play store, the only way to install apps on most Android devices, the first result would be a Google ad for Chrome.

williamdclt 3y ago
meh, that's the case for all sorts of apps, not only google things. Looking for "tinder" gives me a Hinge ad as first result.
- regentbowerbird 3y ago
  That's besides your point but Tinder and Hinge are not competitors, they are both owned by Match Group.
- acdha 3y ago
  True, but Google has a conflict of interest here and they really need to be barred from doing this in categories where they also compete.
- bearjaws 3y ago
  Except Google is just moving money from right hand to left hand. If Firefox wanted to be at the top, they have to pay cash to Google.

upofadown 3y ago

>"I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. They might be that indifferent though. If everyone in an organization knows that there are no repercussions to being incompatible with a particular entity, they will spend no time ensuring such compatibility. Entropy will do the rest. Sometimes an anticompetitive situation can evolve without anyone taking an assertive action.

yifanl 3y ago
I made this comment years ago, but selective indifference is still malicious.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > selective indifference is still malicious I don't think you can conclude that, at least not without playing with the definition of "malicious" which according to MW is "having or showing a desire to cause harm to someone." If a typical engineer at Google, who is under the gun on schedule and needs to ship, prioritizes getting stuff working on Chrome which serves the vast majority of the market, and never ends up testing on FF (which may not even be installed on their machines), that's not the engineer "having a desire to cause harm to [mozilla]". If you are arguing that the outcome is still the same, then I don't disagree, but even then still I think motivations matter for some things. Someone who accidentally hits a pedestrian and kills them is IMHO a different (and importantly different when it comes to meting out justice) situation vs a person intentionally aiming for and killing a pedestrian.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s not malice on behalf of that engineer. It is at the level of the managers who decided not to have adequate staffing, and who set the policy that unlike other companies they are willing to risk poor user experience to shift the browser market.
glenstein 3y ago
>Sometimes an anticompetitive situation can evolve without anyone taking an assertive action One example from TFA is checking a user agent and purposely adding a 5 second timer if it is not Chrome, which imo is hard to accidentally do.

etimberg 3y ago

I dunno, I use Firefox on my laptop and it just feels so slow and clunky compared to Chromium based browsers. It's been like that for years and doesn't seem to get better

zqfm 3y ago
This is anecdotal, but my experience has been the opposite. I briefly switched to Chrome some years ago because everyone else was and the dev tools were genuinely better, but as a user it felt clunky and slow, so I switched back to Firefox. They pretty quickly got their act together wrt to the debugger and such and so I only ever dropped into Chrome for work and to this day it's still clunky and slow. I never understood why anyone would want to stay with Chrome especially with Google ramping up their shenanigans.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Firefox has been fairly meh for me performance-wise, and tends to absorb memory over time. I kinda expected that with a few hundred tabs open. What I didn't expect was how sluggish Firefox (119.0.1) would become on a brand new machine with around 20 tabs open. By the time I restarted it today, switching to Firefox and acquiring focus took about 2 seconds. I've a grand total of 3 plugins (FB Container, Multi-Account Container, uBlock Origin) installed.
linza 3y ago
I feel the same. However, how much of this is actually one being faster/slower than the other, and how much is really just subjectiveness one could train away. And now: how much of this is due to deliberate sabotage.
acdha 3y ago
Uninstall your extensions. If you do a side by side comparison of clean installs, they’ll feel similarly responsive - Firefox uses less memory but the Chrome team closed the gap somewhat over the last year. Safari is still noticeably faster and lighter than both but that’s only to be expected since they don’t have cross-platform complications.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> [They accuse] Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.

mtVessel 3y ago

There was a period of time when sites pretty much worked everywhere. In the last five years or so, the number of sites that only work in Chrome was risen precipitously. It's either malice or incompetence, and I have no trouble believing either.

nness 3y ago
Gotta protect your ad revenue some how...
nness 3y ago
Gotta protect that ad revenue some how...
isodev 3y ago
Even Microsoft’s GitHub has all kinds of glitches unless you’re using a chromium browser. The general push towards a single engine is just undeniable at this point. Whoever controls the browser, controls the web.
- rascul 3y ago
  > Even Microsoft’s GitHub has all kinds of glitches unless you’re using a chromium browser. What are some of the glitches? I'm curious if I've ran into any of them.
  - Thin_icE 3y ago
    Same, never found any glitch.
  - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
    ctrl-/ doesn't work in firefox for me (the shortcut for "Focus secondary search bar") But all things considered that's pretty minor
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Given how bad the current Github UI is (and how sloppy the rollout was) I'm quite content to attribute it to incompetence rather than malice, but: Type a long blurb into a text input widget e.g. a comment on a pull request. The text just bounces up and down as you type. I've noticed this with whatever the extended support version of Firefox (macos 10.14) is and with the current Firefox (macos 14.1). To be fair GH renders widgets partially off screen with whatever version of Safari comes with macos 10.14 There is no more static text on GH so if you go back further than that (or have javascript disabled) nothing renders at all. There's no issue tracker (because why would there be?) but there was a discussion thread. Last I saw someone posted detailed steps to reproduce a search bug and the GH response was to lock the discussion thread.

gkoberger 3y ago

I'm surprised more people haven't noted this is 2019 article is here now because of OpenAI. Both Mozilla and OpenAI were for-profit companies fully owned by a non-profit of the same name, and dependent on a large corporation (Google/Microsoft) for a large majority of their finances. And both times, the large company ended up competing directly (Chrome/whatever's happening here) due to being slowed down, while still being the main financier of the original company.

rabbits_2002 3y ago

Google went from my most trusted tech company in 2010 to being just blatantly evil. I think it must be the new CEO.

acdha 3y ago
That’s shortly after they acquired DoubleClick in 2008 – note in particular how they haven’t managed to introduce a good new product since that time. I think that’s because the torrent of ad revenue meant that nothing really affects the price of your stock so all of the executive types are busy playing politics without real fear that users won’t like what they’re shipping.
paul7986 3y ago
No they were evil way before then .. they just were able to keep their rosy image for longer then should have been able to.
nullc 3y ago
Google was evil even in 2010. For example, in 2007 Google actively conspired with Apple to illegally fix wages industry wide, concealing their activity, and using the threat of spurious patent litigation to force hesitant executives into their illegal collusion. Even though I didn't work at one of the colluding companies, I got a ~20% step function in my income when the collusion finally collapsed and wages became more competitive across the industry. Considering indirect effects like this, the amounts stolen from workers in related industry probably amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars.
- mariusor 3y ago
  Complaining about the level of compensation at Google and Apple (even as far back as 15 years ago) feels like a very, _very_ first world problem.
  - greenyoda 3y ago
    Regardless of how much the employees were being paid, CEOs colluding with each other to not recruit employees from each other was a blatant violation of US anti-trust law.

MightyBuzzard 3y ago

[dead]

pipeline_peak 3y ago

Even if these conspiracy theories proved true, we all know Firefox didn't stand a chance lol

xd1936 3y ago

Just today, the /r/YouTube subreddit was discussing how Polymer adds an artificial 5 second delay based on user-agents other than Chrome. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...

accrual 3y ago
Here is the JS that was found: setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
- phkahler 3y ago
  That's pretty clearly anti-competetive.
  - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - DANmode 3y ago
      Make a technical or legal point along with your cleverness, will ya?
      - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
        It's not "clearly" for nefarious purposes, because it's not "clear" at all what the code was doing or why, from just that one tiny snippet. By looking at the context of the code it was a part of, you see what it's really there for, which has a reasonable explanation. 30 seconds of looking at the thread linked above would have shown that, but that ruins the fun of jumping to the conclusions one wants to be true.
rendaw 3y ago
Being discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

Tagbert 3y ago

Related story: “YouTube artificially slows down video load times when using Firefox” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

throw7 3y ago

of course. most of my friends have switched to chrome just because of these "oopses" or niggles. switch to chrome and "it just works". it's not just google here... a lot of heavy javascript sites just don't care to make things work in firefox now. I keep chrome/chromium around for "broken" sites and to chromecast even. It is what it is.

octacat 3y ago
web experience is soo bad that there is not much difference between ff and chrome actually. Like clicking "Let me choose which info to share" on a cookie banner and it takes 5 seconds to load the next "config" window. ff with adblocker and cookie window blocker kinda helps, but now reddit, twitter and medium, and quora all want you to login.

FooBarBizBazz 3y ago

I've noticed serious performance issues with Firefox Android on certain websites, and this has always crossed my mind, but I've thought -- "nah, it's probably an innocent issue". Maybe not. Generally don't unnecessarily ascribe things to malice -- -- unless we're talking about a tightly-managed megacorp. Then the probability that one of their managers has engaged in whatever fuckery approaches one.

seec 3y ago

Firefox was never really good no matter what some tried to imply. It was always a bit crappy, slow, and sometimes ugly. I never understood the passion some people have for it. Sure, it had a lot of extensions but at the time where this was relevant actually using the extension would slow the browser so much it required an overkill computer to be worthwhile. I doubt Google had any need to pay any kind of attention for Firefox to be bad. They were doing that themselves very well already. Maybe the problem with Firefox has a lot more to do with their overpaid most likely hippie-feminist person they have as a CEO, no need to search for Google malfeasance when you have THAT type of CEO. Fairly sure she can create political bullshit out of nothing that would bring any org to failure. I hate the modern world. So hypocrite. We go look for answers on the other side of the planet when it is right there. But you can say it, because it is not politically correct. Seriously kill me already.

glenstein 3y ago
Before Chrome, Firefox had a market share of something like 30%, because it was light years better than IE. And its ability to support extensions was mind blowing. It didn't crash, which was important, it was fast, also important at the time, and was innovative and customizable in ways we take for granted now. Firefox was dominant and Chrome was the little brother, but then the turns tabled.
- seec 3y ago
  I know but that was quite a while ago. And it illustrates exactly what I mean. They had 4-5 years lead on Chrome and they still fucked it up. They lost the browser war way before Google got so many dominant web properties. When Chrome got out, Youtube wasn't nearly as big and important, Google Docs was still pretty basic, slow and missing a lot of functionality. Nobody would have switched to Chrome just to use the Google stuff; but people did switch to chrome because it was better. That's it. I was a Mac only person at the time of Firefox release and it wasn't that much better than Internet Explorer for Mac. But Safari was pretty good, in fact at that time Apple was actually making Safari for Windows as well. I preferred it to Firefox, like most people I knew who tried both... Then Chrome forked the Safari open-source code base and improved it. Firefox lost because it was technically not as good and because of poor leadership. I believe they waste too much ressource on political bullshit, non-working consensus and whatnot. But most of the defenders are ideological zealots. Which is why I got downvoted because they cannot handle the truth. Nobody needed to sabotage Firefox, it wasn't very good in the first place.

r0ckarong 3y ago

So Google is employing the same tactics that Microsoft has used for the last 40 years. I'm shocked ... SHOCKED.