> “Towards the end of 2004 I sent a note to somebody I knew here and saying that I was interested in anything that they might have and it turned out that Google

> “Towards the end of 2004 I sent a note to somebody I knew here and saying that I was interested in anything that they might have and it turned out that Google was interested in Firefox. They liked the product and they thought it would be good to support its development, so eventually they hired myself and several other people from the Mozilla community to continue development on it.” https://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php%3Fid=977.html https://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php%3Fid=977.html Presumably then Google developed a competing browser so they could collect more data and not come into constant conflict with Mozilla’s insistence on client-side-only data processing — but, as the interview above notes, the initial engagement appears to be because a coder suggested Google pay for Firefox development.