But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don’t like it. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. This is not a thread about blaming google for Firefox troubles though. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. I’m all for “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence” but I don’t believe google is that incompetent. We’ll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.” Over and over. But we were still a search partner, so we’d say “hey what gives?”Īnd every time, they’d say, “oops. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.”Īll of this is stuff you’re allowed to do to compete, of course. gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.īut Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. I think our friends inside google genuinely believed that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, “We’re on the same side. They had a competing product now, but they didn’t cut ties, break our search deal - nothing like that. When chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla’s income. I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time google was our biggest partner. It’s a piece of the #BlockSidewalk discussion I may have unique perspective on.īecause they’ve run this play on me before. So I want to talk about google/alphabet and “amateur hour” tactics. This is what Johnathan Nightingale, who was Firefox VP of Engineering at Mozilla, said about this:
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