It’s no secret that Google Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, and while a lot of that might be owed to its quality, some believe that Google intentionally sabotaged competing browsers in order to grow in popularity. A former Mozilla executive has lashed out at the Mountain View company for repeatedly and continuously finding less-than-desirable ways to promote its own browser.
Jonathan Nightingale posted a series of tweets over the weekend, detailing some of the events that took place between Google and Mozilla over the years. Nightingale starts by pointing out that Google typically played nice with Mozilla before Chrome was a thing, but things turned sour once Google’s browser launched. While the company kept trying to convince Mozilla that both organizations were on the same side, things would often break in Firefox for no real reason.
This is really not that surprising. The only reason Google plays nice with Mozilla is the same reason Microsoft invested in Apple in the late ’90s and kept its products available on Mac OS despite the fact the Mac was basically dead: they need an antitrust lightning rod.
It’s not a surprise, because it’s the same people. Many of the execs and managers that left Ballmer-soft have landed at Google, and brought the same tactics with them.
“Google Play Services and Google Mobile Services in Android” is the Windows OEM license of the 21st century, and it’s being pushed using the same dirty tactics, with the same bulk prepurchase clauses, and the same “you are not allowed to sell a competing product” license terms.
Remember when you could just take your diskettes and CD-ROMs and use them on another OS? (say OS/2 or Desktop Linux using Wine). With Android, all your bought apps (and app IAPs) are locked in the Play Store of a single company.
*Android, all your bought apps (and app IAPs) are locked in the Play Store of a single company.*
This is simply not true. I can upgrade apps I bought from Google Playstore from other Android Appstores such as APKPure and others
I’m not shedding any tears for Mozilla and neither should anyone else.
In a lot of ways Mozilla is nastier than Google ever was, starting with the forced upgrades of browsers without asking permission first to the moronic “services” they’re trying to sucker unsuspecting people into signing up for.
This is why international, royalty-free, patent-unencumbered, backwards/forwards compatible, real standards are a necessary thing. You simply cannot trust de-facto standards with a reference implementation owned by only one entity.
W3C only publishes recommendations, and WHATWG is a moving target. Leaving Chromium the biggest, and therefore the de-facto controller of web browser standards.
The Android API used to be a royalty-free, patent-unencumbered standard (as far Google was concerned, that is) before the introduction of Play Services (with a detailed compatibility definition and a free reference implementation), but even then this still didn’t stop Google from owning your purchased apps through the Play Store.
Valve and EA don’t own anything related to the Windows API either, but they own a large percentage of some gamers’ purchased games.
kurkosdr,
But it was owned by one company and not by an international body. Free reference implementations by a single company don’t count, as I mentioned in my criteria.
Controlled opposition.
However, that doesn’t excuse Mozilla going off the rails in its own ways (as the article even points out).
To what part of the article are you referring?
The main area’s Mozilla has gone off the rails are gimping UI configurability (which is slowly returning) and botching monetization efforts (ads in Firefox in certain areas instead of just sticking with search revenue).
The article has a brief “Nightingale later states that Firefox’s downfall is Mozilla’s own doing”, which I would like to see expanded how (if) departed this guy is from reality,
Update: and the original source is equally brief in a tweet “This is not a thread about blaming google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. “
@nicubunu – Thanks, that’s what I meant.
@cb88 – there’s also some dubious policies around partner projects and recently with extensions being blocked that seem to be doing some damage.
And now, Google is using the “enemy of my enemy” tatics whenever possible as Edge is now Chromium-based. This will be the next point of pressure at the browsers market.
That Microsoft clown(Kenneth Auchenberg) saying that Mozilla should abandon their “philosophical ivory tower”, it’s even funny you know, comming from a company that relied on proprietary software for years and contributed for the creation of “Compatible with IE only” sites.
Now, they changed their failed Edge browser engine and want to be treated as experts…
One thing you can always count on in this world, is that if Thom is linking an article about some kind of malice, injustice in technology world or tech. companies doing shady stuff, his personal comment will be “That’s not surprising at all, we should be used to this by now, this is completely normal”. But I guess that’s a worldview they have in America…
I’m not American.
Thom isn’t from the US.
Oh… that’s unexpected. Well, but the rest is true.
Look, everyone. Opera’s back, and it’s called Firefox! Are we do for another useless EU court wrangle and browser ballot?
I wish Opera was back.. the presto engine was amazingly efficient at browsing even complex sites on what’d we’d today consider potato hardware. The last release I could find for Solaris 9 even browses most some websites usably on a 85Mhz Supersparc II (assuming you are fairly patient 😉 ).
It was the best browser on my N800 also.
cb88,
Yeah, but now websites are all heavy in Javascript frameworks.
And classic Opera was not only efficient, but also most standards-compliant: https://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/does-your-browser-behave.html
Anyways, Opera 9.27 (their high point IMHO) is still quite usable on my dual Pentium II 266. And untill 2015 I used as my main browser on an Athlon XP 1700+ (but even underclocked to 1100 MHz and undervolted to minimum, to conserve power and hw) the last classic Opera…