14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome is currently the number one browser on the desktop and mobile, and with Microsoft and others embracing Chromium, the browser war is getting a lot more challenging for Mozilla Firefox.
And while Firefox itself is recording a decline, a former Mozilla employee says Google itself is partially responsible for the way users migrated from this app to Chrome.
Johnathan Nightingale, who was part of the Firefox team for eight years, says Google was Mozilla’s biggest partner before the search giant started the work on their own browser.
Everything changed when Chrome was ready for prime time, and Nightingale explains that Google turned to dirty tricks to increase the adoption of its browser. All while slowing down Firefox’s, he says.
“Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as ‘incompatible,’” the former Mozilla engineer explains.
“We’ll fix it”
When asked about all these problems, Google acknowledged the mishaps, promising to fix them as fast as possible.
“All of this is stuff you’re allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we’d say “hey what gives?” And every time, they’d say, “oops. That was accidental. 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?” he explains.
Needless to say, this approach eventually drove more people from Firefox to Chrome, and the more time Google needed to fix these “oopses,” the bigger the number of users making the switch.
“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,” he adds.
Needless to say, Google hasn’t offered a response to these claims, but as it stands, not only that Chrome is the top browser, but there’s little chance Firefox can ever recover to regain the leading spot.