A former Mozilla executive explains how Google Chrome ousted Firefox as the most popular browser

Internet does not lack stories on how a big company with more and resource manpower put similar businesses in jeopardy. A former Mozilla executive, Jonathan Nightingale has a similar story to corroborate. In a series of tweet, the Mozilla executive explained how Google practiced unfair business tactics to sabotage other browsers, especially Firefox, making a way for its own Chrome browser to rise to the top.

Shedding lights on some of the events that took place between Google and Mozilla over the past few years, Jonathan hit out at Google by saying that the search giant had put Firefox at a disadvantage. Services like Gmail, Google Docs experienced “selective performance issues” and this according to the former executive was intentional. He then pointed out the compatibility issues that Firefox encountered while accessing various Google web services. He said, “Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as incompatible.”

But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers. 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.”

— Johnathan Nightingale (@johnath) April 13, 2019

He also said that Mozilla instead of spending time on the development of the Firefox browser, wasted a lot of time informing Google about issues pertaining to compatibility, and others. And by the time the company realized that Google is performing the stunt just to dethrone Firefox, it’s too late. However, Jonathan holds the view Firefox fall behind the competition for their own doing.

A former Microsoft Edge intern, Joshua Bakita also shared a similar story. According to Bakita, one of the reasons Microsoft dropped EdgeHTML rendering was due to the fact mentioned Jonathan.

“I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up,” said the former Edge intern.

Via: Neowin