Former Mozilla executive accuses Google of sabotaging Firefox

In a series of tweets, Johnathan Nightingale, the former General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox unit at Mozilla, accuses Google of sabotaging the browser to lure users to Chrome. Nightingale worked on Firefox for eight years and says that since the launch of Chrome, there were an unusual high number of incidents with small bugs on Google websites.

Nightingale says that every time, Google would say "oops, that was accidental" and that they would fix it in the next push in two weeks. But the oopses happened over and over again, dozens or maybe hundreds of them:

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?

I’m all for “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence” but I don’t believe google is that incompetent.

— Johnathan Nightingale (@johnath) April 13, 2019

I think they were running out the clock. 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.

— Johnathan Nightingale (@johnath) April 13, 2019

This is not the first time a Firefox developer complains about sabotage from Google. However, Nightingale doesn't hold a grudge against Google, and points out Firefox's downfall was caused by Mozilla's own doing.