Is Google doing its darndest to squeeze out Firefox or other browsers?
A question for the more tech-savvy here.
I seem to recall an article about Google trying to eliminate competition by making it so that searches or other content would work well on Chrome but not on Firefox. I think I also heard they both run on Chromium, so the engine under the end is the same? I don't fully remember.
But where I'm going with this: I'm noticing lately that certain websites or searches won't work well with Firefox, but when i switch to Chrome, they go off without a hitch. I admit that this often involves personal information being entered (side note- I even had one incident where it didn't work on laptop and had to resort to my phone instead to get it to work). The problem is... I HATE using Chrome. There are some issues with Firefox occasionally, but I'm going to use FF about 90% of the time. And I think I heard that people are becoming more aware of how much of a bastard Chrome is... so is Chrome fighting back dirty to force people to come back over? Or could it possibly be some completely unrelated issue?
Firefox isn't based on Chromium. I use plenty of Google stuff, up to and including their Office-like suite in Firefox and I don't recall ever having a problem. There are occasional websites where I need to use Chrome but they're always some crappy ecommerce thing, not Google sites.
I'm not sure I'd describe Chrome as a bastard. It's a very capable browser. I just find Firefox slightly quicker and it's cross-device sync works better for my needs.
The thing is, Google don't really need to care about Firefox. Firefox isn't a threat to Chrome. Mozilla has been around longer than Google have and they've never really been a threat to anyone. Netscape did some really great stuff back in the day (and still do) but it took Chrome to dethrone Internet Explorer. Chrome doesn't have competition, not in any meaningful sense. Sure there are tonnes of other browsers but most of them are Chromium and those that aren't, are pretty seriously niche. It's the same way Microsoft don't have to worry about Linux on desktop. Firefox dethroning Chrome and Linux beating Windows is just not happening, much as a handful of nerds (myself included) might want it to.
That's not how I remember it.
Netscape was the dominate browser until Microsoft tightly coupled IE into Windows 98 and engaged in many multiple monopolistic behaviors to wipe it off the map.
Netscape went open source, becoming Mozilla. They languished in obscurity for awhile, but as IE stagnated, they started introducing killer features IE didn't have... like killing the plague of popups.
As a result, by time Chrome hit the scene, Firefox had already dethroned IE, taking it from a 95%+ marketshare to a
50%70% marketshare. (hazy memory)And then Google leveraged its monopoly on search, being the front page of the internet, to give free advertising space on all other browsers to how much better their browser was.
Network effects switched from Firefox growth to Google growth, in no small part because Google had not yet burned all goodwill and they were a household brand the way Mozilla wasn't.
I could ramble about this forever, but my point is that it was Firefox that broke Microsoft's hold on the market, Google just leveraged this market disruption to dominate using its own monopoly power.
Its for this reason that when we go to split up Google, spinning Chrome away from the lot of it is a critical requirement.
On top of this, Google intentionally made their products run worse on Firefox and other browsers. The most notable one was when they published an update for YouTube that used the Shadow DOM v0 JavaScript API. As v0 implies, it wasn’t actually a finalized standard, so basically only Chrome could use it at the time. They had a polyfill that was used for other browser so it would still “work”, but it was extremely slow and laggy. This is probably the single biggest reason why people had the impression that Firefox was slow (and to be fair, it was when compared to Chrome at the time, but it wasn’t quite that dramatic).
On top of that a lot of Google services would just plain stop working for a short period on browsers that were not Chrome. You could say bringing this up goes into conspiracy territory, but it was happening extremely frequently. The most generous interpretation would have been that Google was originating the practice of only testing on Chrome, but that’s extremely unlikely given the state of the web browser market at the time.
Google pursued other avenues of aggressive promotion, too, like striking deals with devs of completely unrelated Windows software to bundle Chrome in their installers, and using every link someone taps in the mobile Gmail app as an opportunity to push mobile Chrome.
Mozilla never had a chance against that.
I was deep in the trenches as a web dev during the browser war years and I remember it fairly well. Firefox never particularly troubled IE on sheer numbers. Firefox definitely pushed features and standards way more than it deserved to given it's market share and I'm forever grateful to the Mozilla foundation for that.
But look at the graph, the fall of IE almost exactly matches the rise of Chrome. "Mobile" is a tricky category but I'd probably split that pretty much down the middle between Chrome and Safari, at least back then. Firefox Mobile hasn't been around very long.
Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape certainly had their part to play, and still do, especially in the arena of developing and popularising web standards - but they were, except very briefly in the very very olde Netscape days, relatively niche.
Maybe if Chrome had never existed then Firefox would be no.1 today, which would be nice. But Microsoft would have fought them very hard and Mozilla just didn't have the resources that Google do to win that fight.
That graph is missing the previous 10 years where firefox took IE from 95% to 70%. Chrome's rise looks a lot less instrumental when you watch in animated form, going back to the 90s.
I'm not sure I'd call that few percent a "dethroning" though. 70% is still a pretty hefty majority. As I said, maybe Firefox would have done it given enough time - although things were looking fairly static in the last pre-Chrome years - but they didn't get the chance.
95% to 70% is a 25% gain in marketshare. Taken from the largest tech monopoly in the world by an unheard of open-source brand with a weird name inside of a few years. More importantly, Firefox did the hardest part: Getting everybody to stop only testing their websites in IE.
Here's an alternative universe timeline with comparable numbers:
"1/3 of all iPhone users have abandoned the App Store in favor of the new Epic Store, only 5 years after Apple was forced to allow alternatives."
Then 15 years later:
"95% of Iphone users now use the Google Play store. Epic's rise in the early iphone app store market didn't have that much impact, since Google rose to 30% pretty quickly after announcing theirs and pushing it every time somebody opened Google Maps"
From the graphs I saw on Wikipedia, FF maxed out at around a third market share around 2009-2010. That was right around the time smartphones were becoming popular. While I don’t doubt Google used monopolistic practices, the combination of “Google is releasing a browser”, the general public not caring too deeply about browsers beyond “does it work?” and the rise of mobile browsing (which Mozilla botched its response to) were also pretty important factors as well.
I addressed this.
All the nerds that were recommending Firefox switched to recommending Chrome because Grandma already knew who Google was, but never heard of this Firefox, on top of the points that @Akir added.
A reasonable antitrust department would have stepped in, recognizing that Google was leveraging their complete dominance in search to exert dominance in a re-emerging browser market (because Safari and Opera were also starting to gain marketshare before Chrome). The result of Chrome's dominance is no surprise to anybody that's old enough to remember the rise of IE.
Don't forget that Chrome was a better browser than Firefox back then. (and Opera too)
That's why I recommended it to people. It was noticeably faster and lighter and more useful and had better support for... most things. Especially this exciting new "web 2.0" nonsense that was coming along.
Chrome is still arguably a better browser now, but it's much closer call. I'm not sure browsers matter any more, frankly. Displaying the web is largely a solved issue.
Browsers matter because some of them are limiting our ability to modify them. You might even say this could be a conflict of interest when Google owns page real estate on millions of websites and might not want users to interfere with that.
Always thought it was a little too convenient that Chrome for Android never gained support for extensions of any kind, and it's crazy that Safari on iOS actually solidly bests it there.
I used, liked, and recommended Chrome back then too... I was young (relatively) and impressionable, was already all-in on the Google suite over Office, so for a good while there Chrome was my primary. I think I returned to Firefox full-time around the time of the Snowden leaks.
I don't think Mozilla had much to do about mobile browsing since Google did with Android + Chrome what Microsoft did with Windows + IE.
Android becoming the most popular OS for smartphones and Chrome being usable and default was all that was needed.
I think there is a crucial mistake in the reasoning here. It's the assumption that Google cares about other browsers only when its place on the top is threatened. I don't think this holds true.
Take Youtube for instance. 87.35% of the traffic on Youtube comes from mobile devices. It's a very fair assumption to think vast majority of mobile traffic comes from their mobile app. On this app, you can't block any ads.
31.5 to 37 percent of internet users use an adblock.
So, 12.65% of the users visiting Youtube have the means to use adblock. But only a small percentage of these people do it. When we calculate it, this suggests that, out of all the traffic Youtube gets, only 4-4.7 percent of users are using adblock.
This lower than 5% of unrealized revenue was enough for Youtube to launch a massive campaign against adblockers. Blocking them in various ways, and possibly even being a contributing factor behind the reason Manifest v3 was developed the way it was.
Compare this to the browser market share, where Chrome has only 65% of it. Sure, Firefox by itself has a very small market share, but collectively other browsers make up 35% of it. This is, from Google's point of view, unrealized potential they can and should take. The economic system incentivizes, and kind of even pushes, these big firms to grow. So they look for any potential avenue for revenue.
I'm not saying this to say the OP is necessarily right. They could or could not be. But I'm pointing out the reasoning behind your rebuttal seems to be wrong. Google definitely has the incentive to push out competitors, and historically they aren't known to play nice. Especially lately.
This might be a mighty nit to pick but 5% of users doesn't necessarily mean 5% of traffic. It's entirely possible that the 5% of users who are motivated enough to install ad-blockers make up a disproportionate amount of the traffic.
In either case given the size of Goggle's ad revenue stream, paying a team of programmers to solve a known problem for a 5% boost in revenue is a no-brainer from a business point of view.
Yeah, true. I didn't wanna go into too much detail, but it's one of the assumptions in the argument I've presented. Another big assumption is that the data I've talked about is accurate.
I've tried to illustrate, based on data we can access relatively easily, why Google would want that money, and why they would care about market share despite being the top dog. I think it's not very likely that the data in question would be extremely different from reality, and the unrealized revenue due to adblock would be much lower than that of one due to limited market share.
Cripes. Lots of guesswork there about who is doing what but sure, OK. Let's say your numbers are correct.
The thing about Youtube is it's very, very expensive to run. It requires terrifying amounts of storage, compute and bandwidth in a way that almost nothing else on the web does. It also does ludicrous amounts of traffic. So 5% of lost revenue is still a fuck of a lot. It's worth chasing.
However, given that Google can track users for the purposes of advertising pretty well in any browser, the amount they'd need to spend to fight Mozilla (and the badwill it would generate when they inevitably get found out) probably isn't worth it.
Also as someone else pointed out, if Google wanted to kill Mozilla, they don't need to mess about making their products run a little less well in certain browsers, they could very easily just stop paying them the money that keeps the entire foundation afloat. Google has very likely done more to help Firefox than any of us here. Why would they do that to a product they wanted to kill?
Paying to keep Mozilla afloat allows them to keep a large amount of control over the web because without them they would be at much higher risk of being sued by the FTC for antitrust.
Mozilla auctions the default search engine space, and it's been Bing in the past. Obviously Google is the current high bidder, so if they withdrew from the auction, Mozilla would take a revenue hit. But it wouldn't be a death knell.
(Also, Mozilla is clearly aware that the centralization of their revenue is a problem, but the broader tech community uniformly reacts with utter derision to their every attempt to diversify. Much hay has been made about the value of Chrome's ad spot on Google's search frontpage—easily billions of dollars, which Chrome obviously did not have to pay—but the constant de facto grandstanding for them by nerds everywhere might well be worth even more.)
It would be all but a death knell if Google were to pull out. Mozilla is already in poor financial health; they had two major layoffs in the last 2 years, you can only imagine what would happen without their breadmaker. Secondly, Microsoft would have all the leverage - they really are the only other search engine left to pay them. They can name their price, essentially, and it's not like Bing is a profitmaker for Microsoft.
Every other search engine is an ant. DDG's annual revenue is LESS than the amount of pocket change Google hands to Mozilla - they couldn't hope to give Mozilla a similar deal if they mortgaged the entire company; There really is no replacing Google in their bottom line.
I don't follow Mozilla's actions all that closely, but my understanding is that the concern is that these other endeavors will end up taking resources and organizational mindspace away from Gecko/Firefox when those projects don't really have much that can be taken away without detriment. The validity of the concern is another question, but it doesn't seem terribly far-fetched to me.
What I'm curious to know is why Mozilla hasn't taken a page out of the playbook of other financially successful FOSS projects which have made user happiness one of their top priorities, like Blender, Krita, and more recently Godot. They've all been getting along great and seem like solid examples of how well that model can work. I have to imagine that if Mozilla really started batting for the fences to implement user requests and generally make Firefox awesome to use that financial support would increase substantially.
Blender is roughly an order of magnitude less complex a piece of software than Firefox. It's got 5M versus 42M lines of code; 75-ish versus 400-ish monthly committers; 14k versus 46k commits in the past month.¹ And despite that stupendous difference in scope, and despite Mozilla making roughly $600 million in annual revenue and spending the vast majority of it on Firefox, they are still arguably failing to keep up with the staggering amount of churn Google uses Chrome to inflict on the Web.
Firefox is not like other open source projects. Google has made the Web outlandishly hostile to alternative implementations. (Reminder: fucking Microsoft declared bankruptcy on maintaining their own browser engine.) Funding models which work for an open source project with a mere 5M LoC simply will not keep up with Google's covering fire in the browser arena, and projects which attempt it will fail.
Just to be clear, yes, this situation is absurd, and it is almost entirely of Google's making. There are obviously a tremendous variety of good reasons to hate Google, but their absolute destruction of the browser market is definitely one of them.
¹ From Openhub: Blender, Firefox.
This is it right here. If features only change once every 5 years or so, its much easier to 'keep up'. But specs are changing constantly, and since Google has dominance, much like the 90s, official standards don't mean squat, it means supporting what Chrome supports.
Obviously everyone's environment is different, but as someone who basically stuck with firefox since it came out, i've had multiple failures, issues, and outright hostile behaviors from the G-Suite with firefox over the years.
The last one was some time ago (2018ish if i had to guess), but it was also crippling. Could it be some weird interaction on my end? Maybe, but I doubt it as the issue was only with google sheets on firefox from multiple machines.
And the issues often went away when you switched your UA to Chrome/Windows.
It wasn't neccessarily intentionally malignant, but its one hell of a coincidence.
Yeah I didn't say that specifically, but it was absolutely the case.
Even if it's not outright malicious intent, it's one of many cases where a company can make the space hostile to competitors and benefit from it, just from being ambivalent.
Yep, I keep work-related apps in Firefox PWAs (separate from my normal profile via an extension). MS Teams kept hounding me about how Firefox isn't compatible with "new teams." So I installed a user agent switcher, set it to Edge, and now it works great.
I also set up a chrome PWA to run YouTube in, with my partner's premium account, and it loads videos much faster than in Firefox. So there might be some background weirdness going on, but we'll never know for sure.
Netscape is still active?!
Well, Mozilla still exist. They're the same organisation, if you go back far enough.
I wish. I have many fond memories of Netscape.
The reason is less conspiratorial and more of a sad reality- a lot of frontend developers, including those at Google, only test on Chromium and maybe Safari and call it a day.
This is why I'm very adamant about not using Chromium-based browsers, not because I think Google is evil, but because I remember when websites would only work on IE6 because why would you test anything else? I use Safari on Apple devices and Firefox on Linux/Windows.
An increasing number of devs don’t bother with WebKit/Safari either, even though that’s throwing a significant number of mobile users under the bus. They test in some form of Blink/Chrome (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Arc, etc) and call it a day. Increasingly, standards aren’t what the W3C defines but however Chrome behaves.
It’s frustrating and disappointing.
Apple are making it a bit hard to do that though. Don't you have to own (or rent/borrow) Apple hardware to run any versions of Safari?
There are other WebKit browsers (like GNOME’s Web, formerly known as Epiphany) but Safari proper requires Apple hardware (if you’re painting within the lines anyway, it can run in a macOS VM too).
It is a bit of an imposition for small time/indie devs, but those usually aren’t the sites that falter under Safari/Firefox. It’s almost always sites run by institutions large enough that a Mac mini or two is less than couch change.
I mean if you're an indie developer sure but the $600 to get an Mac Mini is a write-off in every other case
This... might actually be why.
One of the sites was even a government website (voter registration), and I expect they might only be testing things on Chrome.
My one bank explicitly wouldn't let me log in until I switched my UA string to Chrome/Windows like it was 2004 (except it was IE then)
Any and all web developers: Stop gating content based on UA. Throw a warning if you must, but for the love of god don't block stuff.
Similar, I typically use firefox fine, but one of my banks had a bug that messed up the UI in firefox for a good while, so I had to switch to chrome until they fixed it. One of the main banks in my country, too. From the little Ive seen of testing where Ive worked, I figured they just hadnt tested as thoroughly in firefox.
I have a few things to add. First of all, Firefox is one of the few browsers left that is independend from Chrome. You only really have 3 types of major browsers: Gecko (Firefox), Chromium (Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera and probably every other browser you've heard of) and Webkit (Safari and a few tiny Linux browsers). Chrome has <90% of the browsershare, then comes webkit, because until recently, any browser on IOS had to be a reskin of Safari. Then comes Firefox trailing last.
There are two cool projects who try to break this triopoly (or pretty much monopoly): Servo and Ladybird. Servo started as an experiment from Mozilla (Firefox) and is what created the Rust programming language. It has been developing for a while, but nearly died since it was abandonex by Mozilla. It has now been taken up by the Linux foundation and Igalia and is slowly moving towards it's intermediate goal of becoming a fit for lightweight embedded usecases.
There is also Ladybird, which is newer and spawned from the fascinating Serenity OS project. It has recently been spun of into it's own project and foundation and has had major cash infusions from a Github co-founder.
Exciting times in the browser space! They are both very far from being useable, but both are making slow but steady progress.
Probably not intentional, although I also don’t think Google engineers are going to care all that much about making sure things run well on Gecko.
If nothing else, Google is the only reason Firefox exists - the single search engine deal with Google accounts for more than 95% of Mozilla’s revenue. If they wanted to kill Firefox, simply not giving Mozilla money anymore would do it pretty quickly.
I think Firefox could be maintained purely by volunteers. Honestly, I would prefer it that way.
They already struggle to keep up with web standards with a 300-400m payroll of software engineers in addition to volunteers, I’m doubtful that just volunteers will be able to keep up with security updates let alone whatever web standards google pumps out of w3c.
Firefox isn't Chrome. Firefox may need configuration to work more like Chrome. Below are a few of my experiences...
DNS over HTTPS will encrypt your DNS requests and send them to a DNS server of the browser's choosing. Different DNS servers act differently. Chrome uses Google DNS and Firefox uses Cloudflare DNS. Still, you can configure each browser to use different DNS servers of your choice.
(The following is based on what I read from Reddit long ago and I cannot easily find a source to verify this information. You can still experiment with this option below.)
Google DNS likes to let people know where you are location wise. Cloudflare hides your location. If your location is known, you will be provided with web servers (CDN servers which mirror web content) located closer to your location so that the internet is faster. If your location is not known then you will be given a generic server which may be generally overloaded. However, to get that closer server, your location is known to others... so it is a speed and privacy tradeoff. Regardless, the two CDN sources may behave differently so you may want to figure Firefox similar to Chrome to see if that speeds things up.
This tended to be an issue with Youtube in past (as far as I recall) and I'm not sure if it is still an issue now.
You can change this in Firefox Settings, in Privacy, you can sent DNS over HTTPS to increased protection which allows you to specify the DNS over HTTPS server you prefer to use (for example, https://dns.google/dns-query is for Google's HTTPS over DNS server). The default protection setting only uses Cloudflare's service.
(Below is based on experience.)
Many folks wonder over to Firefox now because Ublock Origin will soon not be supported on Chrome (Ublock Origin Lite will work but it isn't quite the same thing). What you may not know is that Ublock Origin is slightly more powerful on Firefox and may be configured differently than what you expect. It should behave the same when the settings are the same as what you used in Chrome.
In Settings, in the Privacy section at the top, are 4 check boxes... One of those check boxes was never available on Chrome. There are i icons at the far right to explain each option.
When enabled, the last option (Uncloak canonical names) can cause Firefox to behave significantly worse (notably, this option is not available in Chrome).
When enabled, the first option (Disable pre-fetching) can cause Firefox to start slower. Ublock Origin is able to stop Firefox from doing anything until Ublock is ready to block ads. This means that Firefox can start a bit slower and that this checkbox will work if enabled. Chrome, on the other hand, won't wait for anything and may load some ad related stuff in before Ublock can come online. Chrome starts faster due to that. However, this checkbox doesn't quite work in Chrome because Chrome sometimes just pre-fetches things anyway.
You can configure the other options as you see fit.
The summary is that Firefox and Chrome are different and the same extension on both browsers also behaves differently. It seems, from my experiences, that the differences tend to favor Firefox being slower but also protecting your privacy more. You can configure the browser to your tastes and recover the speed you are used to.
Funny you posted this today! Since the beginning of August the CRM tool my company uses has been causing Firefox to stop responding for up to minutes at a time. I just gave up this morning and am trying out a browser called Arc. So far so good.