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Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone used to think that was Google.

When was that? Around the time they decided to liberate the web from the evil clutches of Microsoft/IE and ... Mozilla/FF (20%+ and growing at that time)?

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I may be remembering things incorrectly but I think Mozilla almost got in trouble with the IRS because too much of funding came from a single source: Google. What I'm trying to say is Mozilla might have died a long time ago if not for Google.

And Apple might have died if not for Microsoft investment.

We very well may be assuming different actors and motivations where there are none: there's just messaging and market differentiation.

> When was that?

When people still believed in the slogan 'Don't be evil' [1]. Google even removed the slogan. I guess they don't believe in it themselves anymore. The replacement 'Do the right thing' seems like a variation of Nike's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

Hah, I love that slogan change. "Yes, we do things that are evil, but we also do things that aren't evil sometimes"

Fun fact: Pine64's dev-kit for their forthcoming PinePhone offering is codenamed "Don't be evil".

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don%27t_be_evil

Compared to both of them Chrome was technically miles better as well. And no, Firefox was stagnant. It actually saved web from IE.

When MS still held the monopoly position and mobile phones weren't mainstream. Google had a mission of "don't be evil" or something similar, they quietly got rid of that and started being evil.

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