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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

My personal little conspiracy theory is that Google pays Mozilla as an antitrust shield.

A lot of us pretty much assume that much, but I think it goes much deeper.

I think Google pays and maintains a working relationship with the CEO of Mozilla (current and former) to purposely keep the organization rudderless, uncompetitive, and shrinking.

Mozilla spends its money building a 3D VR metaverse here, a bunch of AI models it later scraps over there, a web3 / distributed social program, etc. It scraps Rust, doesn't invest into Firefox. Just silly toys and experiments.

That nice CEO salary is hush money.

Just a fun little pet theory, totally not based on evidence.

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I don't know if there's a direct quid pro quo relationship between the CEO of Mozilla and Google but I feel quite confident that Google absolutely influences the organization in ways beyond just the cash injection to make it rudderless, uncompetitive and shrinking as you say.

It could be as simple as ex-Google employees at lower levels than CEO who are paid by Google take positions at Mozilla, or more subtle things like guiding the direction of the organization through standards boards.

It would be really fascinating to look at the org charts of Mozilla past and present and try and build the network between people who worked at Google or Google related organizations before, during, and after their time at Mozilla.

Because you're absolutely right that the organization is so absolutely dysfunctional that it can't just be incompetence, it has to be absolute malice.

Yes simple things such as becoming employed at Mozilla to perform corporate espionage for Google.

Corporate espionage targeting an open-source project?

White collar crime is very much a real thing and some of the most successful organizations got that way because they broke the law.

We don't live in a meritocracy and nice guys finish last.

That's just how things are.

Firefox is already an excellent and fast browser and people just don't use it. I think it's a marketing problem. Google, Microsoft, Brave, etc all put a lot of money and resources into promoting their browsers, pushing them at an OS level (with legal care), using ads etc. For Firefox to compete they'd need to spend a lot more of their money marketing and end up building far fewer fun toys and experiments, and they could still never achieve the same level as MS or Google.

I think I'd rather they keep innovating

People stop using things which don't work or stop working on the regular.

Its not a marketing problem, its a market problem.

The only money in the current market is in ads/surveillance and that's basically a requirement to compete. They can't achieve the same level as MS or Google because of sabotage, and an adverse market.

In some circles its called tortuous interference of a contract, but the bar to prove it is impossibly high so companies can strategically make changes to dependencies that force costs on a competitor as a dominant market player.

Do you know how many times Firefox has had bug tickets opened for Google, and Cloudflare, and others where those companies basically broke the web for everyone on that browser because their silent internal changes to captcha's and other systems didn't play nice with competitors browsers which respect privacy more than others? Change management is a solved problem, so the only reason this happens is because of purposeful asymmetry here where FTC enforcement has failed.

These breakages happens a lot, every few months on the regular going back more than a decade.

How do you attract people's attention to use your browser and deal with the brokenness, when competitors constantly break it? These type of toy projects.

I was part of the first generation Mozilla FireFox fan. Yep, I had the "Get FireFox" T-Shirt and everything. I came over from Netscape Navigator. After all these years honestly, good riddance. The glitches, the bugs, the crashes, the instability, and it took years or was it decades for them to make it so that extentions don't break on every update. Too little too late. There's no reason for me to go back. We already have the bad memories, and firefox comes with a lot of bad emotions for it to feel new and fresh again. Imagine Mozilla saying "Okay guys we redid FireFox again this time, do you want to try it?" NO.

>>I think I'd rather they keep innovating

Yes, but innovating and then killing the innovations, e.g., most recently Pocket, is not really innovating in any useful sense. When something like Pocket starts getting traction then gets killed for no apparent reason, it does seem like more circumstantial evidence to support the above thesis that Google is paying Mozilla just as an increasingly weak anti-trust shield

Was pocket getting traction? It's been around since 2007 and Wikipedia says it had 17 million users in 2015. In an internet of billions of users that's not many.

Google have often killed innovative and popular products (reader, picasa, chromecast, stadia, panoramio) but I doubt anyone would believe that's it's evidence of some kind of infiltrator sabotaging the company.

I wouldn't measure traction merely by counts of occasional users — which measures only lowest common denominator.

Much more important is quantity and quality of use by those do make it a part of their personal or work lives — measuring 'stickiness'.

Having many users who can and will stop using your product for trivial reasons is far less good than having fewer users who will stick with your product, and find it a positive value, and will stick with your ecosystem and encourage others to do so.

And yes, with Google, I actively avoid using their products specifically because no matter how useful they make those products, Google has a well-established habit of killing them for no apparent reason or timing. It'd be one thing if the products could be used local-stand-alone as long as I wanted, but when it's just killing the cloud where it all runs, it is just nearly guaranteeing a future waste of my time to re-find another solution.

I didn't think I had that risk with Firefox/Mozilla, but evidently I do, and that is just another reason now to start searching for a new browser...

> “Towards the end of 2004 I sent a note to somebody I knew here and saying that I was interested in anything that they might have and it turned out that Google was interested in Firefox. They liked the product and they thought it would be good to support its development, so eventually they hired myself and several other people from the Mozilla community to continue development on it.”

https://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php%3Fid=977.html

Presumably then Google developed a competing browser so they could collect more data and not come into constant conflict with Mozilla’s insistence on client-side-only data processing — but, as the interview above notes, the initial engagement appears to be because a coder suggested Google pay for Firefox development.

Has a nice sound to it but Hanlon's razor says: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'd be impressed if this was the case but I expect neither side is sufficiently competent or malicious to explain it.

Not heard of Hanlon's razor but I'll be quoting that

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