Firefox Marketing Head Expresses Concerns Over Google's Apparent 'Only Be On Chrome' Push (medium.com)

Eric Petitt, head up Firefox marketing, writing in a blog: I use Chrome every day. Works fine. Easy to use. There are multiple things that bug me about the Chrome product, for sure, but I'm OK with Chrome. I just don't like only being on Chrome. And that's what Chrome wants. It wants you to only use Chrome. Chrome is not evil, it's just too big for its britches. Its influence on the internet economy and individuals is out of balance. Chrome, with 4 times the market share of its nearest competitor (Firefox), is an eight-lane highway to the largest advertising company in the world. Google built it to maximize revenue from your searches and deliver display ads on millions of websites. To monetize every... single... click. And today, there exists no meaningful safety valve on its market dominance. Beyond Google, the web looks more and more like a feudal system, where the geography of the web has been partitioned off by the Frightful Five. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are our lord and protectors, exacting a royal sum for our online behaviors. We're the serfs and tenants, providing homage inside their walled fortresses. Noble upstarts are erased or subsumed under their existing order. (Footnote: Petitt has made it clear that the aforementioned views are his own, and not those of Mozilla.)

Comments

ONly Only Only

[sycodon]

Only be on DOS
Only be on Windows 3.1
Only be on Netscape
Only be on AOL
Only be on IE
Only be on Mac
Only be on iPhone
Only be on Windows phone
Only be on Android
Only
Only
Only

Manufacturers have been trying to lock people into their platform since people began selling stuff. Computers, software, tools, vehicle, you name it.

Need a competent DOJ

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time for the DOJ to crack down on Google for anticompetitive behavior. They're quite possibly even worse than Microsoft was in the 1990s. Unfortunately, I have no confidence that a DOJ in the Trump administration will enforce the nation's laws. Get rid of Trump and Sessions, and perhaps there will be hope of enforcing existing antitrust laws.

Re:Need a competent DOJ

[alexo]

Do a google search on mobile Chrome and on mobile Firefox and you'll see that there is some useful functionality that is only available on Chrome. Specifically if you check the images search.

Tailoring their web pages to limit functionality on competing browsers is anticompetitive.

Oh deary deary me.

[Computershack]

Funny how Mozilla/Firefox weren't complaining when they had a large marketshare. It is called competition and if people are going to a competitor's product you need to look at why, what you offer and what you could offer which would persuade people to yours. You have no right to market share, you have no right to anything at all. I also find it quite hypocritical that you mention the advertising given the tie-ins Firefox and Mozilla have had in the past and the fact that on the leading Linux platforms Firefox has done a deal to ensure that it is the default installed OOTB browser. Maybe other browser companies such as Opera should complain about you doing that?

Perhaps given your job title you should look at your own performance and take a closer look at home as to why Firefox doesn't do as well as it should. If you don't competition get out of the game.

Re:Oh deary deary me.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Perhaps given your job title you should look at your own performance and take a closer look at home as to why Firefox doesn't do as well as it should. If you don't competition get out of the game.

Read through this bug on adding concurrency to Firefox to get a good feeling why Mozilla lost so much browser market share:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

"Always with you what cannot be done."

$350M in funding per year, and they couldn't straighten out threads/processes. A bunch of crazy-ass trendy projects that got killed - those got millions of dollars in funding each. Users cursing at their slow browser - not even a priority.

If Chrome is winning (has won?), it's because its dev team seems to have an "OK, we'll fix that" attitude.

Re:Oh deary deary me.

[slack_justyb]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool the torches there buddy. I get where you are coming from but I think we're a little past that point. You've got a great argument at say 20% delta between first and second place, but we're way, way, way past that point. Chrome is at 54% with second place at 15% and that's Apple's Safari which I'm sure 90% of that 15% is iPhone. That's an almost 40% difference between the two. While no one is screaming monopoly (okay maybe a few but no one cares about them), we're in the territory where we should grow a bit concerned.

The W3C manages the standards of the web and even then Google has an insanely heavy hand in the process there and even if W3C doesn't agree to something, who cares, Google just does it anyway. So I get it, competition and all, but there's a point where we should pro-actively start looking at what checks are in place to ensure that Google doesn't make W3C, OASIS, et al completely irrelevant.

You know how people say that "gee I wish people were more proactive before monopolies formed?" Yeah, we're there, this is that point where it is time to ask questions. Not asking questions, not ensuring that Google just doesn't start stomping standards and going the non-evil form of embrace, enhance, and extinguish, ensuring the young whipper snappers that Google hires don't GNOME 3 the hell out of the Internet, that's the entire point. It's not to say, "OMG! Google is just too big, has way too much a lead over other browsers, it's just not fair *wail to heavens*". It is to say, "Hey, uh, do we have enough checks and balances to ensure that Google doesn't use their lead to just fudge bomb how the web works?" The answer is pretty much no and that's been a concern for like forever (I remember conversations about this issue back in late 1990s and W3C was way smaller then), but more so now that I lot more people happen to be on the Internet daily.

Totally understand your position, but just up and up being cynical and telling them to go f'off, !!CAPITALISM!! Is exactly the crap that just leads to an insanely high level of apathy that ultimately leads to the same folks that said !!CAPITALISM!! saying, "WTF?! Where were you all and why didn't you stop them?!?!" I for one don't want another IE and neither should anyone else. We need an organization that can literally say, "Google Chrome is not compliant with ISO(ideally W3 as opposed to ISO)-96716723(whatever) of HTML rendering standards, they are a non-standard browser." And we should actively shun non-standard browsers.

Also, just want to add that this nowhere even gets into how slow the W3C has been, how they totally missed the ball on mobile-everything, and how they are totally getting left behind in IoT. So there's an even amount of blame to lay on W3C's feet too. Also mobile OS makers and what not, there's some blame heading to them too... It's a really complex topic, but yeah screaming !!CAPITALISM!! isn't going to fix jack crap and possible just make it worse off.

Simple solution

[Ostrich25]

Make Firefox not suck. I had a laundry list of issues with FF that culminated in my switching to Chrome, where everything "just works". I used FF for *years*, until I literally couldn't make myself keep fighting with the browser.

This isn't just Google's fault.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not just Google's fault - people are writing Chrome-only websites. Not surprisingly, google.com only supports U2F (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor) on Chrome. Surprisingly and infuriatingly, other tech companies are doing the same, even though Firefox supports U2F with a plugin. Dropbox and Atlassian both require Chrome for U2F, and refuse to try to work with Firefox. (Kudos to Github for doing it right.)

Re:This isn't just Google's fault.

[TemporalBeing]

Try again with Firefox 58 or later. Due out end of this year.

And no longer have (a) tab groups and (b) 90+% of the add-ons and extensions for Firefox out there. FF57 is where I believe their putting the guillotine to their own necks.

Wish Google sites would shut up

[sremick]

What I'd really like is for all the Google service sites to STFU and remember when I say I don't want Chrome. Every fucking page for every fucking site has some sort of pop-up box, banner, or somesuch that uses Microsoft tacticts to suggest that somehow this web service will work better in Chrome than some other web-compliant browser like the one I'm already using (Firefox). If closing/dismissing/saying "NO" would silence them for good that'd be one thing, but they won't fucking go away. They keep coming back.

Sorry, Google, but the dozen or so background processes Chrome launches that arrogantly assume that you're doing nothing else with your computer and Chrome therefore has implicit permission to own every all RAM and CPU 100%, crowding out everything else with they sheer quantity of the number of spawned threads has resulted in you being banned from my systems. Go the fuck away and leave me alone and stop trying to take over the world, assholes.

Re:Wish Google sites would shut up

[sremick]

No, it does not "trump all other factors". I don't care if every install of Chrome got you $10. Chrome is blatant spyware, and "factually" slows down your computer. I know many previous Chrome fans who've ditched it and gone back to Firefox for this very reason (an issue on both MacOS and Windows).

Gmail, Google, Hangouts, Calendar, Contacts, and so on all work 100% perfectly fine in Firefox. But without giving away your soul by letting Google know every click on every site.

Stop trying to be Chrome then

[TypoNAM]

Mozilla has been pushing hard to make Firefox to be exactly like Google Chrome along with its limitations and lack of customizability. By Firefox v57 there will be no reason to ever use Firefox anymore because of Web Extensions won't allow users to install real extensions that allow them to actually change Firefox's behavior and UI as they want it to instead of Mozilla's ideology of having Firefox be a Chrome copycat. The pathetic Theme options in future Firefox versions is just as awful as Windows 10's themes and limited color choices, meaning no real options at all.

So I find it hilarious that somebody from Mozilla is concerned with Chrome becoming the only web browser in town when it's Mozilla themselves pushing the remaining Firefox users away towards Google Chrome because of their behavior and border-line user hostility. Because why bother using a gimmick when you can use the real thing?