It's not a conspiracy that Google pays Mozilla for default search engine placement.

Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda

Hanlon's razor only makes sense if you're a teenager posting on reddit. Just world theory and all that.

Once you get into corporate politics it's the exact opposite.

God help you if you ever get into the nuts and bolts of governmental, or gasp intergovernmental politics.

Eh, from my experience in several large companies there's some malice, but there's way more incompetence.

From my experience, companies are happy to strategically feign incompetence, blindness and deafness.

Th other conspiracy I've heard is Google subsidizes Mozilla so they have a credible claim there's competition in the market.

This is the correct answer

Why would Google try to prop up Firefox as a competitor? Both Safari and Edge on desktop are twice the market share of Firefox, so the browser market is competitive enough without Firefox.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Safari can probably be discounted since Apple discontinued the Windows version in 2012. A browser that can only run on 18% of desktops worldwide isn't necessarily the competitor Google is looking for.

Edge is available on Linux and macOS, so it would probably do. But that would allow one of Google's biggest competitors to drop an under-performing product and lobby for antitrust against Google. Unlikely to happen, but a risk Google might not want to take.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Chrome, edge and safari are just, well chrome, on a single family of rendering engines

Google would probably prefer if Safari and Edge did not gain market share. They're both developed by large corporations that pose a major threat to Google. Firefox, not so much.

Safari and Edge (which is also Chrome) having twice the dismal market share of Firefox doesn't make the browser market competitive. Safari is an appliance delivered exclusively on machines manufactured by a single company that holds a small, though luxury, part of the market. Edge (is Chrome, and) is only available on one OS (although granted, it's a very widespread OS.

Firefox is the only "credible" competitor, although Firefox's only profitable customer is Google itself.

It is plausible that it's part of a broader antitrust litigation defense strategy

Doing both makes sense. Google has a clear motive to keep Firefox in the market, at the same time they have repeatedly shown that they want Firefox to have the smallest market share possible. For antitrust purposes it might be enough to show "people could to Firefox", even if nobody does.

If true, it really backfired on them as buying Mozilla's default search is currently being used against them in a search engine antitrust suit.

According to a weird definition of "really backfired," because they would without question have been hit a long time ago with credible antitrust if they hadn't kept Firefox afloat (though user-hostile enough to keep people on Chrome.)

There's such a marginal difference between the quality of the two browsers, and Chrome is held back in what it can be by the necessity of furthering Google's commercial interests. The only limit Firefox has had is that they can't abuse the trust of their users. Firefox had to voluntarily (and often aggressively) inflict a huge amount of reputational and functional damage on itself to reduce its market share to the place that it has.

edit: it's important to say that they didn't really backslide technically; it's user-hostile (management) decisions that have hurt the browser, not anything to do with the skill of Firefox developers.

> would without question have been hit a long time ago with credible antitrust if they hadn't kept Firefox afloat

It is questionable, and being declared a search engine monopoly would be far worse for Google than Chrome being a browser monopoly. They only make Chrome to push their search/ad network.

Conspiracy theory

That makes no sense. Mozilla goes so hard on the VPN ads exactly because it wants to diversify its revenues away from its vassalage to Google.

A pet theory of mine is Mozilla’s C-suite knows no matter how bad Firefox gets and how low their user count, Google will continue to fund them because Google likes something to point to if antitrust came knocking - in fact the lower Firefox’s influence the better as Chrome can then unilaterally control the web.

So they spend all of Mozilla’s money on various BS like Pocket and now VPN to try to make more money so they can further increase their already high salaries, instead of reinvesting into Firefox - hence the anti-user intrusive ads, the reduction of head count while paying themselves millions of dollars.

> I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user.

IIRC, didn't Mozilla lay off some R&D team that was doing some promising work on modernizing and improving its browser engine?

That "promising work" was "inventing the Rust programming language," and, yes.

I think parent is refering to the servo team.

My annoyance is more the half-brained projects which Mozilla pursues. Then surprised Pikachu when they have to cut budgets and Firefox is impacted.

Reminds of good old Mr Elop.