[l1k]

It's also worth mentioning that the Firefox team did the same kind of "oopses" to browsers embedding Gecko. See this interview with Mike Pinkerton, who later went to Google to work on the Chrome Mac team:

"People will make changes to do something good for Firefox and because Firefox is the only really blessed project by the Mozilla Corporation and the Foundation, that’s their only focus. So they’ll make changes that work great in Firefox and then they’ll do—they’ll either like, break Camino’s build just entirely, or things will stop working, or things will slow down, and nobody will really understand why. Because, you know, there was no communication about, you know, this change might have this effect. There’s also a lot of strife back and forth between features that are implemented in the core Gecko in a way that they will only work with Firefox. [...] So we’d run into situations where we try and implement a feature and we discover we just can’t do it. And we kind of raise our hands and say, “Ah, can we get this fixed?” And the answer would invariably be, “Well, it works in Firefox. Who cares?” [...] And that’s something that eventually made me sour greatly on the Foundation and the Corporation and why we kind of took our ball and went elsewhere, and stopped trying to work directly with the Foundation for the majority of problems."

http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277

[eridius]

I don't see the two situations as comparable. Websites are supposed to work on all browsers. But while Gecko is open-source, it only really cared about being Firefox's engine. And it's perfectly fine for a project like that to only care about the browser that pays its development team. If you care about non-Firefox usage, you can roll up your sleeves and pitch in, implement your desired changes, and try to get them merged upstream. But it's not fine for a company like Google, building products for "the open web", to intentionally build sites that don't work in non-Chrome browsers (let alone explicitly manufacturing fake "incompatibilities"). Leveraging their dominance in web apps to force adoption of their browser is the exact sort of monopolistic tactic that's supposed to be illegal.

[oblio]

Did they actually offer/promote Gecko for embedding? I kind of doubt that.

[l1k]

Read the full interview. Netscape was owned by AOL back then and the motivation for Gecko was to have an HTML engine that could be embedded in AOL's software. Firefox was just one browser based on that engine, but became the primary focus once its popularity rose.

Camino was another browser based on Gecko, but died in 2011 when Mozilla killed off support for embedding: http://caminobrowser.org/blog/#mozembedding