[brenns10]

I think the very defense you're using is the problem though. It's fine if nobody uses the competing browser for work at Google. It is, however, pretty standard to have automatic tests for performance and functionality, and these need to be cross-platform. Having insufficient automated testing for Firefox to catch these sorts of issues is a structural, anti-competitive bias. Especially when these things clearly don't happen with Chrome.

Couple that with the article's documented case of using a deprecated API from Chrome that's unsupported in FF. That's bias in the design, and that's something that leadership is either not catching, or making a conscious decision on. I'm sure it's couched in some statstic about which monetizable users are impacted or something. But at the end of the day it's an organizational, structural bias.

And that's not to say this is necessarily illegal. I honestly wouldn't know. But I think you made a straw man to attack. The allegation isn't necessarily that there's an organization wide conspiracy of evil Googlers. Just that the organization and culture is designed to benefit Chrome and disadvantage Firefox, and that's happening regularly with user-harming effects.

[acdha]

I think this is correct and would add that the YouTube example highlights that it’s a management decision, not just an inexcusable lack of testing. I’d definitely believe that developers tune what they use first, but once a known problem is identified someone had to decide how to prioritize it.

In many ways, I’d treat this like mandatory banking & investment separations where a cost of being a browser developer should be that you can’t ignore things other shops can. Vimeo could decide not to fix a performance regression affecting Firefox but YouTube should be required to fix it within 60 days, and if they don’t like that they can split it into an independent company which wouldn’t have that constant conflict of interest concern.

[bsimpson]

I'm not defending anything - I definitely have my own thoughts on the matter, I'm just trying to be conscientious about what I publicly say about my employer.

However, I don't believe that engineers are intentionally disfavoring Firefox, trying to drive market share down to "run out the clock" or "sabotage" competitors.

For all its dysfunction, Google does tend to hire well-intentioned people - the person being quoted even said as much. There's also a long list of annual trainings that coach people to tread lightly regarding anything that might be perceived as anticompetitive.

It's fair to talk about the craft of engineering and how different processes have different effects. Like I said, I have to be conscientious about what I say, so I'm not going to engage that point. But loaded language like "sabotage" and "run out the clock" suggests a malicious intent that I don't believe exists.