Did Google Sabotage Firefox and IE?

Firefox's former VP accused Google of sabotaging Firefox -- for example, when Gmail and Google Docs 'started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox' and demo sites 'would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'... There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe... [W]hen you see a sustained pattern of 'oops' and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed.'
Now Nightingale's accusations have stirred up some follow-up from technology reporters. An anonymous reader shares a blog post by ZDNet security reporter Catalin Cimpanu:
Nightingale is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations. In July 2018, Mozilla Program Manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox. He revealed that both Firefox and Edge were superior when loading YouTube content when compared to Chrome, and in order to counteract this performance issue, Google switched to using a JavaScript library for YouTube that they knew wasn't supported by Firefox.
At this point, it's very hard not to believe or take Nightingale's comments seriously. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming the new Microsoft, and Chrome is slowly turning into the new IE, an opinion that more and more users are starting to share.
On Twitter, a senior editor at the Verge added 'Google did a lot of 'oops' accidents to Windows Phone, too. Same pattern of behavior with its services and Edge. Oopsy this, oopsy that.' The site MSPowerUser also shares a similar story from former Microsoft Edge intern, Joshua Bakita. 'I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.'
Meanwhile, Computerworld argues that data 'backs up Nightingale's admission, to a point.'
[I]f Google monkey business contributed to Firefox's fall, it must have really damaged Microsoft's IE. During the time it took Chrome to replace Firefox as the No. 2 browser, Firefox lost just 9% of its user share, while IE shed 22%. And Chrome's most explosive growth - which began in early 2016 - didn't come at Firefox's expense; instead, it first hollowed out IE, then suppressed any potential enthusiasm for the follow-on Edge.

Chrome didn't reach its current place -- last month capturing nearly 68% of all browser activity -- by raiding Firefox. It did it by destroying IE.

Oops.

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