At that time, Google was seen as "the good guys" when it went against Microsoft, pushing for open web standards against the monopoly of IE6. Both Chrome (initially) adhering to open standards and open source protocols like Google Talk. It looked like the David vs Goliath biblical tale.
People thought Google was gonna maintain that position forever. It turned out that the "cool nerds doing open source and making money meanwhile" stance was just a sham, and Google abruptly became another faceless corporation.
A lot of people fell for it. Even the Mozilla developers. When Firefox started having compatibility issues with Gmail, they considered it as bugs in the Gmail software, and Google developers were all like "oh haha sorry I'll fix that in no time", but over time the compatibility issues piled up and the anti competitive stance slowly unveiled by itself.
People thought Google was gonna maintain that position forever. It turned out that the "cool nerds doing open source and making money meanwhile" stance was just a sham, and Google abruptly became another faceless corporation.
A lot of people fell for it. Even the Mozilla developers. When Firefox started having compatibility issues with Gmail, they considered it as bugs in the Gmail software, and Google developers were all like "oh haha sorry I'll fix that in no time", but over time the compatibility issues piled up and the anti competitive stance slowly unveiled by itself.