They hurt Firefox by giving them money. If not for the big fat google pay check Firefox would have had to be a good browser instead of the piggy bank for the personal projects of its former ceo.
There aren’t a ton of medium-sized successful browsers out there that didn’t take Google’s money, I think funding web browser development is just hard.
IMO the real anti-competitive behavior was iterating so fast on web standards. Chrome seems to be the vanguard on a lot of new web features, and has started up this whole silly JavaScript performance as a figure-of-merit competition.
The fact that Firefox has to pay dozens of full time engineering salaries or whatever just to tread water is the real problem IMO. Because not only can they not do it well, but most groups can’t do it at all.
As a result, the web as a standards-based platform for sharing documents is basically dying, being killed better than Microsoft ever could. And without the obvious appearance of being evil.
