I bet this falls into a gray area though. Maybe they’re not exactly trying to kill Firefox, they just don’t mind too much if it dies. Some programmer makes a mistake that affects Firefox and they don’t instantly revert the change because someone higher sees that the mistake is not necessarily bad for Google. Similarly testing is more lax for Firefox. If it had been Chrome, the managers would have paged 50 people to fix it ASAP, and there would be retrospectives about how their testing failed to prevent a future occurrence.
It’s like saying evolution has no purpose, it’s just random mutations, but then there is a selection process that picks non harmful and beneficial mutations, so it does go in a predictable direction.
But knowing you can repeatedly get away with incompetence is malice. Hanlon's razor is used as an excuse for moral culpability, as if who is merely incompetent isn't evil; but, once you point out how that level of incompetence is hurting others, if they choose to not merely prevent such incompetence going forward, but recognize when they make mistakes and take steps to make it right--yes: after the fact; not merely fixing a bug, for example, and not merely apologizing for their incompetence, but making some kind of reparation to those harmed--that must be understood as malicious behavior.
Malice vs incompetence is about intent. It doesn't say anything about if its reasonable. Gross negligence is unacceptable incompetence, but that doesn't imply its intentional.
On the contrary, i think it applies more. The larger the group, the more stupid stuff it does.