[CaptSpify]

I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla, but I am still grateful for the work they do. It's nice to see that they have such a big resource pool to work with, as they are one of the few groups that I think genuinely cares for it's users.

It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

[leeoniya]

> It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it

[wutbrodo]

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

[leeoniya]

> They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction.

IMO, this is a silly way to look at it.

Mozilla's existence is critically dependent on a single "customer" that requires the privacy-focused "do good" company to preset a user's default search choice to an anti-privacy track-you-everywhere company.

don't get me wrong, it's a great [and necessary] compromise for the money and being easily changeable. i hope firefox can regain user share so that google continues needing it.

[wutbrodo]

That makes a lot more sense. Your initial comment without this context sounded like economic contact with someone reduced you to their level of "goodness", which I strongly disbelieve. That isn't to say that you shouldn't draw any lines about who you'll do business with, but this line in particular didn't make a lot of sense.

[bigbugbag]

Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment.

How could that be a sound business transaction ?

Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.

[briffle]

> as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.

This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.

[bigbugbag]

You're missing part of the picture here.

Yahoo has been the default engine in firefox... for the US market. it was still google everywhere else in the world except Russia where they went with yandex.

Mozilla got a lot of flak in Europe for not replacing google in the part of the world that mattered the most , where they have the most market share and where there is a good local alternative that actually respect privacy and was willing to do business with them (qwant).

And the reason for the yahoo deal is that yahoo was trying to sell and needed this firefox deal to better negotiate their own sale at a time when mozilla was actively trying to move away from google (well maybe not that actively).

To my knowledge there was not a time when google was not default search engine in firefox at all.

[dao-]

No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.

[megaman22]

I suppose there is a depressing number of people that don't change shitty browser defaults to the better option.

It's staggering to me how that is a thing, but I routinely see people stung by the same malware attacks over and over, and they don't realize that streaming TV on sketchy sites and watching weird porn on an unsecured browser is like licking a gangrenous wound.

[Feniks]

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if Google sees Mozilla as a PR tool and a lightning rod.

Still whatever: I think we can all agree that the world is better with an alternative to Chrome.

[cies]

That created an alternative to C/C++ (i.e. Rust) in the process of being an "alternative" to Chrome.

[tasty_freeze]

... and it takes literally three seconds to change your default search provided from google to any of the eight or so provided search engine, and a few more seconds to change it to any search engine at all.

[vrodic]

It's easy to support Mozilla if you are not a mega-corp https://donate.mozilla.org/

[forapurpose]

I don't think Google provided much revenue in 2016; Yahoo was the search provider in the U.S. Mozilla is not tied to Google.

[CaptSpify]

I wouldn't consider Yahoo much better than Google either though...

[bigbugbag]

google was the default search engine in the rest of the world where it has the most market share except maybe Russia, also this was a move by yahoo in order to help with selling their business at a non negative price tag.

[dao-]

Google stopped paying Mozilla for that as their global deal expired and Mozilla signed with Yahoo.

[throw2016]

Its a bit like the town sheriff being dependent on the main robber for sustenance. He/She is not going to be inclined to stop them.

Mozilla is happy to posture and trade on public goodwill and cave in to Google at every opportunity. This is a very convenient arrangement for both of them.

Now browsers have become so complex that only another well resourced corp can develop one, forgot about the typical open source project developing one. This is not an accident, gratuitous complexity is happening in other areas too. Guess who this benefits.

[megaman22]

Chrome needs at least some kind of a fragment of competition to keep them from stagnating. Lord knows neither of the other two (Safari and Edge) are even close enough to threaten.

[gsnedders]

I don't think stagnating is the risk with Chrome; I think Chrome running too far ahead and shipping things with only high-level buy-in from vendors (but no review of detail, or any plan to implement soon) is a much bigger risk.

[Sylos]

Maybe it's me having too high expectations with the amount of stuff Mozilla has been lining up and is releasing right now all within a short timeframe, but to me, it kind of already feels like Chrome is stagnating.

There's for example a handful of glaring issues that they just don't seem to care to fix:

- Every other month you hear of yet another Chrome extension stealing user data, impersonating another extension etc.

- I haven't been keeping up with it, but I don't think they ever bothered to fix the autofill phishing flaw that keeps on being posted here every so often [1].

- Their extension API is missing a few chunks that make it impossible to port NoScript and make ad blocking less effective.

- Chrome for Android still doesn't support extensions at all.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525

[username223]

Chrome is the client side of Google's play to control both client and server on the "Open Web" and, more broadly, to own the surveillance economy.

[bigbugbag]

I think quite the opposite that they do not care for their users and blatantly disregard user feedback and users. From experience after having repeatedly told that I'm not significant/worthy enough for a variety of reasons for not using windows, not using gnome, not using pulseaudio, working with older people who have a hard time dealing with computers, having a use for disabling javascript, disabling spying telemetry and profiling, wanting to be able to install unsigned extension, being a power user, etc.

Each time I've been denied from mozilla it was justified by the fact that I was part of a niche segment of the user base and as such was not as good as a member of the large segment of the user base, in other words not really an actual user.

I may need help to see how it is a "do good" company, it does not seem very different from another company, it takes hundred millions of dollars out of advertising money coming from surveillance capitalism and one of the worst offender on privacy issues, tries to push their own agenda devised in a vacuum, deprives its users of freedom of choice, make its success on the work of volunteers but does not give them credit or respect, has marketing saying something but does not deliver. This is hardly "doing good" and seems quite in line with what to expect from a regular company.

[s4vi0r]

Why would you expect otherwise? If you're asking for some niche feature of course they'll blow you off. It isn't worth their resources developing features which only a small niche cares about.

Firefox is open source, so you could always put your money where your mouth is and write your own fork with the features you want if neither ff nor any of the other forks work for you.

[CaptSpify]

Don't get me wrong, I started by saying: "I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla..."

I have a lot of criticism about how they approach problems, and about how they treat their users. But I also think they are at least trying. They aren't doing the best, and they slip up a lot, but I get the feeling that they genuinely do want what is best for their users. Even if they sometimes don't execute that properly...

[chris_wot]

I’m sad you have been downvoted so badly. Whilst I disagree largely, these criticisms are valid.