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by wutbrodo 3116 days ago
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.
2 comments
leeoniya 3116 days ago
> 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.

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wutbrodo 3116 days ago
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.
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bigbugbag 3116 days ago
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.

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briffle 3116 days ago
> 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.

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bigbugbag 3116 days ago
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.

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dao- 3116 days ago
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.
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Buge 3115 days ago
That seems weird. There was no search engine that was willing to pay money to be default outside of US, China, and Russia?
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Feniks 3115 days ago
In Europe Google has a 90+% market share. At this point nobody even bothers to compete.
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dao- 3115 days ago
There was no search engine willing to pay that would deliver good enough search results in those markets...
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gcb0 3116 days ago
even if they don't have a explicit deal, they got search revenue sharing from google on those markets.

not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

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magicalist 3116 days ago
> not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

Safe search/browsing has always been local.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing

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megaman22 3116 days ago
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.

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