[prepend]

It’s not perfect, but I like it better than the alternatives (selling user data, non profit).

Technically the browser is nice, but there’s something nice about a for profit org whose incentives are aligned with mine. For now, I use a FireFox for similar reasons, but I like Brave’s mode for the web better than the “bad ad” model that google and Facebook push.

I used to like Opera for similar reasons.

[hvis]

What could one find disgreeable in a company being a non-profit?

[luckylion]

In a "we depend on the biggest enemy of privacy for funding" kind of way?

[hvis]

Being a non-profit doesn't imply any of that.

And nobody has ever demonstrated that this ostensible "dependence" has any adverse effects on Mozilla's policy.

[luckylion]

It's hard to demonstrate anything if you don't have a control group and can't turn the thing in question on and off. Conflicts of interest are real, you don't need to demonstrate that they are, though it's not clear how much they sway Mozilla's decisions.

And you're right, the non-profit-status doesn't imply that, they could just as well do the same as a commercial enterprise. It would be more obvious that way.

Would Mozilla make the step to ship an adblocker with Firefox? It would certainly be what their users want (the most popular extension by far being uBlock Origin), but it would pretty much decrease their worth to Google to zero, hence kill the funding. And there's your conflict of interest.

[hvis]

It's a difficult problem. Unless a majority-marketshare browser does that as well (and we know that Chrome certainly won't), a lot of websites might choose to block all Firefox users instead.

And perhaps you and I know how to disable an ad blocker selectively. An average user might simply see problems with websites and uninstall Firefox as "not working", tanking its marketshare even more.

So Google doesn't necessarily factor into that decision, really.

[luckylion]

True, though I think that would be a short (and just!) war that would get us to a much better place: hiding the type of user agent you're using from the site means less finger printing opportunities.

It very much could lead to the opposite too. "Oh hey, the web works when you're using Firefox". My mother has become a missionary (for adblockers, not firefox) since she's once witnessed how websites look on a friend's PC. She told her "I think your computer is broken", which lead to confusion & a presentation on my mother's PC... which lead to them calling me asking how to make her friend's PC do that too.

It might, ironically, also be a great signal for Google's bots. I've never seen a quality site that tried to block me for using an adblock, and even "hey, please turn adblock on" is a strong signal for me that it's SEO content and I should go on looking for something else.

[prepend]

I am a big proponent for non-profit but I think they can be risky if they are dependent on donors, especially a few donors.

Mozilla Foundation has google as it’s biggest revenue source [0], so if Google ever decides to change this it will cripple the org.

I think this would be different if revenue came from many donors so this risk would be lower.

I use FireFox and support Mozilla, but it’s challenging to donate to FireFox as Mozilla runs quite a few projects.

Nobody is perfect, but non-profits have risks like any organization.

[0] was yahoo for a while, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation

[hvis]

> if Google ever decides to change this it will cripple the org

Not really. They do have a rainy-day fund, and they have experimented with partnering with other search providers in the past (such as Microsoft, or country-local search engines like Yandex). The main reason they still use Google is that the users prefer it. But if Google decides not to pay anymore, Mozilla will survive.