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by metajack 2243 days ago
When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense.

I don't think this was a good decision by Mozilla, especially as Germany is very privacy focused and its marketshare in Germany was quite good. The very next year I believe marketshare dropped in Germany substantially.

This was another Mozilla self-own, and it was painful to watch from inside while I worked there.

1 comments

> When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense.

I don't see where I made this "clarification".

Let's be clear. Firefox was trying to test switching from Google to Cliqz (where it had a stake). Mozilla had a difficult time trying to break the golden cage they find themselves in. To their credit, they did try. Ultimately the Cliqz-Firefox integration was, unilaterally, cancelled. If your main source of revenue comes from your “competitor” you are slowly pushing yourself to irrelevance.

And also, the privacy issue again: I addressed a similar question in another comment in this thread [0]. If you want to spread FUD, please make a proper case.

[0] Another comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045099

> Mozilla had a difficult time trying to break the golden cage they find themselves in.

They could have partnered with Yahoo (and in fact did, at least temporarily), or Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Any of these search engines would be chomping at the bit to become the default for a browser as popular as Firefox.