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by asldfhasdf2 2205 days ago
> that also happens to have a competing product

Firefox is a "feature" for Google Chrome.

The day Google stops paying mozilla and mozilla close shop, they will get the same treatment Google itself set up in courts against Microsoft for IE6. It's pretty much protection money for their past selfs.

2 comments

Google doesn't actually need Mozilla to increase their search market share. When Mozilla switched to Yahoo in the U.S., many users switched back to Google [1], and those who care about privacy switch to things such as DuckDuckGo anyways.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/report-yahoo-search-losing-fire...

That's my theory as well.

It's cheaper to keep mozilla barely alive than to pay lawyers and governments for anti-trust lawsuits around the globe.

And they get to harvest search data from firefox users as a bonus.