| > They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share. Like, 10+ years ago...? > Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse. What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free! In fact, Mozilla's bills are being paid in large by Google paying for them to use google.com as the default browser. Mozilla has always struggled to make money. This is not some new phenomenon with the company, and certainly is not because of Google making a good browser. > Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking. I mean... what? They shouldn't have been allowed to do that... because why? Because a browser defaults to a specific search engine? C'mon now. Google built a great browser that users loved, and they flocked to it. It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use. End of story. There's no sinister anti-competition plot here. For heaven's sake, Google pays loads of Mozilla's bills, and collaborates with them on loooooads of projects! |
I appreciate the breath of fresh air Chrome brought in when it entered the market but: every percentage point Chrome takes in the market is a dollar Google doesn't have to pay for search traffic acquisition. Google absolutely profits from the chrome userbase. In the same manner, Android is valuable as a means of avoiding paying Apple for defaults on iOS.
Chrome has always represented a threat to Mozilla's business model, even though it was seemingly more and more profitable with less and less market share (shades of "The Producers"). It'll be interesting to see how 2021 shakes out; Yahoo! outbidding Google for default search engine momentarily put to rest the idea that Mozilla was an antimonopoly figleaf funded by Google. However, the minute Mozilla legally could, they flipped back to Google, and, frankly, that undercuts their bargaining position with Google. And with Yahoo.
> It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.
Given how strongly Mozilla's fate is tied to market share, it seems like they should be leaning harder on advertising. I'm told Mozilla has a huge marketing department but IDK what they do TBH.