Hacker News Reader

Comment by neuland | Hacker News Reader

Your right on a privacy front from an absolute perspective. But, it's almost certain that Google paid for this change. A stronger Mozilla (financially speaking) is good for privacy and free software.

Also, normal users expect Google. So, having it in the default provides a more familiar experience for them to possibly switch to Firefox.

View on HN

Still, Firefox could automatically switch to e.g. Duckduckgo whenever the user is in incognito mode.

That's a great idea, along with a message explaining why.

Well, they could, but I would assume a contract with Google would prevent that.

Could. We don't know what's in this contract.

Pretty sure Google doesn't circumvent incognito so what's the point?

Google certainly tracks people by their IP address, so your privacy is lesser with Google as your search engine than DDG.

Not only that, but it also raises awareness of private search engines with the general audience.

Are you sure? I thought they didn't do this.

I love the idea. Would you mind mind filing a bug on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411340

One more idea - any chance you guys are making a Firefox Focus for the desktop? It's great on mobile, would love a desktop version too!

It's just a content blocker + private browsing. Can get same functionality on desktop with private browsing and some ad blocker

Plus tab functionality removed, hence the name "focus".

(I should add that, while I work at Mozilla this is my personal view, not Mozilla's official view, yada, yada)

Their privacy-focused mobile browser, Firefox Focus, defaults to DDG.

Though keep in mind it dates back to 2004.

> A stronger Mozilla (financially speaking) is good for privacy and free software.

While I understand exactly what you mean, surely there's a point at which accepting money from privacy-violating organisations (and bundling a privacy-violating extension, and who knows what else is coming?) means that Mozilla is no longer good for privacy?

Definitely true. It's a balancing act. Granted, that means that some people are going to think you're compromising too much on your ideals (or to little).

Yea, I mean wasn't the default provider of Yahoo before because they paid for it specifically.

It'd be nice if DuckDuckGo could afford it, but keep in mind, the privacy aspect of their service is a marketing bent. They still run mostly on AWS. If a government agency wants your DuckDuckGo data, they can just serve a warrant to Amazon instead.

Google was the paying provider before Yahoo. This has been how Mozilla makes most of their money the last 10 years.

Keeping Firefox alive also helps assuage anti-trust concerns with regard to Chrome’s position in their ecosystem.

In that case presumably Google would continue to fund Mozilla even if they go to another default search engine?

I think Google was still giving them money when they were defaulting to Yahoo, just less than the terms of this new deal.

You are not financially stronger if one day most of your income will come from a source which you are expected to strongly protect from.

It's not 'one day', the majority of Mozilla's funding has always come from 'search royalties'. Wikipedia says initial funding first came from AOL in 2003, then they had a deal with Google from 2004-2014. In 2014, it says they signed a deal with Yahoo. This is nothing new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

even more it is a joke to talk about being financially strong=independent, it is a puppet / outsourced browser organization

and yet it was the only browser that really opposed EME, and only backed down once not only every browser had implemented the extension, but many major media providers too. Basically once the browser became useless for media consumption because of it.

That's not how things work in the real world. This is a blatant conflict of interest, and its ironical inspite of the open source and privacy song and dance by Mozilla there is no transparency on the deal.

What do you mean "no transparency"? This has been announced officially, what else would you have expected?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com