Mozilla terminates its deal with Yahoo and makes Google the default in Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla terminates its deal with Yahoo and makes Google the default in Firefox

techcrunch.com

184 pointspob123498 comments

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15695114

> As Recode reported last year, there was a clause in the Mozilla deal that would have the potential Yahoo acquirer pay $375 million per year through 2019 if Mozilla didn’t want to work with the buyer. This clause also allowed Mozilla to walk away at its sole discretion. We don’t know if Mozilla invoked this clause to terminate the agreement, but it seems likely.

Am I understanding this correctly? Mozilla will get paid $374M by invoking a clause at their own discretion. Sounds like a horrible deal to ratify. Was Yahoo that desperate?

Apparently. See the Recode article [0] from last year.

[0]: https://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-...

To be fair, it wasn't like there was a whole lot of incentive for Mozilla to use Yahoo! as the default, given as many people prefer Google. And especially with Yahoo! not doing so well, they would certainly not risk being associated with the likes of Verizon, a company that appears to be almost antithetical to Mozilla's mission.

In 2014, Yahoo looked to be in much better shape than it it is today. Sweeten the deal with a scenario that you don't think will happen and at the same time drop off a poison pill to defend against takeovers. Only problem was that Yahoo had to be better than Google at search. I'd say it was hubris, not desperation.

IIRC at the time there was a bidding war with Bing or something.

Not so transparently awful, since it was contingent on Yahoo being acquired, back when that prospect introduced a lot of uncertainty into any deals with Yahoo.

Desperation, covered under a thick layer of the fake confidence derived from positive thinking at all cost.

If the mission is to ensure survival as an independent entity and not maximising takeover value, then betting large amounts of post-takeover money would be logical, the obvious impact of such a bet on takeover bids would be "out of scope".

> (Disclaimer: TechCrunch is part of Oath, Verizon’s roll-up of AOL and Yahoo, though nobody at TechCrunch that I know has ever willingly used Yahoo Search).

Just awesome :D

I guess it speaks well of Oath that TechCrunch writers feel so safe dissing other branches of their conglomerate.

Firefox forwards people to Google, Google guides people to installing Chrome. Hmm...

It's not like Mozilla had a choice but its still pretty funny when you think about it.

Mozilla is also trying to stand for privacy on the web and making Google the default search provider is a pretty bad idea for their brand.

Switching to duckduckgo would've made sense but would've required some faith I guess.

I think it's more about the money and this kind of faith does not bring any money. For the record I don't mind Mozilla's decision.

No. It would have required forgoing most of their current revenue.

The money from Yahoo, now Google, is also a huge source of revenue for Mozilla (if not the main source). DuckDuckGo can't afford to fund the development of Firefox and Google isn't going to throw money at Firefox, if their search isn't the default... Well maybe a little, just to keep a competitor around and avoid anti-trust legislation.

Honestly I doubt the average user would notice if DuckDuckGo was the default, except perhaps for a few rephrasing of a few search queries.

It's not just the main source, it's nearly the entire source. (~98%)

> Back in 2014, the last year of the Google deal, that agreement brought in $323 million of the foundation’s $330 million in total revenue.

They wouldn't have much of a brand if they didn't have the hundred of millions of dollars they get from deals like this to pay their employees.

Mozilla is also trying hard to get market share back. Setting DDG as the default would not help with that. Most people will want Google.

Just saying Google is at odds with a free web which is the core mission of Mozilla.

You can't stand up for anything if you don't survive in the marketplace. Mozilla needs a revenue stream. I donated last month. When was the last time that you did?

Not trying to shame you, but developers need to put food on the table and there's nothing wrong with finding a reliable revenue source.

I'm very privacy aware, I don't publish pictures of my son on Facebook, the minimum I tolerate for serious chats is WhatsApp due to having E2E encryption and wishing for Signal or better, I disabled location tracking and ads personalization in Google, I encrypt my backups, I keep my passwords in 1Password, I have a sticker on my laptop's camera, I vote and publicly argue against privacy invading laws.

However DuckDuckGo and Bing are simply unusable for me — it is true that in many cases in order to get the results that you want, you simply have to modify your query, however I discovered that many times it doesn't work. The situation is improving, they keep patching local searches to be barely usable and if you're not feeling pain when doing local searches, then you're probably not living in Europe. But besides local searches, the software development related searches are poor as well.

Not trying to disregard the fine work that DuckDuckGo is doing, I'm glad that it exists, but I could not tolerate it for more than a week, every time I tried, including only a month ago.

Mozilla switching to Yahoo was actually shooting themselves in the foot, because as a matter of fact people want to use Google's search engine because it is superior to everything else.

Firefox is also the best browser if you want to use multiple search engines at the same time. On mobile as well. It's just a freaking default, you can always change it.

I bit the bullet and I'm using DuckDuckGo as default.

Every time the results will be poor I add !g to the search and DuckDuckGo sends me to google. (or !guk for google uk, !so for stackoverflow, !wes for spanish wikipedia, !amde for german amazon, and so on)

It's easy to do, and I enjoy the privacy for all the other searches.

DuckDuckGo is ok, I don't know if it's me but I feel like it's getting worse, for a period there I was hardly resorting to use "bags".

It's kind of interesting that no one can seem to build a really great privacy focused search engine. I'd pay for a product like Google but that respected my privacy. In fact, I'd gladly pay for it over some of the other subscriptions I pay for.

Maybe a hole in the market?

Give Searx a look, for example at https://searx.me , but there's many other public instances running, because -- unlike DDG -- it's fully free software, https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

Of course the level of privacy is determined by whoever is hosting it, but at least there's a choice there.

Did not know !g trick it is pretty awesome. Whenever I hit some unrelated results, I used to open a new tab and query the same thing in Google. My life just got easier.

I'm ok with the philosophy but I don't think a web browser (any of them) need to receive this amount of money. It's a simple web browser. We don't need other special features, just a simple fast browser. I'm currently making my own text based browser, I hate how many pictures, spam that I get when I only care about the text.

This must be a message from 1995 :-))

> Not trying to shame you, but developers need to put food on the table and there's nothing wrong with finding a reliable revenue source.

Then they should change their core mission statement and stop pretending they actually care about privacy. That would be only fair. Google should be listed as conflict of interest for Mozilla.

Taking big moral stands on things like proprietary video codecs and DRM has never helped Mozilla do anything good for the web, unfortunately. Google just does what they want anyway. As long as this change in default search engine doesn't compromise the privacy of Firefox users (I don't think it does compared to how things were before?), they might as well take the money.

Then again, Yahoo's results always seemed rubbish so I immediately switched it to Google or Bing after installing...

As part of the deal they should have negotiated that Google removes that bagger 'install Chrome' from so many of their products.

Apparently this caught Verizon by surprise:

> "Yahoo and Mozilla have enjoyed a productive relationship together since 2014," said Charles Stewart, a spokesman for Verizon’s digital advertising business, Oath. "We are surprised that Mozilla has decided to take another path and we are in discussions with them regarding the terms of our agreement."

(Source: https://washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-OZF67R6VDKHT...)

That sounds a lot like "we are going to try not to pay".

Never mind "try not to pay", that's table stakes. Likelier than not, they'll seek some form of reparation.

Sounds like having to pay even if Mozilla terminated it was built in.

Wow. Whoever managed to get that clause in there must be pretty happy right now.

Or maybe Mozilla doesn't want to send search queries and user info to Verizon for analytics. Plus there might be a trust issue with search results.

That's not an "or". According to the article, Mozilla is very likely still entitled to payment after terminating. The statement from Yahoo in the grandparent comment makes it sound like Verizon didn't quite realise this possibility and are looking to avoid it.

My first thought about this was that Verizon was pushing for some additional tracking requirements with which Mozilla was not comfortable. Google may be a little more flexible in that regards. Or maybe Mozillians just don't like Verizon.

They've been fighting them over e.g. net neutrality for quite a while, so it makes sense they don't want to be associated with them.

Just because the official line is "we are surprised" doesn't mean they're actually surprised. This came from a spokesman.

Who needs Google when thee is DuckDuckGo anyway? Switched to DuckDuckGo (after getting mad of Google demanding me to solve captchas all the time) about a year ago... 100% satisfied.

Are you using a proxy or tor? I have never been asked a CAPTCHA on Google even with auto-deleting cookies and no javascript.

I was asked a CAPTCHA every couple of weeks during heavy bursts of search, but this was only when I used the https://encrypted.google.com along with similar privacy measures to you. I was also on a VPN sometimes.

Not OP, but captchas pop up when I use proxies and tor. If you're not logged into a google account, you usually need to solve more than one captcha and it gets frustrating quickly. Luckily DDG does not treat tor and proxy traffic suspiciously.

Also Qwant is very good (https://www.qwant.com/)

I've tried using it but at least for technical-related searches it doesn't event approach the quality of results I get from Google

Probably the answer is quite simple: Google has more money to offer.

Apparently DDG actually offers some money. Seamonkey is getting some funding when people use DDG on that browser. It is currently the default for Seamonkey.

while i've left DDG as my default search, it's not particularly good, i always find myself appending "!g" to get to google results instead... so much so that when google results are terrible (on some poorly worded searches or vague topics) i automatically append a "!g" by habit on google.

as for why i've left it as default? well it's just convenient to have the shortcuts.

I left google for ddg because google search results are complete shit these days "systemd raunchy variables" google will remove whatever it's not popular in their search results "raunchy" and I have no way of forcing it to either include the missing word or not display any results.

Sadly ddg is also doing the same thing, whenever I use bangs to search on google I get results that are just as bad.

Oh, put the word (or exact phase) you REALLY want results for in quotation marks and scream "did I f'in stutter?"

I forgot about this situation, true that it gets super frustrating

> Historically, search engine royalties have been the main revenue driver for Mozilla. Back in 2014, the last year of the Google deal, that agreement brought in $323 million of the foundation’s $330 million in total revenue.

So basically Google was/is funding Firefox? Seems weird given the battle with Chrome for market share.

Yes, because normal people will use whatever default search engine that comes with the browser. That means more ads money for the search engine.

"normal" people use their default search engine to get to "google".

Google has funded Firefox since before Chrome was created. At that time Firefox was an important way to protect against Microsoft, which is able to use Internet Explorer to funnel traffic to Bing.

Now that Google has Chrome, I suppose the situation is a bit more nuanced. I imagine that for Google a Firefox install is still preferable to a Safari or Internet Explorer install. Also I suspect that Mozilla will often (although not always) be an ally to Google on web standards committees. Google (as the main web search engine) has a strong interest in growing the capabilities of web browsers and the web generally (vs other proprietary alternatives).

> Google (as the main web search engine) has a strong interest in growing the capabilities of web browsers and the web generally (vs other proprietary alternatives).

Is that true? Google's AMP initiative seems like a precursor to building their own walled garden.

AMP is pretty anti-walled-garden. It's specifically a way of getting the advantages of centralization (performance standards, caching by a central server) while making that the same advantages are available to competitors (see e.g. Twitter's use of AMP: https://searchengineland.com/twitter-ramps-amp-278300)

I see it as a Pepsi vs Coke or BMW vs Audi relationship. The head-to-head competition style gives the illusion that they're the only choices (thus removing Safari/IE from the conversation), and at the same time, both choices are under your influence.

> the illusion that they're the only choices (thus removing Safari/IE from the conversation)

I like how quickly Edge's existence became forgotten.

But Coke doesn't give Pepsi money and Audi doesn't give BMW money. I'd compare it to Microsoft once lending Apple https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-to-invest-150-million-in... to make sure it (Apple) survives.

They do have joint ventures for electric car infrastructure.

There is no real battle between Chrome and Firefox.

Google doesn't make money off Chrome, it is just a gateway to access profitable services. If Firefox gets users to the same place, there is no reason for Google to complain.

>>Google doesn't make money off Chrome, it is just a gateway to access profitable services.

In other words it makes /or could make money of Chrome (depending on investment and years of potential payback ++)

Googles approach is to own the roads, not be a car company...

Chrome is something that makes them money indirectly by ensuring fair access to services where Google has less to lose by openness than their competition. A loss leader, if you want to think of it that way.

Strategically it also puts Googles thumb on the scale of web standards and the enterprise market, and lets them shape both to their ends. Office Online 2025 is going to be a loooot more open if it has to work in Chrome in addition to MS NewEdge than if MS were successfully pushing a walled off stack from client to web, and being able to move over half the internets webbrowsers in any direction to support any given position puts them in the drivers seat wherever it matters to them.

Google is also using Chrome in their Chrome OS products which threaten massive volumes of seat licenses in their competition.

Considering direct monetisation of their webbrowser kinda misses the aims of that product, and their considerable income from related markets where openness ensures their viability and competitive advantages.

Related to this - I've always wondered why Mozilla doesn't just build-in an ad-blocker directly into the browser. The speed/security bump is significant.

Probably because they want/need the deals with the search engine companies?

They are so big on net neutrality and whatever, they can't do that.

Well, besides their strong affiliation for net neutrality, implementing an ad-blocker in the browser seems like a hostile move.

Safari got away with it.

They already have a pretty decent tracking protection app built-into the browser, and if I remember correctly it can also be enabled outside private browsing mode I’m guessing that they are slowly moving towards implementing a full ad blocker in the browser

I'm in Japan since 2 months now, and I see most of the people using in the metro/street using Yahoo than Google. Is Yahoo doing a better search in Japanese than Google? Or are they just better in marketing?

Also, seeing lot of people (also many over 30!) browsing Twitter. What surprised me, I rarely saw it in other countries I've been.

Yahoo Japan is a different beast from the rest of Yahoo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Japan

Oh wow. I really liked "old yahoo". This is a great thing.

And they have a bunch of useful local services and since ebay does not exist in Japanese the next big thing in Japan is Yahoo auctions which is pretty, pretty big.

Huh. Didn't realize that after the Verizon acquisition, it lost all ownership ties with Yahoo. So future readers don't have to click through:

Yahoo Japan was always a separate company, a joint venture between Yahoo and SoftBank. When Verizon acquired Yahoo, the bits that Verizon didn't want - including Yahoo's share of Yahoo Japan - were spun off into a holding company, Altaba. And so now SoftBank and Altaba between them own most of Yahoo Japan.

Twitter is a more useful in Japan because they can express a lot more in 140 characters than people who use variants of the Latin/Cyrillic alphabet. You can actually communicate entire thoughts, rather than half-baked hot takes.

That's why we have 280 chars now in other countries except for Japan, Korea and China, which stick to the 140 chars.

Yahoo Japan was a JV between softbank and yahoo a long time ago. They kept the branding but they are largely not the same company. Yahoo Japan is actually itself a conglomerate made up of everything from data center to being a cheaper telco in addition to being a portal.

Some of the biggest Mastodon instances are Japanese too, off the top of my head friends.nico seems large.

Niconico video is big but Google has made youtube a lot bigger in japan compared to a few years ago by doing massive PR campaigns in TV and traditional media.

Nico is like if yahoo had been a success, right? I know they have a .nico tld

I feel like it's a shame these national level internet companies die off when the big US corps move in

As others have said, Yahoo Japan is a separate company (that shared technology with Yahoo US).

They also moved to Google search results after Yahoo gave up and started using Bing results around 2010, which probably helped them maintain market share (since the Yahoo search transition to Bing was a clusterfuck).

Japanese doesn't use spaces between words, and at least c:a 2008 Google didn't do a great job of separating out search terms.

Somewhat important to note that its only the default in the US, India and a few other countries - presumably not the EU because of the whole Internet Explorer setting Bing as the default debacle a couple of years ago

> Somewhat important to note ...

Yep, important enough that they noted it twice in TFA, including in the first paragraph:

> "... at least if you live in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan."

How and when they decide whether I'm in US etc. or not?

When you download an en-US localisation of the browser.

Not sure what you meant, google is the default in at least northern EU. Yahoo has never had any presence here so we have never been burdened with it.

"This move makes Google Mozilla’s default search engine in most of the world, with the exception of China, where the default is Baidu, and Russia, Turkey, Belarus and Kazakhstan, where Yandex is the default."

That is, the deal with Yahoo only applied in the US, India, Hong Kong, et al.

You can't stand for privacy and promote Google at the same time. That's disingenuous and the 'explanations' are transparently self serving.

If Mozilla needs that money from Google then they should own up to it and get off the privacy bandwagon rather than trivialize it.

A bit of related discussion a day or two ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15696915

One thing Mozilla should consider is shifting to a non-commercial operational model entirely. Assume a Patreon-like campaign that attracts 500k patrons paying $10 / month each. That results in a $60M annual revenue, enough to sustain a meaningful company.

It's still only 10% of their current annual revenue (which is closer to half a billion USD), but I would argue that becoming completely independent from any commercial incentives might be worth this sacrifice.

That is... a very ambitious assumption.

I do believe money means influence, so I think this will mean a whole slew of new bad decisions by Mozilla. Very worrysome. It's 73% of used browsers under the control of Google. Also the best alternative to Google Chrome under their control.

I liked the idea of Mozilla not being paid by Google. Sad, but not surprising when looking at Yahoos "success" in the last years :/

What happened with Bing? They weren't interested?

Headline: Mozilla terminate$ its deal with Yahoo...

if we had a functioning government a company with 70+% market share would not be able to buy even more market-share. Monopoly and all...

Seems to be the result of a competitiveness between Mayer and Google. This was very visible during Yahoo selloff so shouldn't be a surprise given Mozilla rely on income from search engines....and this is an easy payout...

https://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-...

Marissa Mayer resigned in July.

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