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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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.

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