It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.
...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it
IMO, this is a silly way to look at it.
Mozilla's existence is critically dependent on a single "customer" that requires the privacy-focused "do good" company to preset a user's default search choice to an anti-privacy track-you-everywhere company.
don't get me wrong, it's a great [and necessary] compromise for the money and being easily changeable. i hope firefox can regain user share so that google continues needing it.
How could that be a sound business transaction ?
Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.
This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.
Yahoo has been the default engine in firefox... for the US market. it was still google everywhere else in the world except Russia where they went with yandex.
Mozilla got a lot of flak in Europe for not replacing google in the part of the world that mattered the most , where they have the most market share and where there is a good local alternative that actually respect privacy and was willing to do business with them (qwant).
And the reason for the yahoo deal is that yahoo was trying to sell and needed this firefox deal to better negotiate their own sale at a time when mozilla was actively trying to move away from google (well maybe not that actively).
To my knowledge there was not a time when google was not default search engine in firefox at all.
not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.
Safe search/browsing has always been local.
It's staggering to me how that is a thing, but I routinely see people stung by the same malware attacks over and over, and they don't realize that streaming TV on sketchy sites and watching weird porn on an unsecured browser is like licking a gangrenous wound.
Still whatever: I think we can all agree that the world is better with an alternative to Chrome.
Mozilla is happy to posture and trade on public goodwill and cave in to Google at every opportunity. This is a very convenient arrangement for both of them.
Now browsers have become so complex that only another well resourced corp can develop one, forgot about the typical open source project developing one. This is not an accident, gratuitous complexity is happening in other areas too. Guess who this benefits.
There's for example a handful of glaring issues that they just don't seem to care to fix:
- Every other month you hear of yet another Chrome extension stealing user data, impersonating another extension etc.
- I haven't been keeping up with it, but I don't think they ever bothered to fix the autofill phishing flaw that keeps on being posted here every so often [1].
- Their extension API is missing a few chunks that make it impossible to port NoScript and make ad blocking less effective.
- Chrome for Android still doesn't support extensions at all.
Each time I've been denied from mozilla it was justified by the fact that I was part of a niche segment of the user base and as such was not as good as a member of the large segment of the user base, in other words not really an actual user.
I may need help to see how it is a "do good" company, it does not seem very different from another company, it takes hundred millions of dollars out of advertising money coming from surveillance capitalism and one of the worst offender on privacy issues, tries to push their own agenda devised in a vacuum, deprives its users of freedom of choice, make its success on the work of volunteers but does not give them credit or respect, has marketing saying something but does not deliver. This is hardly "doing good" and seems quite in line with what to expect from a regular company.
I have a lot of criticism about how they approach problems, and about how they treat their users. But I also think they are at least trying. They aren't doing the best, and they slip up a lot, but I get the feeling that they genuinely do want what is best for their users. Even if they sometimes don't execute that properly...
Firefox is open source, so you could always put your money where your mouth is and write your own fork with the features you want if neither ff nor any of the other forks work for you.