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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

> 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

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

> They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction.

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.

That makes a lot more sense. Your initial comment without this context sounded like economic contact with someone reduced you to their level of "goodness", which I strongly disbelieve. That isn't to say that you shouldn't draw any lines about who you'll do business with, but this line in particular didn't make a lot of sense.

Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment.

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.

> 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.

You're missing part of the picture here.

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.

No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.

That seems weird. There was no search engine that was willing to pay money to be default outside of US, China, and Russia?

In Europe Google has a 90+% market share. At this point nobody even bothers to compete.

There was no search engine willing to pay that would deliver good enough search results in those markets...

even if they don't have a explicit deal, they got search revenue sharing from google on those markets.

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.

> 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.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing

I suppose there is a depressing number of people that don't change shitty browser defaults to the better option.

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.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if Google sees Mozilla as a PR tool and a lightning rod.

Still whatever: I think we can all agree that the world is better with an alternative to Chrome.

That created an alternative to C/C++ (i.e. Rust) in the process of being an "alternative" to Chrome.

... and it takes literally three seconds to change your default search provided from google to any of the eight or so provided search engine, and a few more seconds to change it to any search engine at all.

It's easy to support Mozilla if you are not a mega-corp https://donate.mozilla.org/

I don't think Google provided much revenue in 2016; Yahoo was the search provider in the U.S. Mozilla is not tied to Google.

I wouldn't consider Yahoo much better than Google either though...

google was the default search engine in the rest of the world where it has the most market share except maybe Russia, also this was a move by yahoo in order to help with selling their business at a non negative price tag.

Google stopped paying Mozilla for that as their global deal expired and Mozilla signed with Yahoo.

Its a bit like the town sheriff being dependent on the main robber for sustenance. He/She is not going to be inclined to stop them.

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.

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