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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

>"Apple and Mozilla are able to push the boundaries on privacy because neither depends on advertising. Google makes most of its money from selling ads."

I am curious will Google at some point push back on Mozilla's efforts here? Isn't the placement of Google search as the default search engine in Firefox a significant source of funding?

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Probably part of the reason why they built and maintain Chrome.

Firefox will always have a dedicated user base -- if Google want to be the default search engine on that browser they will have to pay for it otherwise services like Bing will occupy that space.

OP's point is the other way around. They are wondering if Mozilla can afford the financial hit of not getting that money from Google anymore. If Google leaves that space, then Bing won't have real competition here, and will pay substantially less.

Yeah this was my question. It seem like a slippery slope for Mozilla since their patronage comes form one of the biggest sources of the behavior they are endeavoring to guard against with these features.

Google also built Chrome to send people to Google Search and click on ads on the way to their destinations. That's why auto-completion in Chrome is terrible. You will often end up on Google Search rather than the destination site. The ads are now disguised so well that most people probably click on them without realizing that they are ads.

Unfortunately, Firefox is now making a mistake by copying Chrome and mixing search results with URLs in one box. You have to go into the settings to re-enable two boxes (ctrl-l for URLs, ctrl-k for search).

>"That's why auto-completion in Chrome is terrible. You will often end up on Google Search rather than the destination site."

Interesting I have noticed this lately as well. Really bad one character a second latency. This is recent-ish phenomenon no? I don't remember this ever being an issue before.

>"Unfortunately, Firefox is now making a mistake by copying Chrome and mixing search results with URLs in one box"

I completely agree. I wonder if this is why Google removed the home icon by default in more recent version of Chrome? If you take away the search home button there is no delineation between search and typing a URL. Is this another dark pattern?

It has been like that as long as I can remember. I couldn't understand why people were falling for the "Chrome is faster" line when it was wasting everyone's time by sending people to search results instead of URLs like Firefox.

Google Chrome doesn't really let you set a home page other than a Google Search box. Even if you set your home page to a specific URL, opening a new tab doesn't start you on your home page -- you get a Google Search box.

Google's attempt to remove subdomains and hide URLs from users also appears to be part of a plan to force users to become more dependent on search rather than being able to go directly to destinations.

Chrome is full of manipulative patterns.

I wonder if Mozilla has something to offer which will let Apple fund them. Because sooner or later Google is going to dump Mozilla. Clearly, Apple has the money and they could probably get some of the regular heat off themselves by moving some of their offshore money back into the US through mozilla.

Isn't there relationship already problematic?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/20/firefox-g...

Old news.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...

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