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Comment by jemfinch | Hacker News Reader

"Firefox doesn’t need to privilege any particular website or application, while Google’s Chrome is “tied to their commercial purposes,” he said."

Ironically the Mozilla Foundation's primary (practically sole?) source of income is derived from the privilege they give Google in their default search box.

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The effort comes just months after Firefox's creator, Mozilla Corp., killed a powerful new tool to limit tracking under pressure from an ad-industry executive, The Wall Street Journal has learned.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870458480457564...

That's some very bad reporting from the Wall Street Journal:

"Mr. Simeonov reached out to the chief executive of Mozilla, who put him in touch with Jay Sullivan, vice president of products at Mozilla. The two spoke on June 9... The software was removed from the Firefox prototype on June 10."

But in fact the software was removed on June 8, before the conversation between Sullivan and Simeonov. Here is the Mercurial changeset: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/76e9dd2d9322

Unfortunately, the WSJ reporter looked at the date of a Bugzilla comment, rather than the date of the change it was discussing. This was pointed out by Mozilla security engineer Jesse Ruderman, who provides more details in the comments here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2010/12/did_we_...

Thanks for clarifying that. The journal series has otherwise been quite illuminating.

Google is the current default, because we still believe it is the best. But if Google were no longer available as a partner, there are other search companies that would pay for that traffic.

They linked to some information at the bottom of the article: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/mozilla-posts-2009-revenue-sur...

"Approximately 86% and 91% of royalties revenue for 2009 and 2008, respectively, was derived from this contract [with Google]."

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