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Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed Mozilla hasn't sued Google for discriminating against their browser - I also use Firefox and suffer endlessly using privacy tools. I can prove there are no more busses and I'm 100% right, but I can predict 100% of the time it'll say "please try again".

The pattern seems to be 2/3 'right' guesses. on sites like eBay, the captcha is broke on firefox. I complete it, and it says "you need to resubmit this form again", and reloads the entire page.

That's the cost of privacy; broken pages and refused access because Google says "NO!".

And businesses are okay with Google denying them money. I wonder if they did a cost/ben analysis if they find it worthwhile.

Thanks to Google, I've actually saved quite a bit of money, they lost out hundreds recently when their automated systems decided to refuse my transaction. Their loss and my gain.

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>I can prove there are no more busses and I'm 100% right, but I can predict 100% of the time it'll say "please try again".

I frequently run into the same issue of having correct answers rejected, and have read posts from many others who experience the same. At some point I started intentionally picking random squares for the first couple image sets. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to end up taking any more submissions overall than when I try to pick the right answers from the start.

Plus, polluting Google's free work data set ever so slightly gives me a small amount of pleasure.

Google pays Mozilla to be the default search engine in firefox. This is Mozilla's main source of revenue, so I doubt they will sue.

I wonder why they don’t negotiate with Msft to use Bing or even DDG instead. Seems... incredibly odd... to put oneself in a position where a third party is directly antagonizing your users, reducing your user satisfaction and likely dramatically increasing churn, but you can’t do anything about it because that same party is your main source of funding.

(Disclaimer, I work at msft. Nowhere near this though).

Yahoo was the default from around 2014-2017 in the United States.

I'm not sure why you think they don't negotiate with other search providers.

The fact that they’re still on google even though google is screwing over their userbase? I don’t use Firefox because of how difficult it makes captcha. There are others like me.

If they are negotiating with other providers, they certainly aren’t doing a very good job of it.

If I recall correctly, the last time I checked Google's support for Mozilla was in the hundreds of millions per year. I would be shocked if DDG could afford even 10% of that, even as an investment they expected to recoup through additional advertising revenue.

> And businesses are okay with Google denying them money

Make sure they know. I write to sites and tell them they just lost a customer because Google doesn't give a shit. I've gotten replies from smaller outfits that had no idea what was going on.

I think their cost analysis would mark you as a bot that got stumped by the captcha and thus a bet benefits. (Sales to bots are worse than not selling, else they wouldn’t implement this at all)

I have managed to successfully solve the audio CAPTCHA before (even though the pictures are impossible to solve), although now they must have disabled it because it doesn't work.

Well said, could not have expressed it any better. I do the same and refuse to use a website or service, that tries to put me through this garbage.

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