Comment by cadence- | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cadence- | Hacker News Reader

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It’s hard for Mozilla to fight for privacy on the internet since their main customer is Google. Firefox needs to have enough tracking in it, in order to send data to Google. Otherwise Mozilla would earn no money.

And there are no other major customers willing to pay Mozilla. Pretty much the only other options are Yahoo/Verizon (they are currently in a legal fight With Mozilla about a breach of contract that happened in 2017), and Bing (but Microsoft is currently on a mission to promote new Edge, and even included various pop-ups in Windows 10 to discourage people from using Firefox, so I don’t think they are interested in being Mozilla’s customer at the moment).

Mozilla has to stay in bed with google, and this is going to muddle any kind of privacy-related initiatives and communication from them.

I thought the Mozilla Google partnership ended several years ago when they changed to Yahoo for Default search and signed a MASSIVE mutiyear deal with Yahoo.

I know they terminated it (and kept the money) when Yahoo was sold to Verizon but I had not heard they signed a new deal with Google, I assume they were surviving off the Yahoo Money still

They currently have search deal with google. This was disclosed in their yearly financial statements. ~90% of their revenue comes from google.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-tro...

Cadence's point is very valid. Mozilla gets funding by charging search engines to be the default in Firefox and that isn't changing anytime soon.

I wish people didn't instinctively downvote when someone is wrong on a technicality, but this is a site filled with nerds after all lol

EDIT: i guess he isnt even technically wrong.

The default is still Google. The search deal with Google is where the vast majority of their budget comes from.

Or perhaps Google needs Mozilla to thwart accusations of having completely monopolised the Web.

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