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Comment by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u | Hacker News Reader

I know it's almost a meme at this point, but maybe Apple should buy Mozilla (or financially support them in some way)? The enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of way. Surely Apple don't want to cede more control over web standards to Google? They both promote valuing user privacy, so it's not like they don't have some common ground.

If Apple really wants to stick it to Google, they could make an iOS App Store policy exception for Firefox / Gecko engine. Heck, that alone may be enough to buoy Mozilla, w/o paying a cent.

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This is how we got into this mess in the first place. Google was the "good guy", up against Microsoft and Apple, and funded Mozilla. After all, Google didn't care about web standards or building a browser! They were a search engine.

So Mozilla became dependent on Google, and here we are.

If Mozilla could stand alone and compete with the other big players, that'd be best. If they couldn't, then forming alliances with others, even former "enemies", would be 2nd best, and work towards independence.

Even Apple took MS money back in the day: seems to have worked out for Apple.

Other buyouts I have been thinking about is Microsoft buying Canonical. Although Canonical buying out Firefox sounds interesting as well but Canonical seems to have gone through a similarish phase where they shut off certain projects.

One other thing that would interest me is Mozilla buying out Fastmail but I am not too sure that would drive the sort of revenue Mozilla needs. There are a few mergers out there that could occur. I mostly mention this one cause it Mozilla had an email service I would pay for it. Especially if its pay only. I want someone who isnt crawling my emails beyond spam detection to manage my email situation.

Heck whats stopping GitHub from buying out Mozilla with its new fatter wallet?

Interesting though with Github. Maintaining the MDN docs certainly aligns well with Github's mission.

Hard to see MS/Github maintaining a browser after Microsoft just adopted Chromium for Edge, but it would be cool to see Firefox given the VS Code treatment. Github had Atom which is where Electron came from, then VS Code is an evolution on top of Electron. Would be nice if Edge was built on Firefox instead of Chromium.

How would that help Mozilla financially?

I'd guess most of the FF iOS users don't even realize it's not Gecko under the hood, and don't even know/care what Gecko is.

Users don't care about browser engines, but they may care about better ad blocking, and YouTube playback in the background (w/o paying for Premium). A "true" iOS FF port could do both, and more. Hopefully this would increase FF's market share, and give Mozilla better bargaining powers.

It is privacy Vs "privacy". Not really comparable. One works actively to help people have privacy, one is using the word to sell devices. An Apple owned FF would be a FF I would leave after many many years.

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