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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla (the Company) has always had problems. They want to be something they're not. But the people on the Mozilla engineering team are top-notch and rarely affected by company drama (and probably feel the same way as you do about it).

Mozilla is one of the few places you can do this specific type of really interesting engineering work, without having to be at Google/Apple/etc.

(ex-Mozillian here :) )

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What happens to the Firefox core dev team if the Mozilla Foundation's main revenue source -- the Google search tie-in -- dries up? Google is probably just waiting for the day that Firefox market share is below a threshold of viable competition, at which point they'll pull the plug on the search engine contract and it's game over for the Mozilla Foundation, unless the Mozilla Corporation can step in and save it, which clearly it is not in a position to do.

Some search engine will be willing to pay for the spot, whether bing, ddg, or something more esoteric (ali-something?)

It's possible Google will keep paying what is peanuts to them not to be technically an absolute monopoly (by keeping Firefox alive at insignificant usage level)

That actually seems like the more nefarious route, and thus the more likely one for Google.

I think that's what's already is happening and has happening for some time. While google keeps generously funding them (even after the Yahoo debacle), they at the same time sabotage the Firefox market share every way they can (I am talking about actual sabotage, not just being "better", and not just the Firefox market share, they got caught sabotaging the original Edge as well). This way they can still say to regulators around the world that they do not have a quasi monopoly on browser (engines). "Look there is independent Apple and independent mozilla, at least!"

Why ex?

Quick look at the profile (unless you recognize the name) reveals Gregory is the founder of ReadMe.com (when you guys moved from io?!), so supposedly ex to start his own company!

Last summer! It's the most expensive thing I own haha

Wow, did that help business, or was it more of a vanity thing? I was thinking domains didn’t matter all that much.

I think pg sums it up the best: http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

"The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company."

I'd say there's a few major reasons: protecting the name and signaling we're a real company to larger corporations.

For us, we also host websites that allows JS/CSS/HTML, so being able to put our assets on a separate domain helps with security issues.

I left 8 years ago! I loved it there, but left to start ReadMe.com.

But I still love the people there (and created https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032 recently)

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