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Comment by make3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how you can be certain of this

Mozilla's main source of revenue has always been the money Google gives them to have Google as the default search engine. They could stop this at any time to effectively kill Mozilla. So, why haven't they? Because there's this case called United States v. Microsoft Corporation that deals with this very issue of browser monopolies. Now usually a lawsuit wouldn't mean dick to Google because they already have a litany of lawsuits against them that their star legal team is hired to handle. But in this one narrow instance a precedent case is massive, and were Google to kill Mozilla, there would be a league of lawyers jumping over themselves to sue Google on this. Why? Because it's a slam dunk, and would at best force Google to say "hey, you can download Chrome, or you can use these alternative browsers" everywhere there's a Chrome download prompt, or at worst force them to split up. They don't want that.

Regarding Mozilla's direction, we already have years of evidence. It all starts with Brendan Eich's resigning. Whether you agree the reasoning is immaterial; that decision lead him to start a direct competitor that is now fighting them for the ever-shrinking demographic of people that don't use Chrome. And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values. Money-wasters like FoxOS (or whatever that mobile OS was called) that distracted from Firefox. And then lots of tick-tacky stuff like FF devtools being inferior to Chrome for years (people say it's better now, but I don't care to check it out, I've been using Chrome's for years), over-focusing on frivolous things like social justice issues. It will be death by 1000 cuts that kills Mozilla from the inside.

"Money-wasters" like FirefoxOS were a gamble to get onto the mobile phone bandwagon, to reduce Google's Android/Chrome moat. If they had worked, it'd have been a huge gain both for Firefox and for users.

> And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values.

Pocket itself isn't antithetical to Firefox's values. It not being open source is, but from what I understand they're still working on making the server open source, though at disappointingly low priority.

Boot2Gecko seems to have worked for KaiOS

I still don't know wtf is Pocket supposed to be doing.

Pocketing? My wild guess. (Lifelong Firefox user).

Simply put it combines "article view" with pinterest style saving. Find an article online, save it to pocket, revisit it later and read it in an "article view".

Chrome syncs things like bookmarks and credit card numbers across browsers whenever a user logs into a Google property.

Pocket is Firefox trying not to fall behind on features.

And presumably from Mozilla's perspective, if it has some sponsored content giving them some non-Google income, so much the better.

Firefox has Bookmark, Settings, Extension sync and send-tab to device features independently of Pocket.

pocket is mainly an article reader and not really a bookmark service. the whole point is you don't have to send tab of some js heavy news website, you can just have the clean reader view from pocket.

If you bookmark articles, they'll likely eventually go offline or your links will break because websites change and die. This is known as link rot.

There are services, of which Pocket is not the only one, that save you personal hard copies of content so you can have it available offline and keep things even if they're gone. Like a personal Wayback Machine. It's a very sensible thing to integrate into a browser in my opinion, although a lot of the Firefox fanbase, being idiots in love with the idea of FOSS donationware, are hostile to. I used to be one of those idiots.

>Mozilla's main source of revenue has always been the money Google

There was a few years there they got off google in favor of Yahoo Money.

Then Yahoo mismanagement imploded that company and back to google they went

There's a possibility that they're going to Bing, in which case they'd truly be a non-Google player. Not a non-Big Tech one, but a real anti-Google system.

MS should really spend their money on Making Bing actually find things people are looking for when they search

Even if I am looking for Microsoft's own documentation on some library or class google returns a better result for MS Docs than Bing does....

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