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Comment by prange | Hacker News Reader

> I wouldn't seriously consider using a non-free application for something as essential as everyday web browsing.

Why? Are you considering forking Firefox?

For clarification - if you either contribute code or money to Firefox, you are clearly supporting the existence of a free browser.

I don’t see how just using it does. So if you aren’t contributing to it you may as well use the browser with the best feature set for your use case.

Marketshare is important, default search engine revenue is based on usage.

It’s not really ‘free’ if it has to produce ad revenue.

It is irrelevant to it being free.

No it isn’t. The direction of development is controlled by the need for funding.

The direction of development is irrelevant to it being free.

If it is controlled by corporate interests, it is not free.

Being controlled by corporate interests is completely orthogonal to being free. A lot of Free Software is being controlled by corporate interests and there's nothing wrong with it.

Using Firefox definitely supports the existence of a free browser. Loss of market share is the #1 threat to the continued existence of a free browser. Beyond the obvious (if a tree falls in a forest, crushing the last copy of the code for a browser that has zero users, then was it a browser at all?):

    lower market share =>
    nobody testing against the free browser or fixing site breakage =>
    quirks (bugs, underdefined specifications, nonstandard features) of other browsers becoming required for a functional Web =>
    free browser is no longer a browser of the actual Web.

I agree that submitting bug reports or patches is an important contribution.

I don’t see how that relates to market share, since regular users won’t do that.

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