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Comment by cracauer | Hacker News Reader

This is bad in one aspect:

Google pays Mozilla a lot of money, mainly to keep Google search the default search engine in Firefox.

If that turns out to be illegal it could create a financial crisis for the Firefox browser and hence reduce diversity in web browsers.

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this is true. but wouldn't it be nice everything didn't have to flow through google and could exist on its own merits?

infrastructure like browsers should really be neutral ground - its sad we can't figure out a way to fund things like that

It would be nice, but it's not realistic. If Google's revenue disappears, then unless Mozilla finds some other form of revenue (which they've been trying to do for years now), Firefox is done for.

At the same time though, when's the last time any of us donated to open source?

I can count myself within the last month... but many will admit that they have never run "npm fund" once.

FWIW, you can't donate to Firefox development.

Mozilla could easily live without Google's money if the vast majority of their income wasn't spent on being Big Nonprofit ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180480 )

I would love it if they lost Google's money and trimmed the bile and focused on making great tech. But something tells me the first to be let go will be the techies, making Firefox effectively a maintenance-only browser. And the army of useless "evangelists" will be there until Mozilla collapses under its own weight.

Maybe we should have a reality check on the true cost of tech. Anything that can break the behavior of the tech industry due to cheap money is a good thing for the long term health of the industry.

Only problem is that there's no good alternative for them. You'd be committing Firefox to a slow death

And maybe that's OK and we should learn to live within our means

Is there a chance that Microsoft can make an offer to Mozilla about making bing the default search in this case. I don't know if this would make sense from Microsoft business point of view and probably an evil from internet freedom ans diversity point. But maybe it is better than the current status.

Another take might be that Google's financial clout killed the browser market. That whole $xx.xx CPM thing that only they attain, and others basically pick up the crumbs. Search terms as input to ads are very powerful.

Might be a bit contrarian, but so what?

Mozilla hasn't produced a decent browser for, what, 12 years? They instead take their hundreds of millions of dollars annually to instead spend time building junk like half-baked password managers.

I'd argue that Mozilla's mishandling of Firefox has been killing innovation in this space for years -- it is a giant red flag for anyone wanting to enter the space considering Mozilla's budget and still not being able to produce something of value. The reality is moreso that Mozilla itself doesn't care about building a better browser. It's only when people started to realise this in the last couple of years that we've started to see some new contenders.

Maybe when Mozilla dies, we might start to see open source efforts going to better browsers.

I actually think Firefox is better than chrome and use it as my main browser. Not sure why you say it’s not decent.

I also think they do a lot of great stuff around Firefox, the email spoofing is good, the sync function is good, their podcasts and studies are good. Not sure what people mean here.

This is a strong but valid take, Mozilla has a huge focus on getting revenue streams from somewhere, but flubbing it right and left along the way. The consumer might benefit from a better browser but Mozilla has basically decided that that’s not what will drive growth or revenues… not that I think they’re particularly correct about that

Idk, I think people underestimate what it takes to support a browser. It's a lot of money and Mozilla doesn't have an ad empire to leverage, operating system sales to subsidize from, or phone/computer sales.

All they have is the revenue they make from Google, a little bit from their attempts at revenue diversification, and a little bit from their partnerships (like Pocket). If the Google revenue disappears, they won't even be able to maintain the current level of quality.

This to me is entirely fantasy. We are instead overestimating what it takes to support a browser because of how much money Mozilla gets and still can't produce anything. We're talking amounts in the billions of dollars here, and more than a billion in current cash reserves.

This Google-controlled narrative is pushed out onto a lot of things (i.e search) which people are slowly starting to realise isn't that complex or expensive to build after all (see Brave Search for example). It's not surprising that Mozilla would echo similar sentiments considering the entire company is controlled opposition.

What other similarly sized or smaller company has successfully built a browser which is not Chromium-based fit for the average consumer? If you're just piggybacking on Google's work, then sure, it's probably not bad, but Mozilla has their own browser engine and is trying to keep feature parity with browsers which have effectively unlimited funding.

Well yes it’s clearly expensive to support a browser and that’s why they’re trying to make money, but they’re failing miserably to deliver on those other revenue streams and they aren’t keeping up in the browser space. That’s all, if they were developing some business model that worked that would be different. That’s why breaking off googles monopoly would kill them, they are dependent on it

If Firefox loses a lot of funding but Google loses the ability to pay companies to make Chrome the default on nearly all devices sold globally today, Firefox will be in much better shape than it is now. Google is killing it, and also giving it a few dollars.

how would the loss of funding put Firefox in better shape? Are you saying that exposure would mean dollars would flow in from donations from new users?

I think they are saying that Firefox would be in a better position to increase market share.

I am not sure that I agree. Specifically, I doubt that mozilla would be able to realize any revenue even if every OEM made Firefox the default browser.

ah thanks for that, Im was wondering how it makes their financial position better. Losing this case imo would knock them out completely

I'm saying if Google can't throw billions at other companies to push Chrome over Firefox, Firefox can get those users for pennies on the dollar, or even be considered the free better choice for product vendors to include.

I think you're misunderstanding....

If Android OEM's aren't locked into Chrome, they'll probably request payment from Edge, Brave and other startup browsers to be the default. Whoever pays most will get the spot. And that browser will end up being ad-ridden to help pay for that.

I could totally imagine browsers having ad-blockers that don't block ads, but merely replace "bad" website-provided ads with browser-provided "good" ads.

Even with tons of new users, how would Mozilla be able to fund continued development of Firefox?

Mozilla will need to find a way to raise funds.

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