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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

And, yet, if Firefox decided to ship an ad blocker on by default they would lose their primary source of funding.

Has that actually been established, or is it still just speculation? I doubt the contract actually says that, though of course it might affect future renewals.

Sorry, I'm claiming they would lose their primary source of funding in the sense that the next time the contract came up for bid no one would want it.

I'm at least somewhat skeptical here. The value gained by Google from all those searches is not exclusively in the ads shown. It might lower the value of the contract, but I would be at least somewhat surprised if it lowered it to zero.

There is value from seeing which result a user apparently likes best, which lets you train your search engine better. But Google already has a ton of this and the marginal contribution from Firefox users must be minimal. Instead, probably a different, smaller, search engine would probably pay. Though, even then, simply the cost of serving acceptable search results could be higher than the marginal value of the data?

Either way, this goes from a contract bringing in hundreds of millions to maybe tens at best?

There's value in being the one to serve personalized results, get people to sign up for accounts, cross-sell other services...

That sounds like Firefox made a bad decision to fund their operations by selling the default search engine space to an advertising company, then.

It’s chicken and egg. Because of their low usage numbers they don’t have much leverage and a deal with devil is the option they’re forced into.

To date, Mozilla refuses to let me donate to directly fund Firefox.

I can donate to Mozilla, but then they'll take my money and pursue whatever their current distraction of the month is. I can pay for Pocket, but then I'm paying for Pocket, which I don't need or want. I can't just give them money and say "I really, really want this money to go directly to Firefox, not to another side project".

Until they offer that as an option, they cannot claim to have tried everything.

I'd love to have an option to pay for Firefox Sync. It's by far my favorite Firefox feature, I use it every day, and I'd happily pay for it even if they just said "this just funds ongoing development and offers no added features", though they'd get more revenue if they find something to offer for paying users.

Firefox has been funded by selling the default search engine for decades, including when it had 30% market share.

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