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Comment by flomo | Hacker News Reader

Root for the illegal Google monopoly then, because that's what Mozilla says they need to survive. (It's over soon.)

I assume you were being sarcastic? I see it the other way around - the sooner Mozilla gets off the drugs^WGoogle's money the better the chance we get a proper competitor to Chrome.

The opposite will happen as they lose most of their funding. They will have to fire most developers and switch to chromium, to become yet another Chrome reskin. Congratulations, you killed Firefox.

Um, so, how are Mozilla supposed to get the hundreds of millions of dollars a year it costs to pay engineers to maintain an evergreen browser without Google's funding?

How did they survive without their funding before they got it? And don't say that web standards are much more complex nowadays - yes, they are, because it is in Google's interest to make them such. Will it hurt? Yes. Will Firefox survive? I hope so. Is it a bad idea? No.

> How did they survive without their funding before they got it?

They were initially Netscape, a commercial company, so they had money from their customers.

After the browser code base was handed over from Netscape/AOL to the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, they got donations from AOL, IBM, Red Hat, etc. which kept them going for a few more years.

The Mozilla Foundation signed the deal with Google two years later, in 2005.

In short, they survived first on commercial revenues and then from donations, neither of which are substantial now.

Informative. AOL also sued Microsoft for iirc $1 billion for their illegal Netscape shenanigans. That kept Mozilla going for several years when they really didn't have a product, and probably would have been shut down otherwise.

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