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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

The opposite is true. Google has been the main funding source for Mozilla. Without Google no Firefox. But a US antitrust ruling from last year says their current deal can't continue, which implies strongly reduced funding. Mozilla needs to find alternative revenue sources or they f*ed.

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> The opposite is true. Google has been the main funding source for Mozilla

I think the point is more that Google has propped up a hapless, ineffectual competitor so that it can point to “competition” when antitrust probes seek to have them spin off their Chrome division or whatever.

Exactly. US antitrust regulatoors (especially ones that don't really want to do their jobs) seem to tend to look at an industry with more than one company in it and go "Yeah, looks great to me!", regardless of the facts on the ground.

I wonder if -should we ever be so lucky as to get a complete account- we'll learn that something vaguely similar happened with the OpenAI/Anthropic situation... not that one is financially dependent on the other, but that the fact that there are two companies doing the same thing instead of one gives the appearance of competition, which tends to ward off antitrust regulators.

It's not just that. It's that they propped up a hapless, ineffectual competitor so that it can point free software enthusiasts to when they bring up browsers.

Every conversation about free browsers results in Firefox, which is trash. And community efforts are almost singularly focused on supporting this thing that is 90% of the way there, but never actually getting there, while Mozilla is able to sit back and do nothing but still get paid. It's the resource curse applied to tech, with the lazy teammate being the one people are hoping will one day wake up and do the work.

It really is time for a reset.

On the other hand, the browser built by that hapless, ineffectual competitor works decently enough for daily use imho.

It's a 20+ year old codebase that they just keep patching. The foundation was built in a competative market by some very intelligent people, and today its just a shambling zombie that's on life support kept up by a company who's main goal is politics and large salaries and not the browser.

Shades of Microsoft bailing out Apple during the 90s to avoid antitrust action?

Is "implies strongly reduced funding" your personal analysis/ opinion or is there some article or other source for this?

https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...

Given you've linked to a paywalled article from May 5 2025 that predates the relevant ruling from September 2025 it seems you've mainly been spreading your own ideas:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/judge-orders-search...

The article is now paywalled. The one you cute does not mention Mozilla. The court ruled that the current deal has to end by the end of 2026. After that, they likely could only do per-query deals, which would be far less lucrative for Mozilla.

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