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Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

Why would this be a bad decision, or make you less likely to use Firefox? Mozilla exists in large part due to the abuses that come with monopolistic control over the Internet. Google is dangerously close to that line.

Choosing a different partner seems like the most mission-aligned option for Mozilla.

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Making the product worse, from the perspective users care about, for ideals.

FF, for instance, made their multi-browser "sync" horribly complicated for users, to preserve zero knowledge, which is the opposite of what 99% of users wanted.

Chrome made it simple (and THEN added a fairly decent ZK option buried in advanced).

What makes Mozilla/Firefox relevant is having enough users that it can't be ignored. Mozilla is already increasingly irrelevant due to mobile (Firefox OS is nice promise, but Safari and Chrome are dominating the space); marginalizing their desktop product doesn't help.

Yeah, Sync could be improved a lot. The good news is that we are working on it, and I have hopes that the next version will solve all issues (both performance and UX) without sacrificing privacy.

Now, if the question is whether adopting Yahoo & co will be bad for the user experience, Mozilla is betting on the fact that these smaller search providers can deliver not just a comparable experience, but also innovation from many sources.

"The next version" is already out. We moved away from the ZK sync a while ago, and use a much more user friendly model now.

I was thinking of CloudSync.

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