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Comment by tagrun | Hacker News Reader

Firefox has also been a pawn in Mozilla's corporate strategies many times.

They changed Firefox users' default search engine to Yahoo, not only in new installations but overriding existing settings, after Mozilla cut a deal with Yahoo.

Mozilla also backed EME, eventually, a big threat to free internet as we knew it, among many other things.

If you take this history into account, portraying Firefox as being unblemished by Mozilla Corporation's monetization schemes and guardian of the free internet is just romantic fiction.

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> They also backed EME,

No they didn't. They argued and fought against EME until it was clear that there was no way they would win. At that point they implemented it so that they could stay relevant, without it their market share would be even lower and they'd have zero chance of getting market share again.

And market share isn't a "corporate" concern, it is vital to their non-profit mission.

All that being said, that doesn't mean I'm happy with everything they do. Just arguing on that one point.

You just gave details on how and why they flipped their stance on EME. And you're essentially saying they traded market share for their principles about free internet. You're basically agreeing with me.

> At that point they implemented it so that they could stay relevant,

...instead of fighting it without giving up.

> And market share isn't a "corporate" concern

This literally makes 0 sense to me. Do you actually believe this? Market share share is vital to Mozilla Corporation's business, which they have been using to cut million dollar deals with Yahoo, Google, etc. I don't wanna go all the want and say "you're the product", but they basically monetize their collective user base. So regardless of how they/you spin it, I don't buy that it's not a corporate concern.

To be clear, I meant market share isn't solely a corporate concern. Certainly it is in the corporation's best interest, but it is also a very big interest from a non-profit/altruistic perspective.

Don't forget the Pocket integration that nobody asked for.

A trip down memory lane: (a brave stance)

"Bug 923590 - Pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=923590

From 2013: https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/

From 2014: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...

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