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Comment by 0xdeadb00f | Hacker News Reader

I understand this doesn't mean Bing _will_ be the default session (yet).

But in a broader way, I don't understand any of the recent descisions Mozilla has been making in regards to Firefox. It keeps getting stranger and stranger.

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Mozilla has lost their way. Mitchell’s ability to lead the company is deficient.

Respectfully I think she should step down and hire a real CEO again.

Knowing nothing of the particulars, I emphatically agree. This past month I have twice disabled ads that circumvent my ad-blocker placed on my homepage by Mozilla labeled as a fucking “experiment.” It’s mind blowing to me that leadership there is so lost and without a paddle they’re putting ads directly in my face without asking. It’s a huge violation of trust and honestly has made me start to regret supporting Firefox and Mozilla all these years.

Mozilla literally goes around preaching bullshit about a safer web, acting like they give a fuck, when I’m reality they’re as eager as anyone to sell you out. It’s disgusting behavior.

I truly don’t want to move back to a Chromium based browser (I hate using Chrome), but they have maybe one more chance before I’m forced to. At least if I’m using Chromium, I can assume my browser is hostile and leaking information instead of assuming it’s trustworthy when it’s clearly not.

Whoever is at Mozilla that approves of this kind of stuff should leave. You’re doing the world a disservice and likely harming the future of the free internet. If that’s the CEO, then by all means, please let the door hit you on the way out as it slams shut.

Why wouldn't you switch to a Firefox derivative or other Gecko-based browser?

Because that shows as Firefox market share to webservers, further perpetuating the "people still use Firefox" myth that's being clung to by people who haven't studied the big picture state of browser security in a while.

It may be going the way of Netscape at this point - hopefully it doesn't get acquired by an Oracle or Verizon type entity, but Mozilla has seriously screwed up in the last several years. Bureaucracy, complacency and loss of vision and purpose, software change for its own sake, and they seem not to have noticed the relevance they've lost. It's sad but predictable.

There is nothing they can do. Users have voted that speed is more important than any privacy, and Firefox will never get faster than chrome.

Its in the article.

>With the current Google contract expiring in fifteen months, Mozilla may be thinking about striking a deal with Microsoft instead.

Why fucking Bing of all things? Why not Duck Duck Go? Are these kinds of deals really solely based on the funding MS would give them?

I mean... yeah, pretty much. A massive part of their funding is their search engine IIRC, so if they could make it bigger, they could certainly improve it. Mozilla's financials mean it's entirely reliant on that, basically.

If they don't have an alternative to Google how can they:

- Negotiate with google?

- Keep on serving a useful browser experience if google doesn't want to be on firefox anymore?

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