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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

Hard to pass up $500M/yr

Just for the record, what is it that Google is paying them $500M/yr to do? I haven't installed Firefox for while, is Google the default search engine or something?

edit: Upon more searching, I find passages like this:

>in 2020, Mozilla Corporation’s revenue was $466 million from its search partnerships (largely driven by its search deal with Google), subscriptions and advertising revenue. [0]

as well as a fine from France for 500M Euros.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/13/mozilla-expects-to-generat...

Google pays Mozilla to exist. I wouldn't be surprised if other browsers get either checks or favors for existing. All of this is to make Google not seem like the monopoly it is.

It literally isn't a browser monopoly. Whether they fund them or not, Firefox and Safari are equally useable browsers.

I use Firefox as a daily driver in both desktop and mobile and have zero issues.

Hell, chromium can do everything chrome can.

Maybe they're a monopoly in the online advertising space but I'd argue that's simply because they're better.

Firefox is Mozilla‘a browser, and it would be gone tomorrow without the money they get from Google.

Safari is a contender on phones, not so much on desktop.

You're considering "contender" when the word you should be using is "competitor".

It's not Google's fault people prefer chrome over safari. The fact that people _can_ choose Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Chromium, Brave, etc. is what matters. As long as Google isn't doing anything anti-competitive, it's absolutely okay to dominate the market with a superior product.

Not existing, but they do buy the default spot for Safari for an allegedly lurid sum.

It's not just Google being the default, Firefox has search suggestions on by default too. Privacy browser sends your keystrokes to Google. So nice.

Do they really need all that money?

They could perhaps get good money, even if considerably less, from DDG.

Well, yes. It’s almost all of their annual revenue and Mozilla already had huge layoffs[0], so presumably they’re not exactly on amazing footing financially. Duckduckgo could not provide anything near that much - ddg has 100m in annual revenue and Google is giving 500m to Mozilla. 5x their entire company’s annual revenue.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-...

If an organisation can be in financial trouble with an annual income of half a billion then it's poorly run. That's ample resources even for something as complex as a browser.

You could do a lot of science for $500M. I wonder where all that money goes for a mostly complete piece of software.

It goes into changing the UI every 6 months and removing features, of course

Who wants to let go of free money? Mozilla is way overpaid, they probably lost focus other than paying $100m for browser development and MDN and probably the rest wasted.

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