Mozilla begs courts to allow Google search deal for Firefox to continue | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla begs courts to allow Google search deal for Firefox to continue

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7 pointspjmlp8 comments

Mozilla clearly has little interest in providing a browser with strong privacy protections by default.

Most of the developers that I know don't even bother with Firefox testing any more.

How would extending this deal be in the best interests of consumers?

While I started out on the side of DOJ (if only to do _something- about Google’s abusive practices), I’ve come around to the idea that this is a foolish idea. How will chrome support itself? If Android is spun out, how will that make money? Legislation is needed. I won’t pretend to know the answer, but I don’t believe it’s this.

Browsers are infrastructure. I wonder if their development should be financed like other infrastructure projects. Though I don't really know what I am talking about. Who pays for telecommunication cables on the ocean floor?

> Who pays for telecommunication cables on the ocean floor?

TIL, it's a mix of private venture and public money [1], depending on which cables we're talking about. The ownership of those cables is also interesting [2] (granted, the source is a bit dated, but I can imagine that's still a trend):

> The leaders of today’s boom are two of the biggest generators of data traffic: Google and Facebook. Internet companies are behind about four-fifths of transatlantic cable investment planned for 2018-20, up from less than 20 percent in the three years through 2017, according to TeleGeography. Google has become “by far the biggest investor” in submarine cables, even taking full ownership of two of them—a reflection of the vast amounts of data the company transmits, says Mike Conradi, a lawyer at DLA Piper in London who’s been working on undersea fiber deals since 1999. Content companies “can make or break these cables.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable...

[2] https://archive.is/PcXvn

Edit: Formatting.

Well, this is what happens when you depend on Google's money for decades and become complacent with it believing that it lasts forever as it accounts for 80% of Mozilla's revenue, with no replacement for that if the search deal gets cancelled.

The CEO promised to move away from Google and to not solely rely on their revenue 16 years ago [0]. Nothing has changed and now Google is going to get broken up and it includes ending this deal directly affecting Mozilla. It's quite frankly Mozilla's fault for not looking for sustainable sources of income.

Mozilla should really have gone through the Rust consultancy route. Now, there is no way out other than begging to the courts and hoping that it doesn't get cut.

Oh dear.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

Google enticed them and Mozilla swallowed the bait --- hook, line and sinker. Now they are dangling like a fish at the end of Goggle's rod.

Brave is what Firefox could have and should have become. This would have actually served consumer interests --- something that Mozilla constantly talks about but never follows through.

> Brave is what Firefox could have and should have become.

On the flipside, Brave went kinda weird with crypto and embedded it in the browser rather than having it be something you can tack on via extension if that's your jam.

They certain bring something interesting to the space, but hitching themselves to the cryptocurrency wagon lost some people (myself included) along the way.

I'm not a crypto fan either. It's there if go looking for it but otherwise, it has no effect on the browser function.

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