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Comment by spwa4 | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: Mozilla makes money from Google paying it to be the default search engine on Firefox. If that practice is outlawed, Mozilla will not have any income stream even close to replacing that.

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EU should heavily subsidize Mozilla, so that this is not necessary.

They definitely shouldn’t. Mozilla has talented engineers, but it’s been catastrophically mismanaged for almost 20 years at this point. Keep Firefox, but let Mozilla finally die.

I’m curious where you start it. I was thinking about it a couple of weeks ago and decided “more than a decade” was safe to say, but I was thinking towards fifteen years, not twenty.

Mozilla wasted most of its money on crappy features no one wanted. They should not be subsidized by anyone.

It's not clear what this claim is based on. Most of its money? Firefox is an excellent browser, and probably much less funded than Chrome/Safari.

Read through https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-...: six years ago, Mozilla laid off 250 people, about a quarter of their staff, in order to focus on… two specific services that they have since killed (Pocket, Hubs), one service completely unrelated to the browser (VPN, though they have recently decided to set more money on fire by integrating some VPN stuff into Firefox, where it never had any place and is frankly an affront), and new and unspecified “security and privacy” tools (probably things like Relay and Monitor) which are almost certainly completely unrelated to the browser.

They are focusing on things that are nothing to do with their core product, and have been acting so for a long time.

Mozilla is deeply unhealthy, and has been slowly collapsing for more than a decade at this point. I believe that the significant majority of its staff are doing things of no or negative value to Firefox.

I suspect that ten developers not beholden to Mozilla but with a mandate to make a good browser would be better custodians of Firefox. If you raised the budget to forty, I’m all but certain of it.

Why Mozilla in particular ? Or its that just what you like ?

Gecko is the only semi-mainstream browser engine that isn't controlled by Google.

Webkit is not controlled by Google and powers Safari as well as some smaller browsers and many other applications.

Safari doesn't run on Windows or Linux. WebKit does run outside of Apple's environment but no major browser uses it which means you are left Firefox, a Blink based browser or a WebKit browser that 5 people use.

Safari runs on many, many millions of various Apple devices though, and I think that more than qualifies it as a major/mainstream browser, and the same for Webkit as a mainstream engine... especially considering Safari's market share is ~5x higher than Firefox. You may disagree though, and that's ok.

They could fund Lady Bird browser. Less legacy code to worry about. Run it lean like Blender.

They won't do anything and everyone knows it. It's not like they are critically dependent on it as a 500 million people government, critically dependent on US software, and US and Chinese hardware, and therefore could find themselves with a problem that would effectively end their ability to work digitally overnight.

Oh wait ...

Nope. Why should my money (taxes) fund a US corporation?

Why not if they are working in your interest and produce open source code.

It's not in my interest. I couldn't care less about Mozilla. It's entirely their fault what is happening to them and to FF.

Here come the downvotes. People, donate your own money to Mozilla, if you're so concerned about its fate. Let me decide what to do with my own money.

Why is this a problem? I don't understand it.

Would this apply to services offering to "promote" your post/listing to the top of the page. Like what is the legislation and logic here.

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