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Comment by nanexcool | Hacker News Reader

Deoesn't Mozilla get like 85% of its budget from Google? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

Yup, to be the default search engine. I'm so glad they get that money.

aren't most biggish free(and open source) software projects in GSOC? https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/list/public/google/g... Should we stop using/trusting anything that get resources from Google, ever?

In fact, it looks like the blog is hosted by Blogger, which IIRC is a google company.

He addresses this in the comments on his blog:

"Yeah. I use GMail too. Fortunately, switching browsers is easier than switching hosted services ... for now ... and I think it also has more impact."

We shouldn't-- but I think the grandparent post is saying that "switch from Chrome to Firefox so as not to support Google" is not an entirely valid argument given the funding situation. Simply put, if you think "this is Google-related" is a reason to switch away from something, then maybe it becomes relevant that Google is funding a big portion of alternative sources?

Obviously there are a few issues with the argument, but I think it brings up an important point.. and demands that the anti-Chrome/pro-Firefox argument matures a bit more.

Roc's point is specifically about Chrome, and letting a single player control how people access the Web. Using Firefox with DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or whatever search engine you prefer is still better than using Chrome.

Yes, it does. Does this invalidate Robert's comments? If anything, I'd say it strengthens them.

"Employee of company A praises company B (from which company A gets most of their revenue)" is not a noteworthy story. But change "praises" to "criticizes" and it's entirely different.

Can you imagine what will happen to Mozilla if Google stops the contract? IMO, it is just a strategy of Google. First make the Mozilla heavily dependent on it and later ditch so the Firefox can easily die

Firefox would probably take some pay cut and switch to bing. I bet Google is quite happy as is: the search engine is 80% of their commercial needs with a browser, so they're just outsourcing another IE competitor. Also, I bet they don't view this so ruthlessly -- else they wouldn't be as committed elsewhere with OSS projects and the releasing the Chromium version of their browser.

If Firefox switched its default search engine from Google to Bing, I wonder how many Firefox users would even notice? Power users would complain for a day, then just switch their search settings back to Google. But I think switching to Bing (or Yahoo) would restore some healthy competition to the web.

I've been using Bing (and IE) for a few months now, after years of Google and Firefox.

I'd guess about half of my searches go like this:

* type into URL bar * get Bing result * after a quick glance: decide that result is useless * copy/paste into Google

I'd love to use Bing almost exclusively (especially since I'm really happy with my Lumia 630), but it is really frustrating sometimes.

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