4 ms·

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously do

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

leeoniya 9y ago
> They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. IMO, this is a silly way to look at it. Mozilla's existence is critically dependent on a single "customer" that requires the privacy-focused "do good" company to preset a user's default search choice to an anti-privacy track-you-everywhere company. don't get me wrong, it's a great [and necessary] compromise for the money and being easily changeable. i hope firefox can regain user share so that google continues needing it.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  That makes a lot more sense. Your initial comment without this context sounded like economic contact with someone reduced you to their level of "goodness", which I strongly disbelieve. That isn't to say that you shouldn't draw any lines about who you'll do business with, but this line in particular didn't make a lot of sense.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment. How could that be a sound business transaction ? Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.
- briffle 9y ago
  > as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning. This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    You're missing part of the picture here. Yahoo has been the default engine in firefox... for the US market. it was still google everywhere else in the world except Russia where they went with yandex. Mozilla got a lot of flak in Europe for not replacing google in the part of the world that mattered the most , where they have the most market share and where there is a good local alternative that actually respect privacy and was willing to do business with them (qwant). And the reason for the yahoo deal is that yahoo was trying to sell and needed this firefox deal to better negotiate their own sale at a time when mozilla was actively trying to move away from google (well maybe not that actively). To my knowledge there was not a time when google was not default search engine in firefox at all.
    - dao- 9y ago
      No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.
      - gcb0 9y ago
        even if they don't have a explicit deal, they got search revenue sharing from google on those markets. not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.
        magicalist 9y ago
        > not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently. Safe search/browsing has always been local. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing
pwdisswordfish2 9y ago
"There's not a company in the world that isn't connected economically to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple of degrees of separation at most." Is it true that initial developers of Google Chrome came from Mozilla? It is willful ignorance to ignore that Mozilla developers were paid with "Google money" in the past and now again. The "service" Google is paying for is not a service. They are paying for web traffic. They have probably 90% or more of the market for search and they are paying tens of millions to get the additional small share of web browser users that Mozilla has. 6% or whatever it is. Its makes you wonder...

leeoniya 9y ago

> They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. IMO, this is a silly way to look at it. Mozilla's existence is critically dependent on a single "customer" that requires the privacy-focused "do good" company to preset a user's default search choice to an anti-privacy track-you-everywhere company. don't get me wrong, it's a great [and necessary] compromise for the money and being easily changeable. i hope firefox can regain user share so that google continues needing it.

wutbrodo 9y ago
That makes a lot more sense. Your initial comment without this context sounded like economic contact with someone reduced you to their level of "goodness", which I strongly disbelieve. That isn't to say that you shouldn't draw any lines about who you'll do business with, but this line in particular didn't make a lot of sense.

bigbugbag 9y ago

Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment. How could that be a sound business transaction ? Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.

briffle 9y ago
> as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning. This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  You're missing part of the picture here. Yahoo has been the default engine in firefox... for the US market. it was still google everywhere else in the world except Russia where they went with yandex. Mozilla got a lot of flak in Europe for not replacing google in the part of the world that mattered the most , where they have the most market share and where there is a good local alternative that actually respect privacy and was willing to do business with them (qwant). And the reason for the yahoo deal is that yahoo was trying to sell and needed this firefox deal to better negotiate their own sale at a time when mozilla was actively trying to move away from google (well maybe not that actively). To my knowledge there was not a time when google was not default search engine in firefox at all.
  - dao- 9y ago
    No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.
    - gcb0 9y ago
      even if they don't have a explicit deal, they got search revenue sharing from google on those markets. not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.
      - magicalist 9y ago
        > not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently. Safe search/browsing has always been local. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing

pwdisswordfish2 9y ago

"There's not a company in the world that isn't connected economically to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple of degrees of separation at most." Is it true that initial developers of Google Chrome came from Mozilla? It is willful ignorance to ignore that Mozilla developers were paid with "Google money" in the past and now again. The "service" Google is paying for is not a service. They are paying for web traffic. They have probably 90% or more of the market for search and they are paying tens of millions to get the additional small share of web browser users that Mozilla has. 6% or whatever it is. Its makes you wonder...