7 ms·

Back in '97, Microsoft invested 150m into Apple as well as published office on macs. This was very likely an effort to keep a competitor alive to pretend window

Back in '97, Microsoft invested 150m into Apple as well as published office on macs. This was very likely an effort to keep a competitor alive to pretend windows was not a monopoly. Mozilla is in a much worse position than Apple was in '97. The only way they can continue to exist is to be on the take from Google's handout. The corpse of Mozilla as a puppet to perform for regulators at Google's command is probably a net negative for the world. Maybe Mozilla has run its course.

foepys 6y ago
The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. Nobody would ever be able to make anything in it that Google doesn't want to exist. Google would deprecate APIs for other APIs that seemingly have the same purpose but are missing a single crucial feature. They would build websites on Chrome private builds that include features that make these apps possible and conveniently release them at nearly the same time so nobody can contest them at launch. Add-ons would be deleted because of arbitrary "ToS violations" like Apple already does. Although they are already planning to cripple add-ons like ad blockers with manifest v3. And much more.
- throwaway13337 6y ago
  The argument is that it's already happened. But because Mozilla exists, they can pretend that it hasn't. In this way, Mozilla is actually helping Google dominate the internet by providing very useful regulatory cover. Google has free reign to do all of what you listed. They tread lightly only due to fears of regulation.
  - foepys 6y ago
    What's the next step after Mozilla shuts down and Google loses its cover? Anti-trust cases take at least 10 years. This is plenty of time for Google to make the internet theirs and the then defunct Gecko engine to be too old to use. Blink and WebKit will be the only engines left. Even if you then pry Blink and Chrome away from Google, there will never be another browser engine and it's naïve to think that just because Blink isn't legally part of Alphabet anymore that they will be instantly independent.
    - d3nj4l 6y ago
      Exactly. Chromium is open source; Google can simply make open-source modifications to it the same way others can. Splitting Chrome from Google isn't going to do anything, and won't stop Google from making proposals to the IETF that work in their benefit.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    See also: Mozilla's mobile Firefox which has recently and needlessly broken a great many addons, including many that aided in preventing tracking. I have two that seem particularly egregious in this context: one that removes utm tracking, and another that redirects amp to html.
    - dralley 6y ago
      What they did was rewrite half the browser, and release it before every single extension API was re-implemented (because the new version is vastly better in almost every other respect). It's not really fair to pretend that they deliberately broke your addons out of malfeasance or something. It seems that most of the APIs are now implemented but are buggy, so they added a flag to the nightly version that allows you to install any addon from AMO at risk of it maybe not working. Once it stabilizes you'll be able to use your addons again. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
      - dleslie 6y ago
        As a user, the new version has a worse UI and no notable speed improvements for the sites that I visit. When I go to open a tab, by default, the ability to close the bottom tab is obscured. And collections? Useless when I already had bookmarks in folders. But hey, they managed to break important privacy-protecting addons in the process. I'm not sure why I still use this browser.
        dralley 6y ago
        The speed improvements are very noticable for me.
        armada651 6y ago
        Want to chime in as well that Firefox Mobile before the rewrite was becoming close to unusable for me due to how slow it was. The rewrite saved me from having to switch to Chrome on Android. It's not perfect, but it's definitely a big improvement.
- exged 6y ago
  Mozilla is already irrelevant. Firefox market share on desktop is already lower than Safari [1] and continues to decline. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
  - walrus01 6y ago
    well that is certainly disheartening
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. There's more to the internet than what is accessed via browsers, but as far as browsers are concerned, well, Apple is not spelled M-O-Z-I-L-L-A. The vast majority of all browser use that isn't Google's Blink is WebKit; Mozilla was significant, but not so much today.
  - foepys 6y ago
    Try setting up a mail server and sending more than 5 mails a day to Gmail, the biggest mail provider. Be prepared for your mails to be declared spam. Google has their own DNS they default to on Android. Who knows when google will "block harmful domains". Google is pushing alternatives to HTTP that are vastly more complicated and improve speed, thus increasing search/page rank. Yes, you will be able to run things yourself. Just don't expect them to be discoverable.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      I think you misunderstood. I wasn't saying Google doesn't have influence over the non-browser parts of the Internet, I'm saying Mozilla isn't a counterbalance to them on the non-browser parts, nor is Mozilla anywhere close to the most important counterbalance, any more, in the browser space.
- oriesdan 6y ago
  Webkit does still exist :) Also, Firefox being free software, we can expect forks to appear the very day Mozilla falls. I even wonder if having a swarm of small implementers wouldn't be better for the standards than having three big ones who discuss among themselves, then decide what the standards should be. Maybe browsers would stop getting more complicated than OSes and go back to essential, that way. I would really love seeing web engines getting simple again so that third party developers can contribute to them - and that's certainly a direction many small implementations would push toward. Of course, this is only speculation. At least, it's not guaranteed doom.
  - orra 6y ago
    > we can expect forks to appear the very day Mozilla falls Eh, forks can legally appear, because it's free software. But maintaining them? Improving the product security, let alone adding new features? That's hella expensive. Hobbyists aren't going to write a competitive a web browser. So, it's important to have a strong Mozilla with a good revenue stream.
    - oriesdan 6y ago
      Yep, that's in line with what I was saying, except for the conclusion. Yes, I don't see either small teams keeping up with the amount of features we currently have (and security is a direct factor of the amount of features), but I would rather see them scaling down browsers than making sure we can keep adding to them. Also, beware to not discard "hobbyists" too easily. Hobbyists did create GNU (and still are maintaining it) and early linux. And Blink comes from Webkit, which comes from khtml, made by hobbyists.
      - hvis 6y ago
        Hobbyists can't as participate in the web standards organizations, and lobby for the changes most beneficial to the user (and not big corp).
        d3sandoval 6y ago
- walrus01 6y ago
  > The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. The English language Internet maybe. Due to the great firewall and locally-hosted data laws, China is building a whole parallel world of software, search engines and cloud based stuff that people who don't read and write Chinese rarely see. For instance, here's "Chinese youtube": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youku All centrally censored and monitored.
  - oblio 6y ago
    China, as big as it is, is just 1 country. Russia also does something similar but on a much smaller scale. Google represents the internet for everyone else. And "everyone else" is almost 200 countries and probably thousands of languages and about 6 billion people. It's not just the "English language internet".
    - berkes 6y ago
      China and India combined make over half the worlds population. But I agree that serving "all the rest" is important: Even if Lesotho, Iceland and Trinidad, combined hardly make "a healthy online business model", they are there, and this diversity should be paramount to the internet. Silicon-valley giants are not helping here either, though.
      - TheNorthman 6y ago
        China and India combined only make about 36% of the worlds population [0], a share that is poised to fall in the coming years. [0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28china+population+%2B+india+population%29+%2F+world+population https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28china+population+%2...
      - oblio 6y ago
        As the side comment, no they don't. China and India aren't half the world's population. And their share is falling. Even if they were: 1. India is (partly) English speaking, so it doesn't fit the split. 2. If you exclude the English speaking world (let's say 1 billion people) and China + India (3 billion people), you're still left with almost 4 billion people. Out of which about 1 billion live in developed countries or are middle/upper class in developing countries. So that's a big market. Japan, the EU, Latin America, etc.
- trabant00 6y ago
  Maybe that is not a bad thing? Maybe the current state is encouraging people to hang on to impossible hopes for things to get better. And if Google would become synonymous with the internet the people would drop that hope and start building something that would really benefit users and not big co? Something like a paradise after apocalypse scenario. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  If Google started behaving like you envision, the community could always fork the last known good version of Chromium. When not using Firefox I'm using an ungoogled version of Chromium (from the Woolys site) I didn't see much difference with the original Chrome. Anyway as the recent news showed, Mozilla's management is extremely wasteful of their resources. If the project was just paying devs to work on Firefox, much less money would be needed and if needed the whole thing could probably be funded by donations.
  - Yizahi 6y ago
    Of course there isn't much difference because Chromium is basically Chrome. There is no single independent Chrome/Chromium fork today meaning that they are the same. Everything Google adds to Chrome get down to Chromium. Sure you can (maybe) cut some telemetry but functional changes stay. If Google decides to switch some protocol handling, or deprecate stuff, or add stuff it all propagates to all mods of Chrome.
    - whatsmyusername 6y ago
      Edge. Which you will see increase in market share.
      - Yizahi 6y ago
        Edge is dead and closed. Chrome-Edge will indeed gain market share and it is better than nothing, but I dispute that it is an independent browser making independent decisions about browser engine and other important stuff (not about GUI and telemetry).
        whatsmyusername 6y ago
        That's what I meant. Though I guess they've decided to take the google route in deploying manifest v3. So I'll probably be dumping them for firefox (or rather, reversing how I use them. Use firefox for my 'logged in' browser and edge as my 'noscript, no cookies, no history, default browser')
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  >The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. More and more I'm starting to agree with the people claiming Mozilla has already ceded on that front, and are just keeping the lights on as long as possible to keep getting paid.
  - bhhaskin 6y ago
    Where is the proof for that argument? Firefox quantum is fantastic. Firefox's warp is coming along nicely. The last release (yesterday) adds a lot of performance improvements. The recent layoffs gained some bad will, but every large org does it from time to time. There are a lot of doom sayers out there, but not a lot of proof.
leejoramo 6y ago
To clarify, in 1997 Microsoft promised to continue publishing Office for Mac. Arguably many of the core MS Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) started on the Mac. Yes, Word for DOS existed before — I used it — but Word for Windows was much more like the Mac version.
kqvamxurcagg 6y ago
Mozilla has become dependent on Google. It's natural they will lobby for their payments to continue. It's a great strategy by Google - keep the #2 competitor dependent on you and they will even lobby on your behalf. All for a few hundred million dollars! Another HN post several weeks ago showed the bloated salaries of Mozilla executives. Mozilla as an organisation should be much smaller, sustainable and led by technicians not business executives.
microtherion 6y ago
> Back in '97, Microsoft invested 150m into Apple as well as published office on macs. This was very likely an effort to keep a competitor alive to pretend windows was not a monopoly. Yes, but ultimately, it DID keep Apple alive at a critical juncture, and Apple ended up returning to relevance, at least in newer markets. So maybe even such artificial life preservers sometimes have a competitive benefit.
artiszt 6y ago
>Maybe Mozilla has run its course< most certainly not technically given for instance : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304
- gilrain 6y ago
  Well, they laid off the entire Servo team, which was effectively their R&D and was responsible for many of the recent performance wins in Firefox. So, certainly yes technically.
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
    Didn't the servo team mostly dabble with Rust? What a bad idea from the very beginning to invent a new language and base core components on it when all you have to to is speed up an exisitng product and you are already using the fastest known language fot that task (--> C). A slow Firefox was an architectural problem not because of choosing the wrong tooling.
    - ylyn 6y ago
      Languages are not just about speed. And Rust is plenty fast.
    - nemothekid 6y ago
      I can’t tell if this is a sarcastic remark or if you truly believe speeding up something as complex as a browser is a cake walk. Two big reasons Rust was invented was to (1) easily parallelize the renderer without introducing many bugs (2) speed up the browser without introducing many exploits. It’s common knowledge now in applications like Chrome (and even Windows) that memory errors are the largest source of CVEs and that type of exploit is almost impossibly difficult to cause in Rust
tzs 6y ago
> Back in '97, Microsoft invested 150m into Apple as well as published office on macs. This was very likely an effort to keep a competitor alive to pretend windows was not a monopoly. > Mozilla is in a much worse position than Apple was in '97. Indeed. In fact, Apple was in no short or medium term danger when they got the $150 million from Microsoft. They had at the time around $1.2 billion in cash reserves. Getting Office on Mac was probably far more important to Apple than the cash. The deal guaranteed Microsoft would support Office on Mac for at least five years. Microsoft got more out of it than just looking a little better to antitrust regulators. Part of the deal was that Apple would drop its lawsuit alleging that Microsoft had copied large parts of the look and feel of the Mac GUI. That had been going on for many years.
perryizgr8 6y ago
> Maybe Mozilla has run its course. Unless they let their Steve Jobs back at the reins. Guess who.

foepys 6y ago

The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. Nobody would ever be able to make anything in it that Google doesn't want to exist. Google would deprecate APIs for other APIs that seemingly have the same purpose but are missing a single crucial feature. They would build websites on Chrome private builds that include features that make these apps possible and conveniently release them at nearly the same time so nobody can contest them at launch. Add-ons would be deleted because of arbitrary "ToS violations" like Apple already does. Although they are already planning to cripple add-ons like ad blockers with manifest v3. And much more.

throwaway13337 6y ago
The argument is that it's already happened. But because Mozilla exists, they can pretend that it hasn't. In this way, Mozilla is actually helping Google dominate the internet by providing very useful regulatory cover. Google has free reign to do all of what you listed. They tread lightly only due to fears of regulation.
- foepys 6y ago
  What's the next step after Mozilla shuts down and Google loses its cover? Anti-trust cases take at least 10 years. This is plenty of time for Google to make the internet theirs and the then defunct Gecko engine to be too old to use. Blink and WebKit will be the only engines left. Even if you then pry Blink and Chrome away from Google, there will never be another browser engine and it's naïve to think that just because Blink isn't legally part of Alphabet anymore that they will be instantly independent.
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    Exactly. Chromium is open source; Google can simply make open-source modifications to it the same way others can. Splitting Chrome from Google isn't going to do anything, and won't stop Google from making proposals to the IETF that work in their benefit.
- dleslie 6y ago
  See also: Mozilla's mobile Firefox which has recently and needlessly broken a great many addons, including many that aided in preventing tracking. I have two that seem particularly egregious in this context: one that removes utm tracking, and another that redirects amp to html.
  - dralley 6y ago
    What they did was rewrite half the browser, and release it before every single extension API was re-implemented (because the new version is vastly better in almost every other respect). It's not really fair to pretend that they deliberately broke your addons out of malfeasance or something. It seems that most of the APIs are now implemented but are buggy, so they added a flag to the nightly version that allows you to install any addon from AMO at risk of it maybe not working. Once it stabilizes you'll be able to use your addons again. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
    - dleslie 6y ago
      As a user, the new version has a worse UI and no notable speed improvements for the sites that I visit. When I go to open a tab, by default, the ability to close the bottom tab is obscured. And collections? Useless when I already had bookmarks in folders. But hey, they managed to break important privacy-protecting addons in the process. I'm not sure why I still use this browser.
      - dralley 6y ago
        The speed improvements are very noticable for me.
      - armada651 6y ago
        Want to chime in as well that Firefox Mobile before the rewrite was becoming close to unusable for me due to how slow it was. The rewrite saved me from having to switch to Chrome on Android. It's not perfect, but it's definitely a big improvement.
exged 6y ago
Mozilla is already irrelevant. Firefox market share on desktop is already lower than Safari [1] and continues to decline. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
- walrus01 6y ago
  well that is certainly disheartening
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. There's more to the internet than what is accessed via browsers, but as far as browsers are concerned, well, Apple is not spelled M-O-Z-I-L-L-A. The vast majority of all browser use that isn't Google's Blink is WebKit; Mozilla was significant, but not so much today.
- foepys 6y ago
  Try setting up a mail server and sending more than 5 mails a day to Gmail, the biggest mail provider. Be prepared for your mails to be declared spam. Google has their own DNS they default to on Android. Who knows when google will "block harmful domains". Google is pushing alternatives to HTTP that are vastly more complicated and improve speed, thus increasing search/page rank. Yes, you will be able to run things yourself. Just don't expect them to be discoverable.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    I think you misunderstood. I wasn't saying Google doesn't have influence over the non-browser parts of the Internet, I'm saying Mozilla isn't a counterbalance to them on the non-browser parts, nor is Mozilla anywhere close to the most important counterbalance, any more, in the browser space.
oriesdan 6y ago
Webkit does still exist :) Also, Firefox being free software, we can expect forks to appear the very day Mozilla falls. I even wonder if having a swarm of small implementers wouldn't be better for the standards than having three big ones who discuss among themselves, then decide what the standards should be. Maybe browsers would stop getting more complicated than OSes and go back to essential, that way. I would really love seeing web engines getting simple again so that third party developers can contribute to them - and that's certainly a direction many small implementations would push toward. Of course, this is only speculation. At least, it's not guaranteed doom.
- orra 6y ago
  > we can expect forks to appear the very day Mozilla falls Eh, forks can legally appear, because it's free software. But maintaining them? Improving the product security, let alone adding new features? That's hella expensive. Hobbyists aren't going to write a competitive a web browser. So, it's important to have a strong Mozilla with a good revenue stream.
  - oriesdan 6y ago
    Yep, that's in line with what I was saying, except for the conclusion. Yes, I don't see either small teams keeping up with the amount of features we currently have (and security is a direct factor of the amount of features), but I would rather see them scaling down browsers than making sure we can keep adding to them. Also, beware to not discard "hobbyists" too easily. Hobbyists did create GNU (and still are maintaining it) and early linux. And Blink comes from Webkit, which comes from khtml, made by hobbyists.
    - hvis 6y ago
      Hobbyists can't as participate in the web standards organizations, and lobby for the changes most beneficial to the user (and not big corp).
      - d3sandoval 6y ago
walrus01 6y ago
> The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. The English language Internet maybe. Due to the great firewall and locally-hosted data laws, China is building a whole parallel world of software, search engines and cloud based stuff that people who don't read and write Chinese rarely see. For instance, here's "Chinese youtube": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youku All centrally censored and monitored.
- oblio 6y ago
  China, as big as it is, is just 1 country. Russia also does something similar but on a much smaller scale. Google represents the internet for everyone else. And "everyone else" is almost 200 countries and probably thousands of languages and about 6 billion people. It's not just the "English language internet".
  - berkes 6y ago
    China and India combined make over half the worlds population. But I agree that serving "all the rest" is important: Even if Lesotho, Iceland and Trinidad, combined hardly make "a healthy online business model", they are there, and this diversity should be paramount to the internet. Silicon-valley giants are not helping here either, though.
    - TheNorthman 6y ago
      China and India combined only make about 36% of the worlds population [0], a share that is poised to fall in the coming years. [0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28china+population+%2B+india+population%29+%2F+world+population https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28china+population+%2...
    - oblio 6y ago
      As the side comment, no they don't. China and India aren't half the world's population. And their share is falling. Even if they were: 1. India is (partly) English speaking, so it doesn't fit the split. 2. If you exclude the English speaking world (let's say 1 billion people) and China + India (3 billion people), you're still left with almost 4 billion people. Out of which about 1 billion live in developed countries or are middle/upper class in developing countries. So that's a big market. Japan, the EU, Latin America, etc.
trabant00 6y ago
Maybe that is not a bad thing? Maybe the current state is encouraging people to hang on to impossible hopes for things to get better. And if Google would become synonymous with the internet the people would drop that hope and start building something that would really benefit users and not big co? Something like a paradise after apocalypse scenario. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking.
jmnicolas 6y ago
If Google started behaving like you envision, the community could always fork the last known good version of Chromium. When not using Firefox I'm using an ungoogled version of Chromium (from the Woolys site) I didn't see much difference with the original Chrome. Anyway as the recent news showed, Mozilla's management is extremely wasteful of their resources. If the project was just paying devs to work on Firefox, much less money would be needed and if needed the whole thing could probably be funded by donations.
- Yizahi 6y ago
  Of course there isn't much difference because Chromium is basically Chrome. There is no single independent Chrome/Chromium fork today meaning that they are the same. Everything Google adds to Chrome get down to Chromium. Sure you can (maybe) cut some telemetry but functional changes stay. If Google decides to switch some protocol handling, or deprecate stuff, or add stuff it all propagates to all mods of Chrome.
  - whatsmyusername 6y ago
    Edge. Which you will see increase in market share.
    - Yizahi 6y ago
      Edge is dead and closed. Chrome-Edge will indeed gain market share and it is better than nothing, but I dispute that it is an independent browser making independent decisions about browser engine and other important stuff (not about GUI and telemetry).
      - whatsmyusername 6y ago
        That's what I meant. Though I guess they've decided to take the google route in deploying manifest v3. So I'll probably be dumping them for firefox (or rather, reversing how I use them. Use firefox for my 'logged in' browser and edge as my 'noscript, no cookies, no history, default browser')
finnthehuman 6y ago
>The day Mozilla shuts its doors is the day when Google would become synonymous with the internet. More and more I'm starting to agree with the people claiming Mozilla has already ceded on that front, and are just keeping the lights on as long as possible to keep getting paid.
- bhhaskin 6y ago
  Where is the proof for that argument? Firefox quantum is fantastic. Firefox's warp is coming along nicely. The last release (yesterday) adds a lot of performance improvements. The recent layoffs gained some bad will, but every large org does it from time to time. There are a lot of doom sayers out there, but not a lot of proof.

leejoramo 6y ago

To clarify, in 1997 Microsoft promised to continue publishing Office for Mac. Arguably many of the core MS Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) started on the Mac. Yes, Word for DOS existed before — I used it — but Word for Windows was much more like the Mac version.

kqvamxurcagg 6y ago

Mozilla has become dependent on Google. It's natural they will lobby for their payments to continue. It's a great strategy by Google - keep the #2 competitor dependent on you and they will even lobby on your behalf. All for a few hundred million dollars! Another HN post several weeks ago showed the bloated salaries of Mozilla executives. Mozilla as an organisation should be much smaller, sustainable and led by technicians not business executives.

microtherion 6y ago

> Back in '97, Microsoft invested 150m into Apple as well as published office on macs. This was very likely an effort to keep a competitor alive to pretend windows was not a monopoly. Yes, but ultimately, it DID keep Apple alive at a critical juncture, and Apple ended up returning to relevance, at least in newer markets. So maybe even such artificial life preservers sometimes have a competitive benefit.

artiszt 6y ago

>Maybe Mozilla has run its course< most certainly not technically given for instance : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304

gilrain 6y ago
Well, they laid off the entire Servo team, which was effectively their R&D and was responsible for many of the recent performance wins in Firefox. So, certainly yes technically.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  Didn't the servo team mostly dabble with Rust? What a bad idea from the very beginning to invent a new language and base core components on it when all you have to to is speed up an exisitng product and you are already using the fastest known language fot that task (--> C). A slow Firefox was an architectural problem not because of choosing the wrong tooling.
  - ylyn 6y ago
    Languages are not just about speed. And Rust is plenty fast.
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    I can’t tell if this is a sarcastic remark or if you truly believe speeding up something as complex as a browser is a cake walk. Two big reasons Rust was invented was to (1) easily parallelize the renderer without introducing many bugs (2) speed up the browser without introducing many exploits. It’s common knowledge now in applications like Chrome (and even Windows) that memory errors are the largest source of CVEs and that type of exploit is almost impossibly difficult to cause in Rust

tzs 6y ago

> Back in '97, Microsoft invested 150m into Apple as well as published office on macs. This was very likely an effort to keep a competitor alive to pretend windows was not a monopoly. > Mozilla is in a much worse position than Apple was in '97. Indeed. In fact, Apple was in no short or medium term danger when they got the $150 million from Microsoft. They had at the time around $1.2 billion in cash reserves. Getting Office on Mac was probably far more important to Apple than the cash. The deal guaranteed Microsoft would support Office on Mac for at least five years. Microsoft got more out of it than just looking a little better to antitrust regulators. Part of the deal was that Apple would drop its lawsuit alleging that Microsoft had copied large parts of the look and feel of the Mac GUI. That had been going on for many years.

perryizgr8 6y ago

> Maybe Mozilla has run its course. Unless they let their Steve Jobs back at the reins. Guess who.