6 ms·

It's hard to believe Mozilla will do much considering 90% of their revenue comes from Google. for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver tow

by fault1 5y ago

It's hard to believe Mozilla will do much considering 90% of their revenue comes from Google. for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.

judge2020 5y ago
In general the people making decisions on standards and implementation don't directly answer to the people honoring the Google deal. Plus, Google knows they really shouldn't stop feeding FF revenue lest they be called out, leading to bad PR and more potential antitrust lawsuits, so I don't see them stopping anytime soon.
dralley 5y ago
Why do people keep saying this when Mozilla is and has already been vocally fighting against Google's overreaching proposals? There's new headlines about this every few months. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi... https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest... There's also this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll... https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185 https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185 And the top comment of the hacker news thread associated with that last link? >My friend who works in an adtech company: >"Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- freediver 5y ago
  Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead? Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.
  - dralley 5y ago
    Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately. It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue. I don't envy the market dynamics of their situation. Selling FOSS is hard to begin with, and it's even harder in a market that is utterly commoditized by players 1000x larger than yourself, and it's even harder if your niche (privacy) rules out nearly every funding option apart from the search deals with Google.
    - freediver 5y ago
      A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current users, no? 10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.
      - scratcheee 5y ago
        Mozilla have been losing market share when the barrier to entry is "install this free alternative to your existing browser" the chance that they could succeed with "buy this paid alternative to your existing browser" is approaching zero. Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives. Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would. In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process. If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee. Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole. That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla. The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Maybe because Mozilla collects a massive amount of "telemetry" on users, in a way that is personally identifiable, despite zero need for it to be so? https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/ https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t... Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d? By the way, the bugzilla report about that particular incident was locked, then made employee-only, then made public again...then restricted beyond employee-only...by a project manager...who used to work for advertising companies before she came over to Mozilla. Or how about the fact that flipping on some of the anti-tracking features include munging the timezone, which means times in almost any website are wrong - which seems to be a poison pill to keep people from turning it on? Edit with details regarding the extension controversy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
  - stupendousyappi 5y ago
    What is the browser extension incident you're referring to? Can you provide a link to an article or previous HN discussion?
    - InvisibleUp 5y ago
      They're referring to https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-16-firefox-mr-robot-extension.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-16-firefox-mr-robot-extensi..., an event that occurred 5 years ago, was immediately rolled back after launch, and hasn't happened again.
      - bacchusracine 5y ago
        >an event that occurred 5 years ago, was immediately rolled back after launch, and hasn't happened again. It shouldn't have happened in the first place so no one gets any points for taking it down immediately. The fact it doesn't seem to have happened again also earns no points because again it should never have happened in the first place. At no point should your web browser silently install an addon/extension without your permission. That this same web browser wants to trot around afterwards and prattle on about how secure and open they are makes it even worse.

by fault1 5y ago

It's hard to believe Mozilla will do much considering 90% of their revenue comes from Google. for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.

judge2020 5y ago

In general the people making decisions on standards and implementation don't directly answer to the people honoring the Google deal. Plus, Google knows they really shouldn't stop feeding FF revenue lest they be called out, leading to bad PR and more potential antitrust lawsuits, so I don't see them stopping anytime soon.

dralley 5y ago

Why do people keep saying this when Mozilla is and has already been vocally fighting against Google's overreaching proposals? There's new headlines about this every few months. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi... https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest... There's also this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll... https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185 https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185 And the top comment of the hacker news thread associated with that last link? >My friend who works in an adtech company: >"Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
freediver 5y ago
Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead? Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.
- dralley 5y ago
  Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately. It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue. I don't envy the market dynamics of their situation. Selling FOSS is hard to begin with, and it's even harder in a market that is utterly commoditized by players 1000x larger than yourself, and it's even harder if your niche (privacy) rules out nearly every funding option apart from the search deals with Google.
  - freediver 5y ago
    A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current users, no? 10M Firefox users paying $50/year would yield same amount of revenue as 200M users monetized with a Google deal. Now, would 5% Firefox users convert to paid users is a different question. If not, then perhaps Firefox as a product (or as an idea) may not be as good. But I think they would, and even if the percentage is lower, it would at least set Firefox free. And that is a good position to be in for any company.
    - scratcheee 5y ago
      Mozilla have been losing market share when the barrier to entry is "install this free alternative to your existing browser" the chance that they could succeed with "buy this paid alternative to your existing browser" is approaching zero. Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives. Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would. In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process. If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee. Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole. That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla. The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Maybe because Mozilla collects a massive amount of "telemetry" on users, in a way that is personally identifiable, despite zero need for it to be so? https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/ https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t... Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d? By the way, the bugzilla report about that particular incident was locked, then made employee-only, then made public again...then restricted beyond employee-only...by a project manager...who used to work for advertising companies before she came over to Mozilla. Or how about the fact that flipping on some of the anti-tracking features include munging the timezone, which means times in almost any website are wrong - which seems to be a poison pill to keep people from turning it on? Edit with details regarding the extension controversy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
- stupendousyappi 5y ago
  What is the browser extension incident you're referring to? Can you provide a link to an article or previous HN discussion?
  - InvisibleUp 5y ago
    They're referring to https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-16-firefox-mr-robot-extension.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-16-firefox-mr-robot-extensi..., an event that occurred 5 years ago, was immediately rolled back after launch, and hasn't happened again.
    - bacchusracine 5y ago
      >an event that occurred 5 years ago, was immediately rolled back after launch, and hasn't happened again. It shouldn't have happened in the first place so no one gets any points for taking it down immediately. The fact it doesn't seem to have happened again also earns no points because again it should never have happened in the first place. At no point should your web browser silently install an addon/extension without your permission. That this same web browser wants to trot around afterwards and prattle on about how secure and open they are makes it even worse.