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FWIW, Mozilla partners with a lot of distros to help ensure that the distro packaging does not negatively impact the Firefox experience.
by dblohm7 5y ago
FWIW, Mozilla partners with a lot of distros to help ensure that the distro packaging does not negatively impact the Firefox experience.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoSure, but the carrot has to be compelling from the distro end to do that. For example, my distro (Fedora) has its own RPM packaged for Firefox that often runs a few days/weeks behind Firefox upstream. I believe this is because Fedora Firefox has its own QA that sometimes catches distro-specific bugs. I'm not positive. The "carrot" in switching to, say, the official Firefox flatpak that comes straight from Mozilla is that I might get the latest-greatest version faster from release, rather than waiting for Fedora QA. But for Mint, it seems like they previously derived some revenue from having default search providers that differed from Mozilla's default. So the carrot that Mozilla is offering Mint would probably need to be better than "We think your users will like using a version closer to upstream." They'd presumably need some agreement in place to compensate for the revenue lost from having Yahoo or DDG be the default search provider. Based on a comment from Clem in the page's comment section, it looks like they might either be getting some revenue either from Mozilla or from Google directly in switching the default search back to Google.