“ The ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations – like Mozilla – best positioned to drive competition and protect the interests of consumers on the web.”
Or in other words ... “We need Google’s money” ... Firefox
The idea that a severance of Google’s alleged monopoly would cause a collapse of the competition actually undermines Mozilla’s point and strengthen’s the US’s point, ironically enough.
there's a history of monopolists supporting weaker firms in order to create the illusion of competition. This shouldn't fool anyone who is well versed in anti-trust history and enforcement.
Bill Gates had enough faith in its effectiveness to do it with Apple (basically handing them free money by buying non-voting shares with a certain arrangement).
There was on-going litigation and cross license negotiations at the time Steve Jobs became CEO, after Apple's the purchase of NeXT. The $150 million investment in stock by Microsoft was part of the settlement.
An interesting factoid, but of course you don't think that Microsoft made that investment in their then-failing competitor because they expected a good return. Right?
> The idea that a severance of Google’s alleged monopoly would cause a collapse of the competition actually undermines Mozilla’s point and strengthen’s the US’s point, ironically enough.
It might strengthen the US's case that there is an antitrust problem, but if the remedies don't actually fix the problem but instead make things worse, it certainly undercuts their case for the remedy.
Is that true? The breakup of Ma Bell probably caused all kinds of short term pain, but in the long term it helped consumers. I don’t think that the short term pain is a great rationale to not enforce antitrust law, if Google indeed meets that standard.
Firefox's waning market share and need to suckle upon Google's teat to survive will only get worse and more dependent with time. So if Google doesn't meet all the qualifications of a monopoly now, it'll be much worse if the US waits to take action.
But they can literally already do that right now. Google just pays more. Nothing forces them to go with Google — they even switched to Yahoo for a bit.
This only ends with Mozilla getting less money since without Google bidding the value of the placement goes down.
If it becomes illegal to pay to set a search engine as default then they wouldn't be able to make those deals. Mozilla would lose all their money and the browser would die.
> If it becomes illegal to pay to set a search engine as default
Just as the Microsoft antitrust case was never about whether it was legal to bundle a browser with an OS, but whether Microsoft's particular act of doing so was illegally leveraging a monopoly in the desktop OS market into other markets, the Google case isn't about whether its legal to pay to set a search engine as a default but whether by doing so Google was illegally protecting an existing search monopoly.
You can't just ignore the relevance of the market power premise of antitrust cases to which it is central and pretend they are about the actions without regard to market power.
If you make it illegal for Google to pay for it but legal for others to pay for it, then you basically enforced that all search engine defaults will not be the most popular one since they will all pay for that position while Google can't. Then the status quo is much better.
In other words, buying a default position in a browser or OS is not an anti-competitive practice. Many other things Google does are, but this isn't.
This DOJ lawsuit is basically a gift to Google if you actually think through what it is likely to achieve, and what a better targeted lawsuit could have achieved but won't, because DOJ chose to instead spend its resources on a weak case for an issue that is largely irrelevant to Google's moat.
Isn't it, though? What's the share of views from Opera or even Brave?
Owning #1 and having the rather distant #2 beholden to you makes it even less likely that a market upstart will be able to emerge; particularly when #1 and #2 are loss leaders.
Having money to buy something that is for sale is not anti-competitive in itself, neither is selling stuff to a monopolist at market rates.
You need to look at why Google's adtech is so obscenely profitable, why they are able to generate so much profit per user. A lot of it is powered by things that either already are or should be illegal, from various abuses of monopolistic power to forced tracking without informed consent.
Fixing those issues would be a good start. Otherwise, nothing will change. Google has enough of its own moat with Pixel devices and Android and Chrome that banning or somehow restricting the sale of default search engine position will hurt sellers of those defaults like Mozilla much more than it will hurt Google's monopoly.
Just because the lawsuit is on paper targeted at Google, doesn't mean that their competitors (or the public) will be the beneficiaries of its results.
People misinterpret what antitrust is all about. It is not about making transactions at market rates. It is about having the power to define market rates through the operations of the company (trust) and its close associates. All the characteristics of trusts appear in Google's behavior when they buy competitors and pay their buddies (FF) to deal with them. When they say that people "chose" to use Google properties, this is clearly false in the moment that they buy would be competitors and pay FF and Apple prices that cannot be replicated by others.
Just what kind of conspiracy do you think exists between Google, Mozilla, and Apple? Those seem to be normal business relationships.
Google being the highest bidder, i.e. paying "prices that can not be replicated by others" does not make an antitrust case alone. By that logic you could sue every billionaire buying expensive real estate, art, surgeries, etc.
Buying competitors (DoubleClick) is the kind of stuff that should have been prevented on antitrust grounds, but that is not related to the search box transaction at all, and is not the focus of this lawsuit.
> By that logic you could sue every billionaire buying expensive real estate, art, surgeries, etc
I don't know any billionaire who has cornered the market for real estate, art, etc. Your example just shows that there is something special about the web search market: it was cornered by Google using several strategies that amount to monopoly.
Yet you haven't provided any explanation why Google's deals with Mozilla and Apple should be considered anti-competitive. Those deals are not how Google became ubiquitous, neither in search nor in advertising.
Once again, do you think Microsoft doesn't have the same money as Google to pay for default search placement? Or do you think Apple or Mozilla won't take their money? I'm sure Microsoft has the money. They just don't want to spend it on this because they don't earn as much money from their search users as Google does, so Google outbids them.
You keep talking about generalities of Google's monopoly position, but I'm not disputing that their monopoly position is problematic and should be reigned it.
What I'm saying is that this particular lawsuit succeeding will at best be a wash all things considered, and at worst will entrench Google's moat even further if it kills off Mozilla.
Or, if you don't think so, what kind of court-imposed solution do you think will come out of this lawsuit?
You already know the answer: MS and/or others cannot pay the same amount of money because Google makes more money from search than they do. This is exactly the point of anti-trust legislation: to avoid that dominant businesses use their position to make anti-competitive arrangements to maintain their monopoly.
The point of anti-trust is not to look at a single legal transaction and criminalize it, but to see the pattern of anti-competitive behavior and stop it.
> what kind of court-imposed solution do you think will come out of this lawsuit?
Like in other anti-trust cases, the obvious solution should be to break up the company so that it cannot control the search market as it does today. I think this should be a great solution for consumers and even for Google shareholders.
No offense, but to me personally that sounds like wishful thinking. I'd love to see Google broken up but I don't think it will come out of this particular lawsuit.
Microsoft wasn't broken up. Google, when they recently faced a similar (although not identical) lawsuit in EU about search defaults, ended up implementing a search engine choice screen on Android where the position and presence of other search engines were determined by an auction. So something that was previously free, even though inconvenient, was now bringing Google extra money. How's that for antitrust. And as a bonus, DDG was outbid and not present on that choice screen at all, even though before that lawsuit they were the most popular non-Google option that people chose.
I think we need much better, tech-giant-aware antitrust laws before we can take on the likes of Google. Too bad the various levels of government right now are... well, you know.
Well, I guess we'll see how this works out eventually. Speculation can only go so far.
I think breaking up Google would be the best option for the market, and even for shareholders. The value of the company after splitting will most probably be higher than under control of the current leadership. They're killing lots of great products in order to maintain the monopoly of search.
Earlier in the day I read several news articles about the US V. Google lawsuit.
Before I even clicked the link, while hovering over it, I thought "I wonder how close they're going to come in this response to biting the hand that feeds them... How are they going to possibly handle this?"
It is my understanding that something like 95% of mozilla's gross revenue each year comes from the google search commission deal. If I am wrong on this somebody please correct me.
I think you would see a (further) mass exodus from people using Firefox if they suddenly changed the default search engine for all versions, in all languages worldwide, to Bing.
They switched to Yahoo search for a while. Looks like maybe 2014-2017[0], though I'm not certain of that.
It was briefly annoying, but I just switched it back, so it wasn't a big deal. Defaults matter, but if you're using Firefox, you're probably less likely to accept an inferior default than most people.
> Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome.
Is that so? What are the numbers? And how do they look absolute? Is there an absolute decline in firefox use? Or just a relative one? Which of those really matter?
There is no way to get even remotely close to accurate numbers.
Firefox blocks many trackers, including Google Analytics, by default.
Chrome does not block trackers by default, and has been known to connect to Analytics even with plugins meant to block it.
Hence the numbers will show FF basically as non existing. Which is just where G wants them to be.
They do have some stats based on their own (much maligned) analytics, but nothing that can be used comparatively (at least AFAIK - would be happy to hear otherwise).
Sorry, but there are lots of ways to get accurate numbers, including through Google Analytics.
Firefox blocks third-party cookies used for tracking, not first-party, which is what GA uses. [1] The story that spread last year that Firefox blocks GA turned out to be a myth.
I don't know why you're trying to promote a narrative that Firefox is far more popular than analytics show, but that's simply not true. Heck, just dump user agent headers on your own websites and measure those -- nobody's blocking that.
At my previous job, a large payment app serving millions of users, I ran the logs through some analyzers and compared that to GA. There was a noticable difference: Firefox did have a noticable larger amount of users if read from the logs than from GA. If you think about it, it is not that strange either.
Similar: according to GA we had 0 people using Brave, Opera Mini or Icecat, yet the logs did show a (statistically insignificant) handfull of users using that.
So, while there is no technical reason why firefox might be underrepresented, there is a practical and explainable difference in some cases.
Edit: when I say "noticable", I mean that it could be percieved, not that it orders of magnitude or even significan enough to matter for the business or our choices.
Stock Firefox but I selected strict mode when it prompted me on the initial release. I'm aware that it's not the default setting but some fraction of people are going to choose it since the UI prompts you to choose between standard and strict mode and it's a couple of clicks away on every page.
> 4.1 billion internet users, firefox has 4% market share
Note that the denominator for market share as measured by StatCounter is "page views", not "browser users".
So for example, say you have 4.1 billion users, who use their laptop and phone evenly for their web browsing. On their phone, none of them use Firefox. All of them load the same number of pages every day. In this scenario, 4% of page views corresponds to 8% of users using Firefox on laptop.
Note that these are not realistic assumptions, of course: people vary widely in terms of how many pages they load, vary widely in terms of how their web activity is split between mobile and non-mobile, etc. For example, in 2010, I would bet that the average Firefox user used the web more than the average IE user, so the StatCounter number for Firefox was inflated compared to the actual fraction of users using Firefox.
If you want to measure actual number of Firefox users, you need to use a data service that tries to measure users instead of page views (i.e. not StatCounter).
Yes, this has been a long-running problem, and was the impetus for Mozilla's attempt at FirefoxOS/boot-to-Gecko.
The current mobile situation is:
* iPhone: can't run Firefox there at all, really. There's Firefox for iOS based on WebKit like everything else on iOS, but I don't even know that StatCounter would count it as "Firefox".
* Android: Google for a long time had (and in many cases continues to have, as far as I know) agreements with OEMs that forbid a default browser other than Chrome. In some cases those agreements forbid preinstalling a non-Chrome browser at all, even as non-default. So you have to rely on people downloading an extra browser from the app store, and people don't do that much.
In addition to all that, "mobile" sites tended to be written to "WebKit", not "standards", for a while for various historical reasons. Unfortunately, at this point that's pretty deeply ingrained and people continue to do that, albeit with "Blink or WebKit" replacing "WebKit", which entrenches the problem.
I don't understand why they sunk so much money into Firefox OS when they could have much more easily released an Android spin that had Firefox by default, along with other privacy enhancements.
I think they missed a huge opportunity in about 2014/2015 to do what CyanogenMod was doing, as a clean/no-nonsense power user variant of Android. Ultimately the Cyanogen company leadership made poor choices and killed their relationship with the largest phone manufacturer that was shipping their OS on the phones (OnePlus), who decided to go and re-implement the same features in their own oxygenOS android build. Thereby killing Cyanogen as a company.
My understanding, and I could be totally wrong on this, is that at the time such an Android spin would not have been able to use things like Google's app store, and possibly things like Maps and whatnot, due to not having Google's browser as default.
A bit tangential to your point but firefox for android isn't bad. I am using it to type this.
Not as snappy or polished as chrome on android to be honest.
I personally switched to it because I felt I give enough data to Google as it is. Probably not a great reason, because they still get a lot of data from me.
Sure, I use Firefox for Android as well. The "no one" was for ease of illustration; the general point is that Firefox market share on mobile is different from desktop and that this affects per-view share more than per-user share. Of course, to the extent that someone only uses a mobile device to access the web, per-user share is affected too.
Worrying and indeed not good for Firefox, if correct.
However, when you simply multiply "browser share" with "amount of 'internet' users, you may very well make some grave mistakes. E.g. does "Browsing Tinder" count as 'internet user'? Someone updating their instagram app? If so, you do miss a lot and maybe the numbers go very far in either direction when corrected?
It subjectively feels like we are back in 2006 when I and many of my fellow sysadmins had already changed to Firefox and my manager and some others insisted we shouldn't care about compability as everyone could just use IE.
Only at that time Firefox had a massive advantage because of enthusiasm and an API that allowed for crazy things, up to allowing extensions like IE tab that, on Windows, would allow you to run certain sites with an IE web view inside a Firefox tab..!
The numbers are worse when you look at American data alone. It looks like Firefox is slowly shedding users. Probably because of Mozilla's questionable practices recently (the enlarged awesome bar, the layoffs, etc).
Maybe I am missing a zoom function, or the visualisation is poor, but I see an almost flat curve, in some cases even slightly upwards (hours per day, probably Covid/work-from-home effect?).
US data does show a very small downtrend on some graphs, but so small, that it hardly counts as "trend", IMO.
According to statcounter in September 2016 Firefox had a roughly 15% market share. It now has roughly 9%. In America it's 13.7% down to 7.1%.
The monthly active users chart for Firefox shows that the last time there were 250M+ active users was April 2019 and the last time there were 240M+ active was October of that year. The graph as presented shows a very slight curve downward, it would be more clear if the Y axis started at 200M (which would however bring about its own caveats - data visualization sucks).
Note that StatCounter measures "page views", not "users". They're proportional if all users use the web an equal amount, but that last bit is just not true.
By consistently and continually molding Firefox to be as similar to Chrome as possible instead of offering something different enough to present a meaningful choice.
Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
I think FFs loss of market share of course has been affected by advertising, but mainly by their own mistakes. I don't think the similarities to Chrome (which were not really so great for a long time) were the main driver.
I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening.
So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.
I still use Firefox and only Firefox, as I still see it as the lesser evil, while being performant enough (I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about), but Mozilla is making it harder and harder every year.
Still, I am nowhere near wanting to switch to a Google product - Firefox would have to become really bad for me to consider that - and I see no other browser even remotely close to replacing Firefox for me. It's still "good enough".
I even keep an ancient Firefox version installed in /opt, because I need it to run a small proprietary Java applet for work, but that's another topic. :)
> I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about
> /opt
From what I understand, the slowness was primarily on Mac (a high-dpi rendering issue) and sometimes Windows (don't recall if there was a specific issue or just several small things that added up). On linux these issues tended not to exist, or at least be nowhere near as bad.
Is it even possible to be "different enough" from Chrome without also being a significantly worse browser? Becoming "as similar to Chrome as possible" is also the thing most browser users want. e.g. Multiprocess broke the XUL add-on model, but it also means dramatically better browser stability.
Multiprocess was a step in the right direction, of course - nobody likes it when one crashed tab brings down everything else with it.
But they kept on removing various cool and useful features just because their telemetry showed that they were only used by a small percentage of users, claiming that they need to save money and focus on things people use the most. Naturally, that leads to the world's blankiest blank of a browser, to borrow a bit of Futurama vernacular.
This is another case of people blaming the victim. The monopoly case against Google is there to show that it has stifled competition, including Firefox. Don't get distracted by the fact that Google is paying Firefox, in fact they're causing much more damage through their monopolist practices than whatever amount they're paying.
Like when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep it afloat... the monopolist needs a token competitor to show off to regulators.
Google dominates the browser market... Firefox is down to single digit marketshare. If Firefox is gone, it's pretty much just Safari on mobile... and who else? (Chrome forks don't count.)
As far as Firefox's hands being tied: they had a deal with Yahoo starting in 2015 for 5 years.. and they terminated it in 2017 when their contract gave them an opportunity. So that should say something about Firefox's choice in the matter.
> If that's the case why would Google pay for being the default search engine?
Even if it is, in fact, the best choice for Mozilla even if money is involved doesn't mean Mozilla will see it that way over stacks offered by Microsoft. So, if it's valuable to Google, it's worth them paying for to assure the decision, whether or not Mozilla should rationally be expected to choose the same thing anyway.
I honestly don't understand why people would give up an app because of a default setting. You can just change it in like 30 seconds. I know the average web user might not even be aware that this is possible, but I'd expect those to be mostly Chrome users in today's Google-dominated market.
Especially since Bing's contracts have historically required disabling the ability to switch to a different search engine, presumably because they realize that everyone would just switch to Google anyway, meaning that it wouldn't just be the default but the only search engine people could easily use unless they jumped ship to Chrome.
The problem isn't that Google is the only company that can pay due to their monopolistic position, it's that they're the only company willing to pay that wouldn't require Mozilla to compromise their key principles and their browser - probably because they're good enough that they're confident people actually want to use them.
> Especially since Bing's contracts have historically required disabling the ability to switch to a different search engine
I wasn’t aware of this or that it was even possible to not be able to switch search providers. What is the biggest example of Bing being forced on an install base without the ability to switch?
The only example I know of Bing is the setup in Windows for IE/Edge. And iOS toyed with it for a while but has stuck with google.
It could be that Mozilla's role in the whole scheme of things is to act as 'Plausible Deniability' defense for big G.
Which is, probably, what that Mozilla's current CEO lawyer is there for.
Google needed to get rid of Brendan Eich (Mozilla's CEO that was to browsers, like Bill Gates to Windows) - for the plausible deniability defense to work [1]
So what about the five years between when Eich left to 2019, where Chris Beard, an MBA as CEO? Plus, why would Yahoo have wanted the search contract then?
This is a good hypothesis. Unfortunately, plausible hypotheses and the truth have a way of getting downvoted to the bottom of the comment section these days. I always find myself scrolling straight to the bottom of the last page of HN discussions to find interesting comments. Downvote if you agree.
I would be surprised if Mozilla doesn't charge everyone who is available out of the box. If they don't, they should.
I don't think there should be a default. New users should be presented a list to select their preferred search engine. This could be an educational effort; many users are likely unaware that there are alternatives. Many users don't care, because they don't understand the difference. A brief onboarding experience would help increase awareness, and it would avoid the codependency problem Mozilla itself created.
It's not that simple. Sure, Google currently pays the bills, but when they go to negotiate, Bing is their BATNA, and the BATNA is what negotiations always trend towards. Mozilla benefits more from a stronger Bing than they do a stronger Google.
If you're reading this thread, and you haven't read enough about negotiations to know what BATNA stands for, and you're forced by darksaints' comment to go look it up, then IMO darksaints has done you a favour.
Yeah - I not a huge fan of non-obvious acronyms in writings that are intended for a general audience. I know it's hard to predict what's obvious and what isn't but this one almost certainly isn't.
I would argue that it's not laziness on my part - it makes things jarring to read. And HN becomes less pleasant the more people that do it.
> I not a huge fan of non-obvious acronyms in writings that are intended for a general audience
Yeah, I'm also not a fan of the use of non-obvious acronyms for common phrases, but I think this case is different in that it's more of a concept. It even has a Wikipedia article[1]. Even if they provided the expansion of the acronym in their comment, one might feel that they should also explain a little about the concept before referring to it, since the general audience cannot be expected to know about it. However, that would distract from the point the comment is meant to make.
Since the comment is not about what BATNA is, it's better to focus writing on the point it's trying to get across, even if it ends up limiting the intended audience. Those that are not familiar with it are better served by looking it up, anyways.
If Google is banned from buying search engine defaults, Bing might be hit by the same ban or at least they'd no longer be bidding against Google so now they'd just have to outrun... DDG?
> If Google is banned from buying search engine defaults, Bing might be hit by the same ban
If Google is banned from protecting it's monopoly by buying default position, no one else would be affected unless they first replaced Google’s monopoly.
> or at least they'd no longer be bidding against Google
This, however, is a real issue. The only reason Bing offers big numbers is to force Google to offer more.
I think this is the best explanation for Mozilla's position on this. It would be a death blow for Mozilla if google was taken out of the running altogether, simply because then their BATNA would be DDG. It's not clear if anti-trust action against google will affect Google's ability to buy default traffic from Mozilla, which is why they haven't taken a particularly strong position yet. Some forms of anti trust action could help Mozilla by bolstering competitors, but other types of actions could hurt Mozilla. It seems like a wait and see kind of thing.
BTW every time competition comes up in this case we should probably ask: competition in what? The case appears to be focusing on search engines and ad networks, but trying to create more competition in search could end up reducing competition in browsers (hence Mozilla's concern about collateral damage). Google is so huge and has so many interlocking monopolies that I don't envy anyone who's trying to fix any of it.
Even if browser competition is important, and even if that (currently) requires a stream of money to flow to Mozilla, it doesn't follow that we should allow unlawful abuse of other monopolies in order to support that. Of course, it's possible the courts decide the status quo is lawful and there's no change.
In a hypothetical situation where you separate Google Ads from Google Search from Google everything else, Google search would still want to pay browsers for default search, and Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc would still have a revenue stream; however, they would only be able to do so to the extent of their web search revenues. Likely the baby Googles are still dominant in all of their fields, but it's not as assured, because there will be less cross promotion, exclusivity, and tying.
If you instead leave Google whole, and prohibit paying browsers for default search, you still have internal payments (de facto, if not explicit) to Chrome and Android that drive product decisions like defaults and putting an unremovable search bar in the default launcher.
It could go multiple ways. The limits of the CCPA, GDPR, and likely some future US federal data privacy act do constrain the possible outcomes.
I'm not sure my opinion of this should happen or that should happen matters one bit. In the US Republicans and Democrats hate Google. In the EU the regulators detest them. In China they are locked out of the market and its a laugh that any executives think they would be allowed in. What that means is Google has almost no political capital today and is basically fucked, short of the billions of dollars they will spend on lawyers.
What Google is or isn't banned from doing depends on how the end "Google" looks. The pending state AG charges likely will cover a lot more of those details. The DOJ thing was known to have been rushed, they wanted it filed this past summer, but this week probably was the last possible window prior to the election. Ironically while the DOJ is now accused of rushing this case because of White House pressure, the Democrat State AGs are saying there actually should be more charges against Google, not less.
That doesn't make things look better for Google, it makes them much worse than we've seen so far. Google today certainly looks a lot different then during the Obama administration when a Google lobbyist or employee would visit the White House on average once a week. What happened there is a mystery to me.
There are multiple possible outcomes here. Who knows when anything will happen, but, my guess is some combination of these things, but not all together -
- Split the search ad business from search engine
- Divest Chrome/Android from Alphabet
- Force them in to some transparent search ad exchange arrangement, meaning not just advertisers but other search engines
Whatever the outcome here, Microsoft is probably the biggest winner. Facebook wins in terms of any incremental ad dollars they gain from Google advertisers. Amazon is also positioned very well if they chose to take advantage of it.
Apple is probably in the worst shape next to Google, as it is estimated 15%-20% of their profits come from the Google arrangement. Combined with changes to Apple's tax rates globally, I could see this chopping Apple's value in half. If 50% of Google's US search traffic is coming from Apple, and half of the users who actually click on ads and buy stuff never leave the default search, the outcome for Alphabet's finances is really, really bad.
This matters a lot. There are users who install adblockers and will directly navigate to google.com no matter what. Those users are worthless to Google. The users that matter are the ones who don't change the default search, possibly click ads for every single search they do that has ads for the top results, and those users do buy things after clicking the ads. If Google lost half of those users, do the math.
Google/Alphabet's cash cow is paid search ads. Anything that sticks a wrench in this business model will bring an end to their golden age of doing a bunch of stuff that loses money while riding a tsunami of background cash flow. If they are split up, meaning Search, Ads, and Youtube, that probably is the best $ outcome for shareholders longer term, and Alphabet's ultra wealthy employees probably still get sick stock options.
FF usage share is already down to 10% and cash flow problematic, Mozilla doesn't have the luxury of sitting around hoping Bing will be in a position to put up larger sums of money at a nebulous point in the future while Google isn't allowed to now.
Since the collapse of Mozilla would leave Chrome with effectively all of the browser market and leave Google in a much worse position with respect to anti-trust / anti-competitiveness investigations, Microsoft has zero reason to rescue Mozilla.
I wonder if Firefox partnering with Duck Duck Go instead would be feasible, or even a net positive for users and developers. I'll admit to partly liking this idea just for the Game of Thrones spiteful backstab energy.
Maybe people should be able to donate directly to Firefox development and not to some controlling org that decides to "invest" the money as it sees fit. But that would be too honest and easy. Gotta have a way to siphon off lots of money for your own bloated salary and the best way to do that is to be between donation and destination.
I'm not sure why the Firefox people haven't split from Mozilla to rectify this. What's keeping them there? Didn't Thunderbird devs split? What am I missing?
This whole things just seems so silly to address. Instead of making it the default search engine simply have a search engine chooser at install. Google is "preferred" (which they still pay for) but below that is a list that is searchable of all other search engines to choose.
It's unsettling how they try to make themselves look like the little guy fighting for justice... They get over $400 million revenue per year, much of it from Google. They're part of the problem. They're gatekeepers.
Also, their funding initiatives to change the web are total BS. They don't want to change anything. They will only fund projects that reinforce the established order and help to lock out the competition. They like things just as they are. They have no idea what it's like to actually be the little guy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 didn't notice much/any speed improvement either. Losing the tab queue sucked and certain links now force open the youtube app rather than in Firefox. The url bar at the bottom is nice, but they released it without the ability to also reverse the order of results.
I think if the new version had just one killer feature it would have been received much more kindly but for many it's a straight downgrade in terms of experience. Personally I think it's crazy that they still don't have working chromecast support.
I use it because the alternative is Chrome. But I'm also very annoyed about the update (forced, like every one is on mobile) and I'm avoiding to use a browser at all on my phone because the experience is so bad.
Before the update, mobile Firefox was so slow for me that using Chrome with no adblocker was a better experience. Now their speeds are about the same. The update was a massive improvement.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's not true! You can get involved as an individual contributor and become a part of the web standards community. There's even a contribution guide: https://wpc.guide/
> 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":
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.
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.
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.
But a tiny part of your search-engine, social-network, app, or whatever is about the translations of the UI. The largest part is about how social constructs, ideals, workflows, and so forth fit. An Indian user might be able to read the screens on your app just fine, but might still be left out due to cultural issues.
In the EU this often becomes very clear when your startup "expands to Belgium" for example. It is not just about translating the app in Dutch and French; the way people interact, do business, communicate; the problems people have, the problems they dont have, and so forth are very different.
This is a pet-peeve of mine: we are all pushed in an American Template due to the prevalence of Silicon Valley "dictated" norms. When I was young, nudity on television in my country was normal. A local movie would have to have at least two naked tits. Today our media has become prude; no more tits on TV on prime-time; something that creeps onto us as "collatoral damage" of using primarily US media platforms.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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')
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
I'm really struggling to find a charitable way to interpret this post, especially in light of other recent Mozilla moves. Are they really arguing that Google's near monopoly is good for... Privacy? Users? The internet?
This really seems like a shameless shill post driven by the same management that thinks that laying off most of their browser developers is the right way forward for Firefox.
Their statement was pretty straightforwards, IMO. The argument is that Mozilla is one of the smaller, independent companies that Google competes with, and that the DoJ should be careful about not hurting said small, independent companies (namely Mozilla) in the process of their anti-trust action.
Google does not compete with Mozilla. Chrome is a loss leader that allows Google to ensure that their products have access to the views they need, and by paying Mozilla a critical share of their operating budget they ensure that the risk of an upstart to their loss leader is minimal.
Alternatively: making a browser means you can choose the default search engine, and this is valuable. Google pays Firefox ~$450M for this, for ~9% of desktop traffic. [1] Chrome is ~70% of desktop traffic [1] and so you could extrapolate it at ~$3.5B.
How exactly do they want to proceed then? The only way now not to hurt Mozilla is to stop the lawsuit completely. Any other action will hurt Mozilla because they are connected by an oxygen tube to the Google. And Mozilla got into this situation completely voluntarily and according to the plan.
They're not arguing that Google's monopoly is good, I think, but just to take note that that's currently also the only thing that pays for some resistance to the monopoly.
Haha. I respect Mozilla but this was totally expected reaction - since lawsuit directly touches on the fact that Google "bribes" it's way to the monopoly, then of course Mozilla will be affected. So they cry "do anything but only if it won't affect our Google money".
And the phrase "look at the ecosystem in its entirety" means "do nothing". IT people should know this better than anyone - waiting for the perfect solution with zero drawbacks mean never getting that solution at all.
I thought this was a thoughtful and reasoned reaction. They didn't take a stance apart from asking for action to think through consequences.
Mozilla is (1) 100% dependent on Google for it's survival (2) competing with Google in the browser space, with unfair tactics by Google (3) Critical to the free Internet.
That places them in a tough position.
I suspect if they didn't have unfair competition from Chrome, they could have more marketshare, and ultimately, more revenue from Bing/DDG/etc. (perhaps at lower per-user prices).
Let's imagine you have a barrel with a burning person inside and a barrel on top with a water. You can a) watch person to burn, or pull a lever and empty a water barrel on it, and risk that person will drown. Then someone cries "wait, you have to think it through so that there will be definitely no negative outcome!", knowing full well that waiting = burning.
This may be not the best comparison, but I think it is close enough. Mozilla spent decades to put themselves into a corner but voluntarily getting 100% dependent on a money coming from a shady entity, hoping that said shady entity would exist forever. Now regulator came to that entity and in the process all symbionts will suffer, and Mozilla the most because they are completely dependent. And now they ask to stop and think.
Ok, we are thinking - do what exactly? What does Mozilla seriously expect? Any action except for doing nothing will hurt them. Or do they expect that DoJ will conjure "free" hundreds of millions to compensate Google feed?
tl;dr
Mozilla ask us to "think about consequences". Ok, we did. Now what?
Breaking up Google, for example, would help, not hurt Mozilla. It would eliminate monopolistic nonsense around Chrome, while not removing incentives for Google Search to pay Mozilla.
A lot of intermediate approaches -- such as firewalling business units at Google -- would achieve similar effects.
I didn't read this as "do nothing." I read this as "think through consequences."
That will be determined by DoJ, I hope. Personally I see way too many ultra rich corporation's behaviors get a pass just because they strictly don't equal definition of a "bribe". Or how 95% of the whole word market is not a "monopoly" because "look, there is that 2% competitor, free market works".
Exactly. All sorts of BD deals get caught up in this line of thinking. Basically it's anti-competitive when there's already a monopoly and you get money for it? "Give your users a worse experience because they can't pay us, and we need the money."
A mixed blessing only if antitrust action doesn't target the browser monopoly. If they do something to constrain Chrome, this could be a boon to Mozilla.
It doesn't matter how constrained Chrome becomes if Mozilla can't pay any developers. Hence Mozilla's reaction being one focusing on "collateral damage" and "Unintended harm".
to be fair while i have some sympathy with the general issue of having to go up against Google in the browser market, Mozilla should have long done something to diversify their income.
On that very page they mention they have a long history of innovative products, but apart from the browser they don't really have anything that seems to generate significant revenue, with almost ~750 employees and a pretty huge budget.
If they do something to Chrome, Google no longer has a reason to write checks to Mozilla. Those fat checks are written in part to keep anti-trust regulators off their backs.
A constrained Chrome be good for Mozilla.org, as an open source effort, but devastating for Mozilla.com because they would no longer have the vast funds to pay millions to executives.
I agree, it would be more upfront to link to their annual report which gives an idea of just how much they depend on the search engine deal for revenue.
Where is the 2019 report? When I tried to change the url to 2019 I got a 404, and funnily enough, when I just remove the year from the url, expecting it to go to the latest, it instead redirects to 2017... a bit humorous and sad for a huge a bastion of the internet.
That said, here is the relevant part from your link:
" Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.)
In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $542 million in CY 2017. 2017 was an outlier, due in part to changes in the search revenue deal that was negotiated that year. Despite the year-over-year change, Mozilla remains in a strong financial position with cash reserves to support continued innovation, partnerships and diversification of the Firefox product lines to fuel its organizational mission.
A portion of search revenue combined with grants and donations is used to fuel the advocacy and movement building work of the Mozilla Foundation and its broad network of supporters of Mozilla’s mission. "
Mozilla would survive the transition. Reduced, circumscribed but survive. Because even post regulatory breakup some entities would want search, and would pay Mozilla for search placement.
The time to release Firefox 92 from Firefox 91 might be a lot longer than from 81 to 82, and be, essentially boring. Is that actually a tragedy? I would argue, no.
I've been wondering if Mozilla ends up owning Chromium eventually.
It would make sense... it's the part of Google's business that they'd be most likely to be okay parting with (after all, it's open source), they wouldn't lose much (Mozilla would still keep Google as the default search engine), and they could get regulators off their backs.
Plus, Google and Mozilla have a longstanding relationship – the early offices were provided by Google and for a long time, every Mozilla employee had a Google badge. The Chrome and Mozilla teams like each other.
The only way that makes sense is if you kill off Gecko (or, more bizarrely, Blink/Chromium). which cuts the number of browser vendors down to a very lopsided 2. And you end up with a very complicated, extremely essential piece of modern computer infrastructure reliant on a single underfunded organization--which is the sort of situation that resulted in the OpenSSL failures that led to Heartbleed.
Right now, a ton of vendors spend a lot of time on negotiating standards, which are written in English. And then that English is translated into code. And at this point, it's really just for the sake of Gecko – every other major player just uses a derivative of Webkit.
So, if you had Mozilla take stewardship over Blink, you wouldn't really need a "standard" anymore. Everyone could just use the same rendering engine, and the code itself would act as the "standard". Each vendor could then build their own chrome around it.
Instead of everyone trying to implement the same stuff the same exact way in multiple rendering engines, forces could be combined.
The latter part of your statement isn’t true. Yes, some people formerly in charge of security response were unfortunately laid off, however that is not indicative of that entire team nor its capabilities.
I assume that the idea is to "break apart" the company voluntarily--in a way that doesn't affect overall profits that much--before the US government breaks apart the company by force (through anti-monopoly laws), where Google would have less say in what the end results would look like.
Not gonna listen to an organization regarding political matters in the name of fairness and competition when they have a past of firing employees over their personal political matters that do not interfere with the organization. In my book they have nothing to say unless it's purely about their product.
"Small and independent companies such as Mozilla thrive by innovating, disrupting and providing users with industry leading features and services in areas like search."
>disrupting
"drastically alter or destroy the structure of."
Every single tech pitch, article, blog, shart of tech thought includes disrupting of the status quo or competition. So this should be right up your alley no Mozilla, or is it not as fun being on the disrupted side?
It seems reasonable to argue that fighting Google's browser monopoly justifies Mozilla helping enable the search monopoly for limited periods of time through default search agreements.
Or you could reasonably argue that the default search payments Mozilla takes are way less harmful to competitors than other things Google does, like scraping data from third party sites and presenting it above search results.
I'm not sure if I agree, but you could definitely argue these things.
Interestingly, Mozilla never comes right out and makes these arguments in its blog post. I guess maybe they imply them. I honestly am not sure if this is because any statement on this has to be heavily vetted by lawyers, or if, as some people will surely suggest, they are afraid of offending Google. (I don't really think they are? But maybe I'm wrong....)
Mozilla has been on life support from Google since at least 2005. For years Google paid Mozilla $1 for every Firefox download in an attempt to break Internet Explorer dominance. That Mozilla would defend Google while being almost completely funded by Google for nearly two decades is.. well.. obvious.
That Mozilla needs Google's money is obvious, that Mozilla is beholden to Google because they need that money to survive is obvious, and this is exactly why we need antitrust intervention from government when large corporations are able to control not only their own resources, but remake entire industries to serve their own interests.
If I were Mozilla, I'd probably be very careful in my wording, even though Google actually does have an interest in keeping Mozilla and Firefox around to be token competition and point at legislators they don't actually have a complete monopoly on everything web because... hey, there is at least one other major browser out there with a wholly different codebase from ours!
There are currently 220 million Firefox users[1]. If 10% of those paid $2 per month, it would be more than $500 million per year. Their Google deal is worth about $400 million in good years.
I imagine it would be fewer than 10%, but even the low single digits would be enough to run a slimmed-down company focused on Firefox alone.
Wrong Mozilla. Mozilla Corporation is developing Firefox (and giving its profits to the parent entity, Mozilla Foundation), the foundation isn't paying for Firefox development.
Yeah, AFAIK the donations all go to other causes. I could not find anything in writing regarding this on their site but this was explained to me on their IRC channel.
It has been confirmed many times that exactly zero of funds donated to the Mozilla Foundation go to Firefox, which is developed by the Mozilla Corporation.
Sure, that's not how we fix Big Tech. Because everything Big must not be privately held. At least all that constitutes modern critical infrastructure must be precisely and transparently planned for public good.
Apologies for being off-topic, but would you be willing to email me at hn@ycombinator.com? I have a question based on an interesting comment you posted in a past thread.
The latest update to Firefox featured a very prominent suggestion to use Mozilla VPN. It seems like a focus on privacy is their reaction. Keeping your data away from companies like Google is the suggestion.
Firefox mobile recently broke addon compatibility in an devastating way; notably, in this context, breaking addons that remove utm trackers and redirect amp to html.
From the title I thought this was going to be an xkcd cartoon with a bunch of stick figures celebrating — but this works too. I’ve watched Chrome take over through the years - it hasn’t become the new IE yet, it doesn’t have the stagnation and compliance issues that IE had - but has been concerning that it’s become one of two engines and that Google has been whittling away privacy features in general and making its apps immune to cache clears and data wipes.
From the title, I thought this was "How does Mozilla feel about the United States, as compared to how Google feels about it" and just sort of tucked it away in the "lolwut" corner of my mind until I saw the "U.S. vs. Google" headline.
.png){kind=link}
Or in other words ... “We need Google’s money” ... Firefox