The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.
In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.
The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.
"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”
May I be frank? I suspect that, in the long run, Mozilla not getting this money will actually benefit Firefox. Sure, so exec will get pissed as they won’t get 5.6 million dollars a year, and Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later; but I think that they’ll focus better on the browser this way. Specially because whoever is paying the dinner is the one picking the dish, and with a higher proportion of their effective income coming from donations, what users want will stop being so neglected.
Just my two cents.
WTF‽
I totally agree.
Frankly, Mozilla should be embarrassed to have released this statement.
It’s basically ‘Please don’t harm our competitor for corruptly bribing rivals! We like those bribes very much!’
Nah, the features nobody asked for will just be limited to ones that will provide a revenue stream.
However once they lose the googlebux, a meaningful part of the revenue stream will be donations. And features implemented because of donators asking for them are, typically, things that we users desire.
Donations are not sustainable. Many open-source projects tried them, and the only thing they can cover are server costs or conferences, developers are still working for free on their own time.
Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business
Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets – roughly half a billion dollars of which was in “cash and cash equivalents” – in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
Y’know, you’re right & that’s wild. I guess I should have known, but didn’t assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org
I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.
The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.
To my knowledge they don’t though, Chrome has had the overall market share for years. Most of the time them is a little project is tailing behind Chrome, because anything that they add to Chrome if the other browsers didn’t follow suit they were left in the dust. I haven’t seen the Mozilla project as a Trailblazer in years
Perhaps.
Worst hypothesis the company gets completely bankrupt, but someone takes up the torch.
The thing is it’s never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it’s bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn’t even close, despite relying on Apple’s webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)
If Google is the only thing holding up the non-Apple web browsers, maybe then this will lead to scaling down the insane scope of the web standards so it becomes reasonable to implement and maintain a browser for non-megacorps.
Wishful thinking, but hey.
Bigger scope than a kernel? That’s a bold statement.
Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that’s a different layer that the kernel historically didn’t worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there’s shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management… A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS
The comment that was here was a bit rude, and I don’t like that. Well others didn’t either, but that just reminds me that being kind is possible while disagreeing. So I abridge to this.
I’m surprised by this take and personally feel the algorithmic density of the kernel and scope of work with hardware abstractions make it much more complex than a browser with access to system calls. But maybe that is just a crazy old man that isn’t thinking straight.
Not sure it’s that bold even. Chrome has approx. 10% more lines of code than Linux, and even for Linux 60% is just drivers.
Flawed metric, sure, but it at least shows that they’re probably similar in complexity.
Hopefully, yes.