Baker’s testimony shows that Mozilla depends so much on its deal with Google for revenue that “the biggest loser of a DOJ win in the Google case would be Mozilla.”
Another interesting comment Mozilla’s takeaway from the experiment was that Firefox "users made it clear that they look for and want and expect Google.”
that’s not really Mozilla’s fault, users are too locked into Google and that’s ultimately Google’s fault.
Although I don’t like at all that Mozilla is funded by Google and testified in their favor.
I’m of two minds. I use Firefox for privacy reasons and don’t use Google if I can avoid it, but I have to admit that chrome was leagues better than other popular browsers at the time. It’s no accident that they ran away with the market share even when IE was on everyone’s computer by default.
Now they’ve gotten huge and their search engine has gone to shit. So it goes with infinite growth. I’m with Firefox for now, but I’ve learned the hard way not to totally trust any piece of software.
You can export EVERYTHING, Forward email, and have alternatives for every thing. It’s incredibly easy to move away from Google.
It’s a choice. There is no lock in.
oh definitely. I haven’t used a Google service in 5 years. But Google’s lock in is not forced, it’s one that relies on people tech illiteracy, comfort and not knowing better.
I’m surpsied (but obviously shouldn’t be) that that many potential users would instantly bounce off Firefox instead of changing the default search engine.
Honestly, the association with Yahoo just makes the platform look like a joke. Like, the first time you do a search and it pops up as Yahoo your first instinct is thinking you’re using the wrong thing.
Im also not convinced. If it were a DDG default it would just make the browser better.
To be clear, I’m not even using DDG as my main search.
DDG is just Bing on the backend. Why is the megacorp Microsoft preferable to the megacorp Google?
I was under the impression that DDG is pretty private and while underlying search is Bing, bing can’t track the searches to individuals
That’s not really true. It uses multiple sources, including their own search engine, to give results. Basically the only thing they don’t include is Google. In practice Bing often produces the majority of the results, but it’s not “just Bing on the backend”. I mean, DDG is older than Bing after all, so it would be a little weird if they didn’t have their own search engine.
Even if it was just a frontend for Bing that wouldn’t really be a bad thing. Ecosia is, and that’s a pretty good search engine. Being one of millions of users all privately receiving the same anonymized results already makes Bing much less problematic.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Terms of that deal required that if it were nullified, Verizon had to pay either “the full length of the contract, or alternately, just the difference between Yahoo’s $375 million and whatever Mozilla got out of a new partner,” ComputerWorld reported.
On top of revenue-sharing with Google, that payment drove up Mozilla’s revenue, which in 2019 reflected “an 84 percent year-over-year increase” that was “easily the most the open source developer has booked in a single year, beating the existing record by more than a quarter of billion dollars,” ComputerWorld reported.
Perhaps that bonus payment made switching back to Google even more attractive at a time when Baker told the court she “felt strongly that Yahoo was not delivering the search experience we needed and had contracted for.”
This user decline wasn’t entirely due to the Yahoo deal, Baker said, but Mozilla’s takeaway from the experiment was that Firefox "users made it clear that they look for and want and expect Google.” Meanwhile, Google was motivated to renew its Mozilla partnership, as court documents show that Google lost search ad revenue while Yahoo’s deal with Firefox was in place.
Baker did not clarify how much Google pays for that deal today, only vaguely estimating that it’s “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually, Bloomberg reported.
According to Dyall’s thread, Baker also testified that she thought Mozilla might be forced into a “death spiral” if it is stuck partnering with Microsoft for search as an outcome of the trial.
The original article contains 1,008 words, the summary contains 247 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
People who use Firefox probably also have some gripes against Google’s work, but I sure as fuck don’t want anything to do with Yahoo
I’m fine with Firefox getting paid for the 2nd step of the install being changing the default search to DDG.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Even when they have such a catchy jingle?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Really? All this over something that is very easily modified by the user?
Most people really don’t care what browser or search engine they use as long as it gets the job done. I wouldn’t call it lazy or stupid, it’s just the reality of humans who have to pick and choose what they spend energy on. Yahoo search has been around a few years longer than Google and it sucked (and still sucks), that’s why people decided it was worth going elsewhere. If you’re going to try and wrench people out of their comfort zones, you’ve gotta put on a better first impression.
Amazing that people would run away over that. People really are Luddites.
Luddites didn’t oppose the technology itself, but the distribution of the profits it brought and were fighting for workers’ rights.
