Google is the main funder of Mozilla via search royalties and direct funding. It's easily changed...but in reality Mozilla suffers if you do change the default because they lose royalties. It's hard to be a good competitors if your livelihood depends on people staying with your competitor's services.
A significant fraction of Mozilla's funding comes from google paying to make google the default. I am not sure what the dollar value of this agreement was, but it was a sizable fraction of a billion dollars a year last I checked.
Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google
Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.
I'm sure it would hurt Mozilla more than Google if Google stopped paying to be the default search provider. I guess indirectly Mozilla is supported by Google Ads.
While Mozilla seems to be a large open source/web advocate, I always have a hard time with the fact that, as an organization, most of their revenue comes directly from Google buying the top spot in default search engines.
I think the difference is that Google is a superior search engine, so in a world where technology trumps money it would be the default.* Of course, abiding by that would kill Mozilla's bargaining position, and Mozilla losing funding would suck for everyone, but...
* or DuckDuckGo (inferior but privacy conscious), but good luck with them funding Mozilla
This is totally incorrect. The majority of Mozilla's current funding comes from a deal with Google to make them the default search engine in Firefox. Google pays for this because search traffic is valuable.
It's worth noting that while Mozilla is a nonprofit organization, it certainly retains a huge conflict of interest: It's primary financial sponsor is still Google.
If Firefox was solely aligned with protecting their users, the default search would be DuckDuckGo, not Google, and it would fully block Google Analytics, Fonts, and AdSense right out of the box.
Mozilla is a non-profit that owns a for-profit corporation which makes Firefox. And their funding largely comes from Google paying them to keep Google as the default search.
There's not a mission-level conflict-of-interest, but there's a practical one. Until they can somehow be funded directly by users, Firefox will have this tension of "don't piss off Google or other referral partners, even if that means going against the users' interests". They won't serve the users well by losing all their funding and then dying.
This situation is why Firefox and Mozilla aren't just everything they could be in terms of completely aligned with users.
Mozilla makes Google the default search engine in Firefox because they're paid to. What's your point? Without money, the biggest projects would struggle to stay afloat.
Good point. Mozilla also received (still receives?) a substantial amount of money from Google, no doubt that achieves similar goals -- prop up a competitor -- although it also helps Google make their search engine the default for Firefox users.
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