If Google stopped supporting Firefox today, Bing would still pay to be the default engine. If bing does not pay, Yandex would do.
My point here is Firefox still has 2.71% market share, a lot of search engines operators would pay Firefox good money to be their default engine.
The default search revenue stream is guaranteed as long as they have good amount of users.
But they actively choose to ruin it.
If Google pulled out, Bing would lowball Mozilla. Yandex are untouchable given that they’re Russian and so there’s not much left.
But that’s all besides the point, removing one dependency to replace it with another doesn’t make sense, people have been clamouring for Mozilla to become self sustainable and they’re attempting to do that. The fact that people want some crazy utopia where Mozilla just replace Google’s money with donations is the problem. Though, I personally think that we as users, should be lobbying our governments and advocating for more investment in open source alternatives such as Mozilla.
Mozilla was surprisingly close to having its own search engine, if you count its partnership with Ghostery several years back. But Brave, a company with presumably fewer resources, bought it out.
But Brave isn’t maintaining a rendering engine, so they’re able to spend on different things.
How much do you think Tailcat cost Brave? I know Mozilla must spend more money doing legitimate browser development, but they also spend a whole lot of money doing entirely unrelated things.
If it was less than $65 million, the amount of money Mozilla committed to AI and VC back in 2022, it could have been the money they purchased Tailcat with back in 2021.
Why are you bringing up AI? Brave, like all major browsers, has also invested in AI https://brave.com/leo/
You said Mozilla couldn’t purchase a search engine by implying they didn’t have enough free money, so I gave you an example of them spending $65 million. I just thought to myself, “isn’t it interesting that they missed an opportunity to directly monetize something,” and I shared it with you.
Then why don’t these search engines pay for being default?
There was a point where Yahoo paid to be the default in America, Google came back at the next opportunity and doubled (IIRC) their offer.
Because Google is already paying.
If anyone else offered to pay what Google pays Mozilla would drop Google like an hot potato (like they did Yahoo).
So I wouldn’t count on any mythical alternative unless Microsoft decides to waste more money promoting Bing (which wouldn’t really be an upgrade privacy wise).
This article is very revealing: Firefox: Illusion of choice
The only good thing that comes out of Firefox are forks like LibreWolf and Mull.
