> The fight is not illusory, and while Firefox may depend on advertising for financial reasons (although I'm not sure how much it currently is), it is not fundamental to its existence
95% of Mozilla's 2018 revenue were generated by Royalties [0], of which 91% are generated by search engine providers. That's a whopping $391 million USD - it will be pretty difficult to fill this gap if Google pulls the plug.
It might be difficult but how is that in any way relevant?
Mozilla's behavior is consistent. Except for a few mistakes that were in my opinion minor, they proved trustworthy repeatedly.
Also let's get the facts straight... all major browsers today are financed from ads, all of them, including Edge, including Safari, including Brave discussed here, all of them.
The ones that aren't financed by ads are simply leaching off the work of others. Of course Brave is a leech while generating revenue from ads too.
Factually untrue. Google is paying Apple billions of dollars ($9 billion in 2018, $12 billion in 2019) to remain the default search engine in Safari.
AFAIK Apple is getting more money from Google than Mozilla does :)
You could say that if this deal went south, then Apple would keep funding Safari, however given they receive a ton of money right now, yes Safari is funded by ads and it goes without saying that they won't do anything to jeopardize those billions of dollars they are getting.
There isn't a single browser right now whose development isn't funded by ads.
Some organizational and individual users have paid for features.
The source code is relatively small, compile time is relatively small. Making small, privacy-focused changes is easy if one is comfortable with C.
One does not use a browser like this for financial or other important transactions. It can be used to do recreational, non-commercial web reading, such as news or other sites one finds posted on HN. One uses major ad-funded browsers like Chrome or Safari for internet banking or e-commerce.
I suppose, but by that logic any web browser is funded by ads unless it either:
1) Doesn't set any default search engine
2) Leaves a great deal of money on the table for no reason whatsoever
Option 2 is stupid, so it's no surprise none of the browsers do this.
Option 1 is a bad user experience regardless of finances. When users type stuff into the search bar, they expect results to come up. You could have a search engine ballot on first startup, but a subset of very-non-technical users is going to be confused by the dialog; there's no good reason to not set a default.
Option 2 isn't stupid, because once you take that money you are beholden to a contract, which comes with both explicit and implicit clauses.
For example Apple would never implement ad blocking by default in Google's Search, not as long as they keep getting payed with _billions of dollars_.
And would Apple even bother to keep improving Safari if they weren't earning so much money from it? Given what happened to IExplorer back in the day, when Microsoft dropped the ball on its development after version 5, I'm not so sure.
Also Safari's content blockers are really easy to circumvent by anti-ad-blocking tech. Doesn't hold a candle to uBlock Origin, which isn't possible to implement on top of Safari. And the available content blockers are so bad many people don't even bother. Fact is Safari is a favorite for ads companies and publishers.
Yes, all browsers are funded by ads, that was the point.
95% of Mozilla's 2018 revenue were generated by Royalties [0], of which 91% are generated by search engine providers. That's a whopping $391 million USD - it will be pretty difficult to fill this gap if Google pulls the plug.
[0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...