this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.
Firefox does not.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
It does, actually. Just indirectly. Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google.
Well, that could mean that Chrome cares more about securely protecting the data because it's important to their income.
In much the same way that a bank robber securely protects the bag of money he stole.
mozilla gotta eat somehow
Firefox's sole income stream comes from them leading you into google search.
You can easily change that setting and it's one of the first most basic things I do with a new browser.
Well that's blatantly untrue. Or if it is true, it must certainly come as a shock to the Mozilla Foundation.
Well, the last time I've looked into their financials it looked something like this(numbers are not precise, Im talking from memory, no way im diving in it again): The mozilla corpiration, which is a for-profit subsidiary of mozilla foundation, earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 million dollars, with overwhelming majority of it coming from google, rest from yandex and baidu. They've spent most of it on firefox devs salaries and moved 13ish million to mozilla foundation, the NPO. The Mozilla Foundation itself earned somewhere around 13 mil, too, with about a mil coming from direct donations, rest from grants. They've spent it on evangelistic purposes, like on events in fuck knows where, stuff not directly related to firefox(vpn, vr stuff), grants to other projects (like rust), but mostly into managements pockets. None of that goes to firefox the browser.
As you can see, Mozilla is completely at a mercy of Google, especially after the deal with yandex fell through due to sactions. Otherwise, they don't have nearly enough resources to keep up as is, nevermind losing 95% of revenue. There is a glimmer of hope for them pivoting into mozilla ecosystem, like with VPN and password manager, but I havent heard about those in a while, and the competetion is stiff there, but Im keeping my hopes up.
That is undeniably important information, and I give you credit for supplying it. However, it should be noted that Firefox is entirely open source, and if the browser stepped out of line with the stated ethos of the foundation, it would immediately be noted most vociferously.