this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Mozilla is such a disorganized company. Why wouldn't they find another search engine deal besides Google? It's possible that they could find another deal somewhere, but it seems to me that they don't care — more like they're a controlled competitor. I'm not surprised considering they scrapped their wording regarding privacy, which leads to a lot of ambiguities.
Google overpays quite a bit so they have a viable competitor to point to for chrome. If the payment tracked FF's usage numbers it would be way lower now. It makes no financial sense for any other search engine to pay that much.
That's assuming they could even afford it. Most can't
Not to mention a lot of companies are seeing search as a dead end product…
The problem with Mozilla is that their route back to greatness would require consolidation that cannot and will not happen due to lack of trust and diverging goals.
Mozilla + Proton + maybe a third party like Kagi for search (though it is api based) as separate but federated organizations is the only rational option for them ever reclaiming what Firefox used to be.
It feels like the world is too far gone for this to ever happen. Cynicism, pervasive internet and surveillance culture, and apathy just don’t make the world feel like it could go any direction people want anymore. Feels like we know the track for this and any new corporation in tech and the uber etc were the last of the unicorns where we actually bought into tech improving our lives.
/rant
I completely disagree; any capital available to Mozilla would be funneled into all the wrong places. Proton would go bankrupt for the sake of Mozilla's AI and CEO bonuses.
Firefox should split from Mozilla like Thunderbird did, and only then consider partnering with another project. Actually, a partnership between Firefox and Thunderbird would be great.
Based on nothing, I too am going to assume they haven't tried.