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Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

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Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#111

Yes, and also continued to lose market share!* I wish they would stop changing the user interface so frequently. * https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp

I beg to differ, I wish they would not remove the previous interface when introducing a new one and offer the user the freedom to choose the one she prefers. This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox: depriving the user of the freedom to choose and forcing change upon them. This constant interface change is affecting many of the older people for whom I provide technical support. They all relied on class…

You're the type of user I learned to avoid once I started shipping software.

You think in a major internal overhaul that the old interface is just a matter of building a quick "[ ] Old, [X] New" radio button dialog.

And then you make a major, disproportional stink like how you've written 20 comments in this submission. Zero awareness through and through, and it's just not worth engaging with you beyond saying "well, I don't think the product is for you." -- A conclusion you seem uninterested in figuring out yourself.

I don't think you have the slightest clue about how hard it is to just keep old crap around when you're trying to evolve software. Else you'd know that either (A) it's not worth it or (B) the ship is simply sailing in a direction that you don't care about, so there's no point whining on the internet.

At some point you need to leave the movie theater so that others can enjoy the show. Leaving 20 comments in this submission just shows that it's an emotional thing for you. Time to move on. It's just a web browser.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#112
post #109
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.

even if they don't have a explicit deal, they got search revenue sharing from google on those markets. not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

> not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

Safe search/browsing has always been local.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#113

I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla, but I am still grateful for the work they do. It's nice to see that they have such a big resource pool to work with, as they are one of the few groups that I think genuinely cares for it's users. It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

I think quite the opposite that they do not care for their users and blatantly disregard user feedback and users. From experience after having repeatedly told that I'm not significant/worthy enough for a variety of reasons for not using windows, not using gnome, not using pulseaudio, working with older people who have a hard time dealing with computers, having a use for disabling javascript, disabling spying telemetr…

Why would you expect otherwise? If you're asking for some niche feature of course they'll blow you off. It isn't worth their resources developing features which only a small niche cares about.

Firefox is open source, so you could always put your money where your mouth is and write your own fork with the features you want if neither ff nor any of the other forks work for you.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome needs at least some kind of a fragment of competition to keep them from stagnating. Lord knows neither of the other two (Safari and Edge) are even close enough to threaten.

I don't think stagnating is the risk with Chrome; I think Chrome running too far ahead and shipping things with only high-level buy-in from vendors (but no review of detail, or any plan to implement soon) is a much bigger risk.

Maybe it's me having too high expectations with the amount of stuff Mozilla has been lining up and is releasing right now all within a short timeframe, but to me, it kind of already feels like Chrome is stagnating.

There's for example a handful of glaring issues that they just don't seem to care to fix:

- Every other month you hear of yet another Chrome extension stealing user data, impersonating another extension etc.

- I haven't been keeping up with it, but I don't think they ever bothered to fix the autofill phishing flaw that keeps on being posted here every so often [1].

- Their extension API is missing a few chunks that make it impossible to port NoScript and make ad blocking less effective.

- Chrome for Android still doesn't support extensions at all.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#115

I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla, but I am still grateful for the work they do. It's nice to see that they have such a big resource pool to work with, as they are one of the few groups that I think genuinely cares for it's users. It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

> It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living. ...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it

It's easy to support Mozilla if you are not a mega-corp https://donate.mozilla.org/

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox Looking at this page, you seem to have more than one ...

Right now there are 81 comments in this thread and bigbugbag has written 18 of them.

I know that people can be salty about open-source projects, because you sort of feel like you can get involved and they're supposed to be the good guys and then you notice that billions of other people just as well want to get involved, or at least be considered, and that your opinion is in the minority and they can't make the impossible possible.

But man, how can be you this persistently salty about it? Even just writing all of these comments must have taken at least half an hour.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#118

Yes, and also continued to lose market share!* I wish they would stop changing the user interface so frequently. * https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp

W3Schools isn't a terribly reliable source for market share, since they only measure their visitors, which is primarily webdevs. And Mozilla offers a competing service, MDN, so webdevs primarily using Firefox probably also have a preference for MDN.

Besides that, they don't separate between desktop and mobile. Marketshare on mobile hardly reflects user opinions, if this is what you were trying to imply.

Other sources, like NetMarketshare, show rising numbers on the desktop.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#119
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it is a bug. It works for search engines shipped with Firefox (such as DuckSuckGo) but not for others (such as StartPage of Qwant). See https://twitter.com/gchampeau/status/938757076213518336

It sounds like Mozilla just wants to keep users confined to a pre-approved list of search engines. Are these also business partners with Mozilla, like Google? Here are some other HTTPS-enabled search engines to test. If I am not mistaken all have been mentioned on HN in the past. https://wiby.me https://gigablast.com https://mojeek.com https://unbubble.eu https://ecosia.org https://searx.me https://symbolhound.com ht…

It looks like a mistake, not malice.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? It certainly continues to raise the cost to Google for the search traffic provided by Firefox. When Firefox switched to Firefox it boosted Yahoo!'s organic share of search [1], which if it held up at the 2% speculated would represent about (16.8B * 2%) 336M searches in Feb '17 [2] attributable to the Mozilla deal. One would need to work backward from the revenue per thousand (RPM) to see what sort of ROI that…

My handwave for the previous Google deal was that Mozilla was getting paid about 10% of the money Google made from Firefox searches. There's a lot of money there.

How that amount is calculated and how transparent it is (to Mozilla or similar partners)?
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