Technology

the duck is always getting better, while the goog is always getting shittier

I mean, they could. They have been cutting costs in the wrong areas, though - those harder to replace if exgoogled. There's plenty of unnecessary fat in Mozilla as an organization. They have been doing lots of expensive (in terms of developer and testing resources) unneeded crap (apparently to support the appearance of relevancy, which is different from relevancy itself), they also don't need that many management people.

Let's please remember how Mozilla started. Yes, a browser back then and a browser now are two completely different things, but the imbalance in resources has always been there. It's just that now they are spreading resources where they shouldn't, to imitate Chrome in things secondary to a browser itself. They don't have the resources for that even with Google, and of course they won't otherwise.

Also supporting something like XULRunner or in general olden times Gecko would help, so that people could use FF's engine like they still do with Chromium and Webkit. That would increase the amount of people contributing in various ways.

That's how I see it, my humble opinion and all that.

It's pretty much their only revenue stream, considering they give all the software away and don't have ads in the browser.

The biggest risk for Google would be for Apple to enter the search market. It’s not hard, as proven by smaller players like DuckDuckGo, but it’s risky enough that Apple takes the 20B and consider it a good deal.

Have you tried Kagi? The search results seems to be a lot better than Google. I'm able to find what I need using search terms that would only returns spammy e-commerce results on Google. I'm on a trial account but so far I'm impressed and might consider getting a paid family subscription if my wife also like it.

I saw it more as testifying about why they did what they did

Ultimately the message is still 'we had to use Google to survive, they have that much control over the space'

I'm of two minds. I use Firefox for privacy reasons and don't use Google if I can avoid it, but I have to admit that chrome was leagues better than other popular browsers at the time. It's no accident that they ran away with the market share even when IE was on everyone's computer by default.

Now they've gotten huge and their search engine has gone to shit. So it goes with infinite growth. I'm with Firefox for now, but I've learned the hard way not to totally trust any piece of software.

Honestly, the association with Yahoo just makes the platform look like a joke. Like, the first time you do a search and it pops up as Yahoo your first instinct is thinking you're using the wrong thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's because their stock data and viewing is pretty mature and a lot of people would go for that alone.