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Mozilla Reponds - We Call the Shots, Not Google.

Posted by Zonk on from the two-great-tastes-fight-it-out dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Recent articles in the New York Times and at CNET have highlighted the growing concern that Google holds significant power and influence over Firefox's development. In an interview published today, Mozilla's technology strategist Mike Shaver did his best to proclaim Mozilla's independence. Yes, Google pays Mozilla $56 million per year, Google is the default search engine, and supplier of many of the browser's features (anti-phishing, anti-malware, incorrect URL resolution). Shaver insists that in spite of these ties, Mozilla still calls the shots over Firefox's development."

2 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I was like that too by griffjon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is all well and good; but look at Flock, which is Firefox + lots of web 2.0 integration, and very Yahoo-centric. No matter how much moolah Google pours into the Mozilla foundation, at the end of the day, it's still providing crunchy, wholesome GPL'ed software. If Google suddenly turns evil; the code still belongs to the community and if Mozilla won't cut the relationship, someone can fork a version out and cut out the Google-centric features.

    A good bit of caution is wise, but let's not look a $56 million/year gift to the OSS community in the mouth overmuch.

    --
    Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
  2. Re:watch the pretty birdie by asa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Now, the question is: if Yahoo, Altavisa, Microsoft, Excite,
    > or Ask (was Teoma), or anyone else for that matter, offers
    > similar services to Firefox for free- will they be allowed
    > to get their foot in the door (via a GOOD user interface to
    > allow selection- modifying about:config params doesn't count)
    > or bundled in (ie, included in the official distribution)?

    I take it you've never used Firefox. We include other search services. We've even defaulted to other search services in some geographic locales. The interface for switching among the included services is super easy and even adding services that are not included are easy to add with a click or two (and there are over 13,000 of them available at mycroft.mozdev.org)

    Not only that, any of these companies could (and some do) distribute a custom version of Firefox with their features as the default.

    - A