Mozilla Reponds - We Call the Shots, Not Google.

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."

Comments

I was like that too

[dedazo]

I used to say the same thing when I was a teenager and generally feeling rebellious. Unfortunately my dad had all the money at the time, so for anything that had to do with money he ended up calling the shots.

I'm not saying this is bad, and frankly I don't buy the "OMG Google will subvert Firefox" or whatever the conspiracy theory du jour is, but when 99% (or close to that) of your income comes from a single place, "I call the shots" comes across a little weak. He might be right in his claim that Mozilla is independent with or without Google's $56 million, but without the $56M Mozilla is a very different company, probably one that cannot support 120 million users or pay developers or CEOs.

When it comes to money, it's always worse to have it and then lose it than to never have it to begin with.

Re:I was like that too

[toleraen]

Could that money come from another source though? Would Yahoo payout like Google does if they switched the default search engines, homepage, etc to yahoo's servers? Sure the cash is really flowing in, but it seems like other there would be other companies that would pay for that right. Maybe not as much as Google, but they'd pay something at least.

Re:I was like that too

[griffjon]

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.

Re:I was like that too

[dedazo]

Perhaps Mozilla could give you the option to set the default search engine when you install it. Then Google would pay for Google installations, Yahoo for theirs, Microsoft for theirs, etc. Users win, the search engine company wins, Mozilla wins. More importantly, Mozilla becomes more independent.

And then maybe Microsoft could rent a clue about that. I for one would love to see Google pay Microsoft for the benefit of being the default search engine in Internet Explorer. People who pick Google as a SE mean no revenue to Microsoft in that sense, anyway. And that would also mean more choice for IE users.

Re:I was like that too

[asa]

> Could that money come from another source though? Would
> Yahoo payout like Google does if they switched the default
> search engines, homepage, etc to yahoo's servers?

We already do have a financial relationship with Yahoo and they pay Mozilla for the traffic Firefox sends them. It's just not as much because they're used by fewer Firefox users (both because they're not default, and because users prefer Google.)

> Sure the cash is really flowing in, but it seems like
> other there would be other companies that would pay for
> that right. Maybe not as much as Google, but they'd pay
> something at least.

Any company, including Microsoft, that depends on traffic would pay to have 130 million users visiting their services regularly. Google is the best right now so we chose them as the default. Yahoo is still a favorite of some people, and so it's included in Firefox as an alternative. Some countries have other popular search services and we include those -- even defaulting to them in some cases, when it makes sense for the users.

This isn't about money, really. Mozilla could get as much or more money by selling off search or other services to the highest bidder but that's not how we operate. Google is the default because it's the best. If some other search overtakes Google, then that will probably soon be the default.

- A

Re:I was like that too

[jalefkowit]

How do you define best? How do you make it a non-subjective? Do you determine they're best because they're the most preferred by users?

People forget where Firefox came from. It was not focus grouped (or even planned, really) by Mozilla. At the time, Mozilla was still almost exclusively funded by AOL, and their primary focus was the Mozilla Suite - a browser/email client/HTML editor/IRC client monolith that had lots of promising features, but was too complex and geek oriented to catch on with the general public.

Firefox exists because in 2002 Blake Ross (along with Dave Hyatt) got fed up with the code bloat and designed-by-committee UI of the old Suite, and decided to start a skunkworks-style OSS project to create the anti-Suite: a lean, fast, browser-and-nothing-else tool using the core Mozilla code but jettisoning most of the complexity that had arisen in the Suite over time.

Back then it was called "Phoenix" (as in, rising from the ashes of Mozilla). The search bar showed up very early in Phoenix's life: Phoenix 0.2, to be exact, released in October 2002. And when the search bar landed, it used Google as its engine.

Because Phoenix was Ross' and Hyatt's personal project, design decisions in those days basically came down to whatever they thought was best. They chose Google for the search engine because in 2002 Google was waaaaaay ahead of the competition in search. Heck, back in those days Yahoo licensed Google Search rather than rolling their own!

This was literally years before Google offered Mozilla a red cent for search traffic. In 2002 Google was still 2 years away from going public and had nothing like the cash mountain it has today. They certainly weren't running around throwing tens of millions at browser programmers' side projects.

In other words: Ross and Hyatt chose Google because at the time the decision was a no brainer. Every other search engine was so much worse than Google at returning relevant results that choosing any of them would have been putting the user's needs second, which was contrary to the whole point of Phoenix/Firefox.

Of course, today the quality of competing engines has mostly caught up, so if they were making the decision today maybe they'd have chosen differently, who knows. But it's a mistake to project the conditions of the world today back upon decisions made five years ago. The tech landscape was very different then.

oil companies and politicians

[facon12]

Yes they do exactly what they want. Just the same way a politician will make all of their own decisions after getting millions from oil companies and other "pacs" with special interests.

Re:Google and Mozilla detest

[Red Flayer]

Reponds is not a word.

Nonsense.

Everyone knows the root of reponds is pond, which is a body of water, often man-made, smaller than a lake.

We also know that bodies of water reflect light off their surface, and further, we know that to reflect means to consider.

To pond is to consider.
A ponder is one who considers.
To repond is to reconsider.
Reponds means reconsiders.

Perhaps you'd like to repond your assumption that reponds is not a perfectly cromulent word?

Can the users demand fixes now?

[recoiledsnake]

Firefox does not look like a very typical FOSS program anymore in which developers don't get any money back from the masses of users. The developers working at Mozilla are getting paid directly from the money that the users are contributing with their clicks. Hence, I think the mantra of 'if you don't like it, fork it" is not really valid in this scenario. Note this is opposed to projects with paid developers like Apache and the Linux kernel which is supported by corporate entities and not end users.

Also, I remember that Mozilla wanted contributions for the NYT ad a few years ago and many of my friends who were students barely scraping by, contributed some of their much needed money to the project. Apart from that I guess a ton of people donated money to Mozilla in the past few years thinking that they needed funding badly. Did Mozilla really need it or were they getting enough money from Google to run that ad by themselves? The fact that the CEO of Mozilla gets a compensation of half a million dollars makes it worse.

Does this also mean the users(who are contributing to the coffers with their use of Firefox) can demand fixes to the nagging bugs and not get a 'if you don't like it fork it' reply? Take a look at this very annoying image captions wrapping bug that plagued users and web developers and was unfixed for seven years despite even stalwarts like XKCD's Randall Munroe complaining in this bugzilla thread. Note that you need to copy paste because bugzilla doesn't allow links from Slashdot https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375

It makes for very entertaining reading. I personally use Opera(I used to be a big supporter of Firefox back in the day) for it's leanness and speed. I would switch over to Firefox in a flash if they fix the bloatness.

Re:Uh huh.

[provigilman]

Oh my God, you're right!!! Google is the start page, that must mean that if in the next version of Firefox they want to add something that gives more functionality to the bookmarks, Google gets a say. It must also mean that when they hire a new dev team to work on the browser, Google does the interviews!!!

It could also just be that Google made a deal with them to have the most popular search engine in the world be the default. You can change it, it's not the end of the world, and it doesn't mean that Google has their hands in the day to day running of everything.

I mean, do we really think that Nissan is approving scripts for Heroes and other NBC shows that have the new Rogue in them? No! It's advertising, and I'm sure Nissan pays a hefty to price to ensure that the script for "Claire's dad gives her a new [insert car]" says "[Nissan Rogue]" instead.

Re:Now I undestand what happened to Thunderbird.

[oahazmatt]

Google doesn't want you to use POP3 or IMAP

But doesn't GMail support both of those, now?

Oh, certainly!

[rholland356]

Men serving two masters always say this, and we know it's rubbish.

The truth will be known as soon as conflicting interests have to be resolved.

Re:so who gets the money?

[asa]

We most certainly have said where the money goes. Read the financial disclosure statement. In summary, the bulk of what we spend goes to personnel and infrastructure and what we don't spend goes into savings/investment.

- A

Re:Remove the defaults

[asa]

> Grey out the search box until the user chooses the search
> engine they want to use. Randomly choose the order of the
> search engines in the drop down box (once). Replace the
> home page with a selection page, and include a type-in box.

Yeah. Everything should be an option. Sounds like you want SeaMonkey and not Firefox. Firefox ships with a set of defaults that we believe are best for the most users. Right now, and for the last five or six years, Google has been the best possible search for most of our users. Where it isn't, we'll change it (like we did for a year in Japan, China, and Korea with Yahoo as the default.)

You're suggesting we optimize for the minority case and that's a cop-out that all too many software programs opt for. Most users don't want to have to configure their browser before they start using it. They want it to "just work" and that's what we aim to deliver.

> That way Mozilla won't be giving Google any special treatment
> and when the users choose Google to be the preferred search
> and home page anyway you can claim that you weren't doing
> anything wrong in the first place.

That way, we can make all of our users suffer an extra flaming hoop to jump through to satisfy a few people who are already quite capable of switching to whatever services they want. Sounds like a great plan.

- A

Re:Prove it.

[asa]

>Make Yahoo! the default search. I dare you.

We did. And users didn't like it at all. We put Yahoo in for CJKT builds because they had a larger presence in those markets. Users were unhappy.

- A

Re:watch the pretty birdie

[asa]

> 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

Re:so who gets the money?

[Lunzo]

asa said "google for it". Obviously a conspiracy. If Google and Mozilla weren't in cahoots asa would have said "search for it with the search engine of your choice".

Re: Mozilla Reponds

[Rolgar]

Give the submitter a break. He was probably submitting from an iPhone.

Firefox is not bloated

[Locklin]

Bloated is the wrong word. Konqueror has an order of magnitude more features than Firefox, but works much faste. I'm sure Konqueror and it's dependencies are also much much more than 6 Mb. However, something to do with the architecture of Firefox is seriously flawed: not only does it leak memory like a siv, the UI and page rendering has slowed with each release (I know, I use it on a 600 Mhz coppermine processor with 128 Mb ram). Additionally, one page with a lot of (poor) javascript can lock up the whole browser for several minutes - why isn't each tab it's own thread?

I use it for several reasons, but latency is an issue that should be given some thought.