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Mozilla Revenue Jump Fuels Its Firefox Overhaul Plan (cnet.com)
Well, now we know what paid for all those programmers cranking out the overhauled Firefox Quantum browser: a major infusion of new money. From a report: Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the open-source web browser, saw its 2016 revenue increase 24 percent to an all-time high of $520 million, it said Friday. Expenses grew too, but not as much, from $361 million to $337 million, so the organization's war chest is significantly bigger now. Mozilla, which now has about 1,200 employees, releases prior-year financial results in conjunction with tax filings. Most of Mozilla's money comes from partnerships with search engines like Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu and Yandex. When you search through Firefox's address bar, those search engines show search ads alongside results and share a portion of the revenue to Mozilla. Mozilla in 2014 signed a major five-year deal with Yahoo to be the default search engine in the US, but canceled it only three years in and moved back to Google instead in November. Mozilla's mission -- to keep the internet open and a place where you aren't in the thrall of tech giants -- may seem abstract. But Mozilla succeeded in breaking the lock Microsoft's Internet Explorer had on the web a decade ago, and now it's fighting the same battle again against Google's Chrome.
Mozilla has 1,200 employees!!! What projects are all these people working on? Because I can't imagine even 600 of them working on Firefox.
It actually has always been an issue. Just in different ways. Back when Microsoft had infamously embedded IE into Windows 98. It meant the application took less time to load, because much of the components were loaded during boot time.
Firefox was at the time quick to load and was light on system usage, and rendered stuff fast and followed the standards well and was secure.
Chrome came out after Firefox kept on adding stuff to it slowing it down, so it was the light and fast browser.
It seems the trend is the small and fast browser wins, then the browser maker puts so much junk on it, it slows it down for an other company to make a new one stripped down to what people want.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Those are your location data requests (which prompted you and you accepted). All browsers do that. See this Stack Overflow question for details.
After installing an outgoing firewall on my laptop I was amazed to see that Firefox was continuously sending updates about the wifi networks I was connected to to a maps.google.com/something address.
I was quite dissapointed, and switched to Waterfox for a while.
Why were you disappointed? How else do you think Geolocation features in a modern browser on the modern internet is supposed to work? If you want to drop the evil conspiracy then here's some information:
What, why and how: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...
Google's specific policy of how it handles Mozilla's requests: https://www.google.com/privacy...
Of course this API request is for Mozilla to get the current location from Google, so it sends your connected WiFi spot and Google replies with where you are. Nothing too exciting since all it's doing is getting the information from Google. It doesn't hand anything out without your permission (and neither does Chrome). That can all be managed under Settings > Permissions > Location.
Finally if you're truly paranoid, head to about:config and set geo.enabled = false.
The worst thing we ever did was give data to those people who are unwilling to take the time to understand it. With the curiosity of what is being sent where you should also add the curiosity of why, how and for what reason. Then you may actually simply turn the relevant setting off instead of panic switching to a whole different product for the wrong reasons.