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Yahoo Sues Mozilla For Breach of Contract -- So Mozilla Counter Sues Yahoo (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Mozilla and Yahoo have started a legal spat about the deal that existed between the two companies regarding the use of the Yahoo search engine in the Firefox browser. On December 1, Yahoo fired the first shot filing a complaint that alleges Mozilla breached a contract that existed between the two companies by terminating the arrangement early. In a counter complaint, Mozilla says that it was not only justified in terminating the contract early, but that Yahoo Holdings and Oath still have a bill that needs to be settled.
Nothing like a legal pissing war between two irrelevant companies.
MOZILLA IS GARBAGE
The old SCO lawyers must be low on funds, they found a couple more dying horses to beat and wring the last dime out of in legal fees.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I just saw a TV commercial for Firefox. What a waste of money.
Nothing like anonymity to allow people to shoot their mouths off like meaningless, impotent, lazy, stupid, ignorant, child molesting bitches.
FUCK YOU
increases costs to end users which are already beyond rip-off status.. cease fire stand down,, transact as though the moms are watching,, thanks agian..
Didn't Yahoo go bankrupt by now?
Wow, I made a mistake surfing /. at -1 today.
IANAL, but I think Mozilla was 100% justified in claiming a total lack of faith just on the way that Yahoo handled its data breaches. The fact that they were having their own problems with the search side and Yahoo dealt so poorly with its users in an equally important area of their business is a perfectly reasonable basis to conclude that Yahoo just doesn't care.
A lot is redacted, and IANAL, but it seems like Yahoo et al don't believe Mozilla had the right to terminate the contract and Mozilla does. i.e. the contract itself included the option to terminate under certain conditions.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Personally I think nothing but good can come of this. There will be additional revenue and jobs created, and it says nothing but good about all the people involved. When it finally is finished I think we'll realize how much work and effort went into this and it finally paid off.
If you ever wondered what Marissa Mayer was like at Google, check out "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edwards.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For some silly reason, I seem to not particularly want *my* web browser to be controlled by an entity which chases after big deal with advertisers. I figure I've lost the battle well before the sponsorship deal breaks down - perhaps at the point where the sponsorship deal goes way beyond the sponsor merely being credited as a sponsor...
Would be nice to have a new Browser project which is a bit more concerned about User's Security Policy than whatever w3c says how the Internet is "supposed" to work. If, for some reason, I am opposed to the Internet, and want the browser to only extract and display the text (using only a bitmap font), show a clickable button instead of an image or iframe (or anything more complex), run only first-party scripts under an interpreter, giving the Script only what it needs in terms of DOM manipulation to keep the Script happy (and to display the desired results), and validate any certificates the website shows [even if I am the CA and am only using the browser on an Intranet] -- I should be able to do that. Moreover, the browser's software components should be coded simply enough that its minimalistic browsing mode should be verifiable.
ha ha ha
I do have my beefs with Mozilla, mind you. But the alternatives are so horrible that I think it's our responsibility to keep it viable. And I'm thanful to the Mozillians for doing their part in it.
Yahoo has gotten a little quirky lately. New firefox gets bombarded with malicious redirects while on their site, meanwhile chrome hangs and in some cases gives you a oh snap! screen. Something tells me that a large portion of Yahoo's servers are compromised. I think they should pay a little more attention to the potential shitstorm they're about to get hit with rather than this legal bullshittery because they are repeating previous mistakes....again.
Why spend one set of legal expenses for settling the same thing when you can spend twice for settling the same thing?
During the years Microsoft influenced Mozilla Foundation there was considerable damage to Mozilla Foundation's reputation. Was that the 3rd step of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
Take a page from Mozilla and get back to what made you good from the start.
Did Mozilla make a U-turn after Firefox 57? If not, they are still headed AWAY from what made them good and working desperately to make Firefox a Chrome clone. It doesn't hurt that Google financed most of that effort. I tried to tell everyone that making Mozilla a for-profit business would spell disaster for Firefox, but nobody listened to me. It just seems like it's inevitable for Netscape and its family to repeatedly make stupid decisions and fly their product into the ground.
The contract contained a nearly insane provision that if Yahoo was sold (which Marissa Mayer did not think would happen), that Mozilla had the right to no longer use the Yahoo search engine AND Yahoo had to continue paying Mozilla $375 million per year through 2019! So Yahoo is suing in hopes that they can at least no longer have to pay Mozilla since they aren't even using Yahoo anymore. Yet another testament to the brilliant business acumen of Marissa Mayer.
So essentially Mozilla is double-dipping here, and getting paid by both Yahoo and Google to use Google's search engine.
Better known as 318230.
Now you went and did it. You posted a story with the term "Mozilla" in it. Every saved Google alert in the Mozilla social media team offices is going off. Now we're going to be swarmed by Mozilla's social media team trying to make it seem like there are people who still take them seriously. Considering that Mozilla's market share is still falling after Firefox 57 (and 67% of Mozilla users refuse to upgrade from earlier verisons), you can't take them too seriously. If they'd invest the money into improving the product in the way the users want instead of hiring people to try and convince users they really want the current shitty product, they'd be doing better. But, that's not how the mindset works in Mozilla. "We're right and all we have to to is show people how right we are," is how they think.
Based on the latest browser market share stats, Firefox isn't in 3rd place. It's much worse than that.
Yes, Chrome is the leader, without a doubt, at about 60% of the market, including both mobile and desktop devices.
Second place goes to Safari, with about 12% of the market.
UC Browser for Android is at about 8%.
So at this point we know that Firefox is at best 4th place, at around 4% to 5% of the market.
Things get hazy at this point, as there are several other browsers near this range, including Samsung Internet, IE/Edge and Opera.
Realistically, Firefox could be well below IE/Edge, given that there are many corporate and institutional users of Microsoft's browsers on large Windows intranets, and these users wouldn't appear in usage data collected for the public web.
So Firefox is probably the 5th place browser now, with at least Samsung Internet and the Opera family of browsers not far behind. If Firefox were to lose a percent or two of market share within the near future, and the nearby competitors don't lose any users, then Firefox could soon fall to perhaps 6th or even 7th place!
The most interesting thing to notice with the stats is how much of a disaster Firefox 57 has been.
If we look at the October 2017 stats, which don't include the final release of Firefox 57 that happened mid November, we see that 4.28% of the market was using Firefox 55, 56 or 57. The November 2017 stats show that Firefox 56, 57 and 58 only have 4.14% of the market! We should also note that the Firefox 52's usage has dropped from 0.50% to 0.49%.
Firefox 57 was supposed to be a hugely important release that was meant to draw in new users. But we've seen the opposite: Firefox has actually lost market share!
We shouldn't be surprised, of course. Firefox 57 is well-known for breaking most extensions, for having a generally-disliked UI, and for not really offering any real improvements to its users. The extension breakage in particular drove many users to alternate browsers, now that Firefox no longer offers an advantage in this area, and it actually offers a lot of disadvantages in other areas.
Things are looking really bleak for Firefox.
If you think that Chrome is "creepy" and you don't trust Opera and Vivaldi because they're based on Chromium, then you really, really, really should read Firefox's privacy policy.
Firefox's very own privacy policy readily admits that it will share personal data with Google and other companies in a variety of ways.
The September 28, 2017 version of it states (with emphasis added):
It can also send information to SalesForce:
And to some "Adjust" company:
And to some "Leanplum" company:
If you're using Firefox because you want to avoid sending data to Google or other companies, well, you've fucked up!
Some Firefox fanatics will probably come along and claim that it's "not a big deal" because this data collection and tracking "can be disabled in some cases" or claim that "'can' doesn't mean 'will'". None of that matters! Even just being able to collect and send out personal data like described in Firefox's privacy policy is unacceptable, even if it's disabled.
In my opinion, Firefox does not respect its users' privacy at all. It's even worse that there are people like you spreading misinformation about Firefox, suggesting it respects the privacy of its users when as far as I'm concerned it very clearly doesn't.
ow8 agenda - give with the laundry
Your attitude, which is much too common within the Firefox community, is a big contributing factor to Firefox's ongoing decline.
Here we have users very clearly explaining how Firefox's 57 extension changes have caused them severe problems. Extensions that worked perfectly fine with Firefox 56 are now suddenly broken, without users even getting any benefit from this breakage. The new system is so limited that many important extensions can't even be ported over. All in all, Firefox 57 has been a hugely disruptive disaster for many Firefox users.
And how do you respond? With name-calling, with ad hominem attacks, with denial, with false accusations, with contempt and with disrespect. You have basically told Firefox's users to "fuck off and die". In effect, that's exactly what they're now doing: they're moving away from Firefox to other browsers that work, and whose communities don't treat their users like shit.
Firefox's extension system was its only competitive advantage. It let users do things with Firefox that they couldn't accomplish with other browsers. Now that Firefox has taken this away from them, these users have no reason to use Firefox. It's far slower and more bloated than browsers like Chrome, Edge and Safari. Firefox's privacy policy shows that it sends data to Google, so it's not even any better in that respect! And as we're already discovered, Firefox advocates treat normal Firefox users as if they're worthless scum.
Open source software projects that treat their users like they're shit just don't survive, especially when there are numerous other compelling options available for users to switch to with little effort at all. People with an attitude like yours just accelerates the process by driving away users at a faster and faster rate.
As for Yahoo, so lame, so lame. Take a page from Mozilla and get back to what made you good from the start
Problem with this possible Yahoo strategy is that what made Yahoo good in its early years was that it did an excellent job at meeting the needs of web users of 1995 - 2001 or so. It was one of the best search engines of the time, and Yahoo Groups was far superior to anything else in replacing pre-Web BBS technology. But then the world changed.
We've seen this in other growing technologies. For example, by 1950 steam locomotive technology had become very sophisticated, but was then replaced by diesel electric locomotives and the whole basis of motive steam technology was made obsolete.
Yahoo is still great at what it has always done, it is just that that is now obsolete, replaced by newer technologies for searching, running forums, and the like.
There's no Yahoo search engine everything is powered by Bing from Microsoft
dates all the way back to when they were till netscape.
But it REALLY turned into a mess those first two years the Mozilla Foundation was formed, when they decided to throw out the old C based browser and replace it with an entirely new C++ browser which took two years to develop. People often forget about that. They had a worked browser they could have almost released in 1998, but chose instead to throw the whole thing out, which lead to IE dominating for the next 4 years, only beginning to get displaced once the gecko engine had matured and firefox (then lacking XUL) became the browser everyone wanted, based on a very minimalist gtk+ interface, soon after adding the restore history feature many of us rely on today for when our browser crashed (early ff was notoriously crash-prone, as was gecko in general.) After FF became popular, they convinced its creator to join Mozilla, before ousting him from leadership of the project and redoing the whole interface with XUL, slowly stripping features away, adding addon support, bloating the browser significantly, but thanks to Athlon XP/P4 plus SDRAM133/DDR266, not enough to drag on the average person's computer by that point. From there it was a constant churn of improvements combined with an even bigger pile of new bugs. Bug reports and even patches were ignored as the codebase rapidly bloated. Google threw a bunch of money at them planning to start Chrome, but needing a successful foil against Microsoft in the intervening few years. And with the big money thrown at them, Mozilla made half-hearted donation campaign requests to its browser using public, but didn't ever bother remedying their initial shortcoming: Not listening to their good employees, and not listening to their user base. Both of which have come together to result in them having a large but subpar development staff. Their recent 'purchases' have all been projects produced by friends or family of current executive staff. Individual funding has dwindled because donating to a company that doesn't listen to you is bad enough, but made worse when the executive compensation packages are only overshadowed by wikipedia, and the largest of the fortune 500 corporations.
For anyone doubting my comments above, you can do research and find citations for most of this history online. But given that I lived through it I don't have those citations to give. Mozilla really turned out to be a Trojan Horse of open source development, as did many others, but the uneducated masses never paid enough attention to donate when they should have and not donated when they shouldn't, which sent mixed signals about the acceptability of Mozilla's behavior as a corporation and non-profit.
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!... twice.....three times..... four times!
What positive thing has moz://a accomplished lately? What's the last effort of theirs that has been successful?
Firefox might have been a success a decade ago, but now it's a joke. It's likely below 5% of the market now. Firefox 57 has been a disastrous release, with it breaking so many extensions and not really offering users anything positive in return for this extension breakage.
Firefox OS was an abysmal failure.
Servo is a failure. Try it out for yourself if you doubt me. I tried it recently and it crashed on me repeatedly. It also fails to render many sites. And it doesn't even really have a UI.
Rust is a failure. It's a difficult language to use, to the point of making C++ a pleasant experience. Servo, which is written in Rust, just goes to show how it isn't a very effective language.
Bugzilla and Thunderbird might as well be considered obsolete, or even dead, projects at this point.
Their treatment of Brendan Eich was shameful.
Their rebranding to "moz://a" has only served to confuse people, some of whom now think that moz://a is pronounced "Mozza".
I can't think of anything positive that moz://a has accomplished within, say, the past 5 years.
Let's Encrypt is maybe the only non-failure I can think of, but their involvement with that is minimal.
Based on their recent rather unsuccessful track record, and Firefox's severe loss of market share, I can't see how moz://a is relevant. Maybe moz://a still exists, but I can't see how it's the force it once was.
What you wrote below fits with my experiences over the years: "After FF became popular, they convinced its creator to join Mozilla, before ousting him from leadership of the project and redoing the whole interface with XUL, slowly stripping features away, adding addon support, bloating the browser significantly, ..."
... didn't ever bother remedying their initial shortcoming: Not listening to their good employees, and not listening to their user base. Both of [those shortcomings] have come together to result in them having a large but subpar development staff."
"From there it was a constant churn of improvements combined with an even bigger pile of new bugs. Bug reports and even patches were ignored as the codebase rapidly bloated."
"Google threw a bunch of money at them planning to start Chrome, but needing a successful foil against Microsoft in the intervening few years."
"Mozilla
"Their recent 'purchases' have all been projects produced by friends or family of current executive staff."
"... the executive compensation packages are only overshadowed by wikipedia, and the largest of the fortune 500 corporations."
This 2014 article tells some of the history: Mozilla still has three big problems -- and now it needs a new CEO (April 4, 2014, last modified on Feb. 21, 2017)
Brendan Eich's coming-out party ended the Mozilla way: free, open -- and shut (April 4, 2014)
Quote from the article immediately above:
"Eich was clearly a qualified candidate for the CEO role: he is the creator of Javascript, one of the languages that powers the open web, and had worked on Firefox and its predecessor Netscape for years. His commitment to the open web is his life's work; those credentials have never been in doubt."
That's what I thought at the time. It seemed to me that the real reason Brendan Eich was removed as CEO is that it was well known that Eich would not allow large amounts of money to be given to people at Mozilla Foundation who have no technical knowledge, or almost none.
Another quote from that article:
"... the ability to build and maintain a diverse coalition of supporters is absolutely integral to Mozilla's prospects."
A HUGE problem in my opinion, is that articles about technology are typically written by people with little or no knowledge of technology. What is "absolutely integral to Mozilla's prospects" is technical knowledge.
It would be very interesting to have a complete list of where the Mozilla Foundation money goes. The $300 million paid by Google every year was spent on what?
This comment about Mozilla Foundation, moderated -1, seems relevant: "The vast majority of their money... Is spent on executive salaries and job titles which pretty obviously have nothing to do with improving the engine code, ..."
Funny, I haven't used either of these dinosaurs in years. In fact, every time I hear that Yahoo or Mozilla are still in business, I'm surprised. Note to Yahoo: suing your business partners is not the best way to attract new business partners. Note to Mozilla: you know Google doesn't need you at all, they've got their own browser that's far superior to your own! They are doing you a favor by offering to share revenue with you!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How is Firefox a "Distant 3rd" or even worse than 3rd? It's a solid 2nd place on the desktop browser share.
http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide
It's even referenced by Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Market_adoption
Don't bring mobile browsers into this, as this is not Firefox's main market.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?