The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.
In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.
The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.
"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”
That’s unfortunate, but it still needs to happen. Mozilla will adapt.
They haven’t launched a successful product in a decade. Pretty sure they’ll get more desperate and have even more misses. Probably AI.
Eh. Given how dead Thunderbird was, I feel it’s fair enough to call it’s recent massive renewal a launch.
And fkr what it’s worth, their recent ‘AI’ endeavours have been private offline language translation (i.e. no sending data to Google translation servers), and better screen reader functionality for blind people. Both good features.
mozilla ai sold to antrophic?