Webpage and technical data to Google’s SafeBrowsing service: To help protect you from malicious downloads, Firefox sends basic information about unrecognized downloads to Google’s SafeBrowsing Service, including the filename and the URL it was downloaded from. While this is a noble cause, it’s still running my searches through a search engine that generates revenue based on mining my search data, tying it to my identity, and logging visited links. Waterfox is partners with Ecosia, a search engine that plants trees with its generated revenues. Besides being Firefox-based and therefore ultimately subject to Mozilla’s upstream decisions, there are a few things about it that bug me. The worst part: Apparently, they weren’t paid for this it was solely a PR cooperation thing.
What does everyone here think? If mozilla came out and said “we can ditch the advertisers, but it means users would have to pay a recurring donation of $x.xx”, then how many users would actually do it? Does the donation business model work without major cutbacks? I had a discussion about this recently with Morgan, and he was bothered that mozilla wasn’t being more upfront about it’s motivations for doing these things. I don’t like that they are messing with FF like this, but I can see why they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Mozilla has millions of users, however they’re not valuable to advertisers unless mozilla can direct traffic to them, which is why they’ve been resetting user preferences and adding new ways to capture users’ attention in the browser.
For better or worse, advertisers (including google) make up most of mozilla’s revenue stream. Nah, mozilla is doing this because it needs money, it’s that simple. Do we know if anyone from Google found their way to Mozilla management?Ĭould be another “Stephen Elop at Nokia” situation.
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