Your right on a privacy front from an absolute perspective. But, it's almost certain that Google paid for this change. A stronger Mozilla (financially speaking) is good for privacy and free software.

Also, normal users expect Google. So, having it in the default provides a more familiar experience for them to possibly switch to Firefox.

Still, Firefox could automatically switch to e.g. Duckduckgo whenever the user is in incognito mode.

I love the idea. Would you mind mind filing a bug on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/?

One more idea - any chance you guys are making a Firefox Focus for the desktop? It's great on mobile, would love a desktop version too!

It's just a content blocker + private browsing. Can get same functionality on desktop with private browsing and some ad blocker

Plus tab functionality removed, hence the name "focus".

(I should add that, while I work at Mozilla this is my personal view, not Mozilla's official view, yada, yada)

Their privacy-focused mobile browser, Firefox Focus, defaults to DDG.

That's a great idea, along with a message explaining why.

Well, they could, but I would assume a contract with Google would prevent that.

Could. We don't know what's in this contract.

Pretty sure Google doesn't circumvent incognito so what's the point?

Google certainly tracks people by their IP address, so your privacy is lesser with Google as your search engine than DDG.

Not only that, but it also raises awareness of private search engines with the general audience.

Are you sure? I thought they didn't do this.

Though keep in mind it dates back to 2004.

> A stronger Mozilla (financially speaking) is good for privacy and free software.

While I understand exactly what you mean, surely there's a point at which accepting money from privacy-violating organisations (and bundling a privacy-violating extension, and who knows what else is coming?) means that Mozilla is no longer good for privacy?

Definitely true. It's a balancing act. Granted, that means that some people are going to think you're compromising too much on your ideals (or to little).

Yea, I mean wasn't the default provider of Yahoo before because they paid for it specifically.

It'd be nice if DuckDuckGo could afford it, but keep in mind, the privacy aspect of their service is a marketing bent. They still run mostly on AWS. If a government agency wants your DuckDuckGo data, they can just serve a warrant to Amazon instead.

Google was the paying provider before Yahoo. This has been how Mozilla makes most of their money the last 10 years.

Keeping Firefox alive also helps assuage anti-trust concerns with regard to Chrome’s position in their ecosystem.

In that case presumably Google would continue to fund Mozilla even if they go to another default search engine?

I think Google was still giving them money when they were defaulting to Yahoo, just less than the terms of this new deal.

You are not financially stronger if one day most of your income will come from a source which you are expected to strongly protect from.

It's not 'one day', the majority of Mozilla's funding has always come from 'search royalties'. Wikipedia says initial funding first came from AOL in 2003, then they had a deal with Google from 2004-2014. In 2014, it says they signed a deal with Yahoo. This is nothing new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

even more it is a joke to talk about being financially strong=independent, it is a puppet / outsourced browser organization

and yet it was the only browser that really opposed EME, and only backed down once not only every browser had implemented the extension, but many major media providers too. Basically once the browser became useless for media consumption because of it.

That's not how things work in the real world. This is a blatant conflict of interest, and its ironical inspite of the open source and privacy song and dance by Mozilla there is no transparency on the deal.

What do you mean "no transparency"? This has been announced officially, what else would you have expected?

Mozilla would cease to be without a viable revenue stream. Either users need to pay or they're going to have to trade most of their privacy for a tiny bit of money for the same goal. Which is the better deal?

If you look at the lifetime of Firefox, in the second half there's a negative correlation between (product popularity + contributor experience) and (revenue + company size).

A fellow adherent to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirat... . Praise His noodly appendage!

You realize I'm addressing the premise introduced by the person I responded to, right? That I'm not the one introducing it?

Also, it's possible to really believe in something but still be honest about its faults. I mean, I formed my harshest criticisms of Mozilla when I was still involved. I point this out, because there's another trend I've noticed, which is the one where you show up in tons of threads that are critical of Mozilla, usually with some flippant non-retort to the topic being discussed (just like you've done here).

We must be reading different comments, because this one of yours:

> If you look at the lifetime of Firefox, in the second half there's a negative correlation between (product popularity + contributor experience) and (revenue + company size).

Contains nothing relevant to the comment it's replying to, while simultaneously fabricating data in order to support an argument that yet still reduces to fallaciously conflating correlation and causation. You accuse me of flippant non-retorts, to which I say: garbage in, garbage out, my good friend. :)

Responding point-by-point to a comment like yours would be as worthwhile as trying to correct any other intellectually dishonest Gish gallop. The things I referenced are quantifiable and quantified.

If you are allowed. My work machine is locked into bing. I can bookmark google.com or duckduckgo.com but default/quick searches go through bing. (Google.com redirects to google.ca which drives me crazy sometimes.) I'd bet the majority of bing traffic comes from such workplaces.

If you want to use google.com without being redirected for some reason, you can use www.google.com/ncr (No country redirect).

Why won't it work for other locations?

www.google.de/ncr results in an error.

Perhaps the German equivalent is "keinlandumleitenbittemöchteGoogleindiesemlandverwenden" or www.google.de/k ?

Wow nice tip I never knew that.

Ha, I don't know if I could handle that. Would be at the top of my list of reasons to look for another job.

> I'd bet the majority of bing traffic comes from such workplaces.

I'd agree with you on that bet. I stumbled onto that revelation when I was running PPC campaigns for B2B software. Bing is a hidden goldmine when it comes to that demographic, thanks to the captive market and the fact that essentially all marketing agencies blatantly ignore Bing's existence so there's no keyword competition.

If you can, sign up for Bing rewards and earn points while you search. You can use those points in exchange for entering competitions or Microsoft/Windows devices and Xbox gift cards.

Lol. I dont touch any MS products outside of work, and certainly dont want to sign up for anything MS-related. I'm and oldschool linux guy who still sees MS as the big evil. It will take them at least 20 more years before i trust them with anything.

And I don't like Bing and Edge Rewards and don't think they are a good idea either.

The maximum daily points add up to around $5/month. A little more if I used Windows and Edge, but it's not worth taking it that far. I just participate because I would love to see other sites adopt the concept and start a bidding war. Why wait around for politicians to figure out UBI?

I'm 100% with sandworm.

But then they'd have the same issue they had with Yahoo. Where users would be put off by the default not being Google.

They are clearly trying hard with this release to get back users now.