Re:Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay goin...
by jacquesm on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @07:17AM
(#24565578)
No, they succeeded at making it impopular. FireFox was popular they had a shot at cementing market dominance. The were more popular than Chrome and MS's product combined.
But now they are a fringe browser, that already has problems keeping up with the developments on the web.
Note that for Google they are only a fig-leaf in their upcoming anti-trust case. Note that Google pulled a lot of underhanded tricks to get people to switch to Chrome and paying FF may have been just enough to keep Mozilla quiet about this. If it had been a for-profit situation and with a different source of revenues for Mozilla then there is a fair chance Mozilla would have made a case for anti-competitive behavior by Google.
So that money may have acted to Google's benefit in more than just one way.
But now they are a fringe browser, that already has problems keeping up with the developments on the web.
Note that for Google they are only a fig-leaf in their upcoming anti-trust case. Note that Google pulled a lot of underhanded tricks to get people to switch to Chrome and paying FF may have been just enough to keep Mozilla quiet about this. If it had been a for-profit situation and with a different source of revenues for Mozilla then there is a fair chance Mozilla would have made a case for anti-competitive behavior by Google.
So that money may have acted to Google's benefit in more than just one way.