I'm hoping the Europeans fund development to provide an alternative to Chrome.
I'm quite envious of this line of thinking. I truly yearn for the times I was so naive and idealistic.
Pessimistic arguments that boil down to "everything sucks therefore I'm right, and any argument to the contrary is just naive and juvenile, and therefore lesser"
I can't speak for anyone else, I'm just honestly done with these people. Get off the internet, don't have kids, and die alone feeling smug - but save the rest of us from with your worthless drivel.
Read your statement again and tell me who the pessimist is, and who is most in need of a break from the internet.
Though of course there’s no telling how far we will eventually go in a trumpworld.
Could you please point to what I said that implies I'm pretending a "full blown dictatorship?" I apologize if that's somehow what I indicated. It certainly wasn't my intent.
”[…] I envy the worldview it's possible someone can take money from another and still maintain independence.”
Do you believe relying on our legal system is naive and idealistic?
What would be the non-idealistic view other than no structures can be trusted and that we live in a dictatorship?
What's up with the straw men?
Poor quality comments lead to poor quality replies. I won't deny mine is as well.
> Read your statement again and tell me who the pessimist is, and who is most in need of a break from the internet.
And that was to them replying to your first backhanded remark.
I wish you'd have elaborated on specifics and actually tried to understand, rather than telling me what I believe. I can see now you just want to be angry at someone, and I'm no longer interested in engaging with you. In any case, I'm genuinely sorry for whatever I've done to activate you, and I wish you well.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133763 and marked it off topic.
Google search revenue represents about 75% of Mozilla's total revenue.
Google search revenue represents about 4% of Apple's total revenue.
If you think those differences don’t matter, make that case directly. But don’t blur financial distinctions into “basically the same.” They’re not.
Mozilla Corporation takes money from Google for search placement. That doesn’t turn it into a subsidiary. Google doesn’t own it, doesn’t run its roadmap, and doesn’t ship its code. Mozilla negotiates search deals the same way Apple does for Safari. Revenue deal ≠ corporate control.
On telemetry: you’re overstating it. Firefox ships with telemetry on, but it documents what it collects, lets users turn it off, and exposes most of it in about:config. Google Chrome ties into a much broader account system, sync stack, and ad network. Chrome doesn’t operate in isolation; it plugs straight into Google’s data ecosystem. Firefox doesn’t own an ad network to feed.
“Almost comparable” needs evidence. Comparable how? Volume? Type? Identifiability? Retention? Without specifics, the claim collapses into vibes.
The bigger difference sits lower in the stack: engine independence. Firefox runs on Gecko. Chrome runs on Blink. If you care about web monoculture, that matters more than marginal telemetry deltas. When one engine dominates, web standards start drifting toward what that engine implements. We watched that happen in the IE6 era.
As for uBlock Origin: yes, it’s a major reason people choose Firefox. But browser architecture shapes how long powerful content blockers survive. Chrome’s extension model changes (Manifest V3) restrict what blockers can do. Firefox kept the older, more capable API. That choice signals priorities.
If your argument reduces to “both collect some data, so it doesn’t matter,” you flatten meaningful differences. The question isn’t purity. The question asks who controls the engine, who sets extension policy, and who benefits from surveillance at scale.
If you think those differences don’t matter, make that case directly. But don’t blur structural distinctions into “basically the same.” They’re not.