this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
191 points (93.6% liked)

Firefox

17302 readers
814 users here now

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 
all 23 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 107 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Because google gives mozilla a huge chunk of change every year. Mainly to stave off anti-trust claims by ensuring firefox says alive.

That allows us to keep using ff and to add tracking blocker extensions to our browser...

[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This money maintains the status quo. It will be adjusted so that Firefox does not gain significant market share but continues to exist as a worthy alternative, and Mozilla is incentivized to stay quiet about Google’s monopoly in the tech sector.

[–] nitefox 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Are they really quite though?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

They certainely arent that loud from what i have seen but makes sense why they dont

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I don't think they're "quiet" per se, it's just that no one cares.

They do seem to be vocal critics of most things google does, but they just don't get that much attention.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

to stave off anti-trust claims

Everyone says this but is it really true?

Edge has almost twice the market share that FireFox does. It wouldn't matter that they both use the same rendering engine, it's a competitor to stave off an anti-trust suit.

If they did need a competitor it would be dramatically more sensible to spin out a fork of chrome and create an org around that, rather than supporting FireFox.

It seems more likely to me that the agreement with FireFox isn't that nefarious - if they don't pay FireFox then they don't get FireFox users in search. That may only be 6% on the desktop, but 6% is significant enough.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah I mentioned that in my post. It's still a competitor. Anti-Trust is not about rendering engines, it's about vendors.

[–] [email protected] 101 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

This has been brought up before (not here, just in general). The short answer is they heavily customized the analytics so it's not as 'bad' out of the box. You can read more about it below.

You can probably ask them directly if you'd want more of an answer. They don't seem to be trying to hide anything.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122305#c8

Edit: also, as far as I know, Firefox actively should be blocking Google Analytics, unless they changed it (which is possible). About four years ago, Firefox started blocking Google Analytics by default.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Well said. May be worth reading through this GitHub issue and this Bugzilla issue as well. Its worth noting its also directly integrated into the browser as well in about:addons.

I'm personally not a fan of Firefox/Mozilla integrating and using Google Analytics, even under these circumstances, and think it does deserve criticism, but it is what it is I guess. I do hope they switch to a better alternative in the future.

In the meantime, setting the following about:config options should take care of and fully strip out Google Analytics and extension recommendations from about:addons:

"extensions.getAddons.showPane" to false

"extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled" to false

"browser.discovery.enabled" to false

"browser.discovery.sites" to be empty

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I thought every page on the web had these two if you want to be placed highly in the SEO.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

Sounds like illegal monopoly abuse to me.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Unrelated, what tool are you using to see this?

[–] darcy 4 points 11 months ago

i believe the duckduckgo extension also does something similar

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Because corporations