Mozilla Reponds - We Call the Shots, Not Google.

An anonymous reader writes "Recent articles in the New York Times and at CNET have highlighted the growing concern that Google holds significant power and influence over Firefox's development. In an interview published today, Mozilla's technology strategist Mike Shaver did his best to proclaim Mozilla's independence. Yes, Google pays Mozilla $56 million per year, Google is the default search engine, and supplier of many of the browser's features (anti-phishing, anti-malware, incorrect URL resolution). Shaver insists that in spite of these ties, Mozilla still calls the shots over Firefox's development."

Re:Do they?

[Cecil]

From the download instructions:

Konqueror is part of KDE's "kdebase" package. The HTML rendering engine khtml is together with all other needed KDE libraries contained in KDE's "kdelibs" package.

To install Konqueror please refer to the pages on how to install KDE.

That's not cross-platform.

Re:so who gets the money?

[asa]

We most certainly have said where the money goes. Read the financial disclosure statement. In summary, the bulk of what we spend goes to personnel and infrastructure and what we don't spend goes into savings/investment.

- A

Not quite

[Wesley Felter]

Mozilla only spends about $12M per year, and they have a lot in the bank ($70M?). If you do the math, they can survive for several years if the search engines pull the plug.

Re:Prove it.

[asa]

>Make Yahoo! the default search. I dare you.

We did. And users didn't like it at all. We put Yahoo in for CJKT builds because they had a larger presence in those markets. Users were unhappy.

- A

Re:Do they?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the download instructions:

Konqueror is part of KDE's "kdebase" package. The HTML rendering engine khtml is together with all other needed KDE libraries contained in KDE's "kdelibs" package.

To install Konqueror please refer to the pages on how to install KDE.

That's not cross-platform.

Konqueror is somewhat cross platform as it will work on any Unix-like OS, including OS X (but only under X11 and X11 on OS X is awful, imho). Suposedly, when KDE4 is released native OS X and Windows versions are going to be available. Still, that would be rather heavy just to get a web browser, and khtml differs (at least in 3.5.x) from WebKit. Try the Safari in Leopard. It's awesome, it even does :hover on just about everything and does css opacity well. Gecko's done that for a while, new versions of Opera do that, and now WebKit does it, but khtml still does not. KHTML also has issues with "overflow: auto" and "<object>" tags, which Gecko, Opera, and WebKit do not.

Re:Can the users demand fixes now?

[asa]

>I remember that Mozilla wanted contributions for the
>NYT ad a few years ago and many of my friends who were
>students barely scraping by, contributed some of their
>much needed money to the project. Apart from that I
>guess a ton of people donated money to Mozilla in the
>past few years thinking that they needed funding badly.
>Did Mozilla really need it or were they getting enough
>money from Google to run that ad by themselves?

Donations to this program happened before there was any serious money coming in from Google. Remember, back then we only had a few users and it's users and traffic that generate revenue. Without contributions from our community, Firefox wouldn't be where it is today -- especially early contributions like with the NYT ad project.

-A

Re:Now I undestand what happened to Thunderbird.

[bahwi]

Well, except about a month ago or so they opened up free IMAP for gmail.

Free IMAP on Gmail [slashdot.org] slashdot article. And I believe they already have POP3 support(I could be wrong, or maybe it's inwards only).

Re:Now I undestand what happened to Thunderbird.

[asa]

>I know I'll be tagged as paranoid. But it might
>explain why Mozilla separated Thunderbird. Google
>doesn't want you to use POP3 or IMAP. They want
>you to use the web. It just might just have been
>one of the reasons that were considered when
>making the decision.

It wasn't. Google doesn't have any say in what we do beyond the code and services they contribute. They absolutely don't have any involvement or influence in Thunderbird where they don't contribute anything at all.

- A

Re:I was like that too

[asa]

> Could that money come from another source though? Would
> Yahoo payout like Google does if they switched the default
> search engines, homepage, etc to yahoo's servers?

We already do have a financial relationship with Yahoo and they pay Mozilla for the traffic Firefox sends them. It's just not as much because they're used by fewer Firefox users (both because they're not default, and because users prefer Google.)

> Sure the cash is really flowing in, but it seems like
> other there would be other companies that would pay for
> that right. Maybe not as much as Google, but they'd pay
> something at least.

Any company, including Microsoft, that depends on traffic would pay to have 130 million users visiting their services regularly. Google is the best right now so we chose them as the default. Yahoo is still a favorite of some people, and so it's included in Firefox as an alternative. Some countries have other popular search services and we include those -- even defaulting to them in some cases, when it makes sense for the users.

This isn't about money, really. Mozilla could get as much or more money by selling off search or other services to the highest bidder but that's not how we operate. Google is the default because it's the best. If some other search overtakes Google, then that will probably soon be the default.

- A

Re:I was like that too

[asa]

Firefox is available under a tri-license. You can accept the Mozilla code under any of the MPL, the GPL, or the LGPL, depending on what best suits your needs. Mozilla only accepts contributions that have all three licenses to preserve our ability to continue offering it all under any of those three license terms.

- A

Re:I was like that too

[AvitarX]

Did you follow the link on the licenses?

Source license:

Core Mozilla project source code is licensed under a disjunctive tri-license giving you the choice of one of the three following sets of free software/open source licensing terms:

        * Mozilla Public License, version 1.1 or later
        * GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later
        * GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/ [mozilla.org]
(Emphasis mine)
Binary license:

Version 2.0

A SOURCE CODE VERSION OF CERTAIN FIREFOX BROWSER FUNCTIONALITY THAT YOU MAY USE, MODIFY AND DISTRIBUTE IS AVAILABLE TO YOU FREE-OF-CHARGE FROM WWW.MOZILLA.ORG UNDER THE MOZILLA PUBLIC LICENSE and other open source software licenses.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox2-en.html [mozilla.com]

Re:I was like that too

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Perhaps Mozilla could give you the option to set the default search engine when you install it.

Assuming the Windows of Firefox:

• you can use the Client Customization Kit [mozilla.org] to build your own custom Firefox installer that ships with your preferred settings;
• you can edit chrome\en-GB.jar\locale\browser-region\region.properties and replace "Google" with "Yahoo.co.uk" in the "browser.search.defaultenginename" line (localize as necessary);
• you can delete searchplugins\google.xml, and Firefox will default to the next-highest-priority search engine for your locale (probably Yahoo); and finally
• you can just click on the search bar and select which search engine you want.

You're looking for fault in something that works perfectly fine.

Re:I was like that too

[jalefkowit]

How do you define best? How do you make it a non-subjective? Do you determine they're best because they're the most preferred by users?

People forget where Firefox came from. It was not focus grouped (or even planned, really) by Mozilla. At the time, Mozilla was still almost exclusively funded by AOL, and their primary focus was the Mozilla Suite [wikipedia.org] - a browser/email client/HTML editor/IRC client monolith that had lots of promising features, but was too complex and geek oriented to catch on with the general public.

Firefox exists because in 2002 Blake Ross [blakeross.com] (along with Dave Hyatt [wikipedia.org]) got fed up with the code bloat and designed-by-committee UI of the old Suite, and decided to start a skunkworks [wikipedia.org]-style OSS project to create the anti-Suite: a lean, fast, browser-and-nothing-else tool using the core Mozilla code but jettisoning most of the complexity that had arisen in the Suite over time.

Back then it was called "Phoenix" (as in, rising from the ashes of Mozilla). The search bar showed up very early in Phoenix's life: Phoenix 0.2 [mozilla.com], to be exact, released in October 2002. And when the search bar landed, it used Google as its engine.

Because Phoenix was Ross' and Hyatt's personal project, design decisions in those days basically came down to whatever they thought was best. They chose Google for the search engine because in 2002 Google was waaaaaay ahead of the competition in search. Heck, back in those days Yahoo licensed Google Search rather than rolling their own! [wikipedia.org]

This was literally years before Google offered Mozilla a red cent for search traffic. In 2002 Google was still 2 years away from going public and had nothing like the cash mountain it has today. They certainly weren't running around throwing tens of millions at browser programmers' side projects.

In other words: Ross and Hyatt chose Google because at the time the decision was a no brainer. Every other search engine was so much worse than Google at returning relevant results that choosing any of them would have been putting the user's needs second, which was contrary to the whole point of Phoenix/Firefox.

Of course, today the quality of competing engines has mostly caught up, so if they were making the decision today maybe they'd have chosen differently, who knows. But it's a mistake to project the conditions of the world today back upon decisions made five years ago. The tech landscape was very different then.