Tldr: Google gives money to Mozilla so it can be the default search engine in Firefox. Now courts want to stop this kind of deal on the grounds that it's against antitrust laws. So Mozilla now says that without this money they might die.
Unlike many people on Lemmy, I kinda like what the Mozilla foundation does, but if they let themselves become dependent on Google's money they should have seen this coming.
There seems to be no real alternative.
Most of the suggestions are based off Chrome or Firefox. They either don’t work for some edge cases or have other glaring problems. Example:
If you don’t support the theft of land from Palestinians and other occupied territories, then don’t use Vivaldi because Booking.com - who is dirty enough to advertise these properties - is on the default homepage and a partner of Vivaldi, breaking the BDS boycott.
what is a better alternative? I moved from chrome to firefox, whats better?
Too fucking bad.
These fuckers just don't know what's good for them.
Mozilla's dependency on Google has apparently warped their activism into fighting against these antitrust lawsuits since early 2025:
Interesting tidbit I gleaned from the Hacker News comments:
Mozilla does sell users' data. That's how the sponsored links and stories work .
Occasionally, sponsors may pay Mozilla to specifically boost the score of their site during frecency ranking. In these cases, the shortcut is based on your history, but shown in the sponsored section. This still happens entirely on your device; your copy of Firefox has a list of participating sites, which receive a higher score during local ranking.
While the ranking happens on device, a smart sponsor will glean information from end users that click through because those links almost certainly track where the users come from. This is selling users' private data to advertisers.
From here , with some minor formatting changes
well let mozilla die and firefox to be taken over by a true non-profit, who only cares about making the browser better and discards all the other fucking shit shit that mozilla is trying to do
Then Firefox has failed. What Firefox should be would always benefit from the destruction of the Corporate Web.
Badly designed antitrust measures can reduce competition. Considering the influence of lobbyists, we have to consider that the system is working as intended.
i gave to mozilla not because of their search deal with google but because they actively sought to fight back against toxicity on the web and internet bro culture but the new ceo backtracked on that.
go back to championing a not for profit, people first, anti toxic internet instead of relying on corporations to be your sugar daddy and you'll survive.
Ya know, even if Mozilla set up a search engine selection prompt and set up “pay for placement” model, they could still get paid. They just wouldn’t make as much $$ because the deal wouldn’t be exclusive to one provider.
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