No, Google pays Firefox to make it seem like it still has competitors and isn't a monopoly. However, a key condition of that payment is that the default search engine in Firefox is Google. They change that, they lose most of their funding -- not most of their Google funding, most of their revenue (which is nearly all Google).

Wouldn’t Mozilla be motivated to fuck google as hard as possible?

If they still existed as an actual company, sure. But, it's not. It's a corpse that Google animates with their huge funding to make it seem like they still have competitors. Technically, Google doesn't own Mozilla, but in a 2012 report, 85% of their funding came from Google. So, they're never going to do anything that risks that funding.

[–] demonicbullet@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Oh, so google has adopted the Microsoft strategy.

Strange, Id think their monopoly would be considered natural if they just let Firefox collapse and didn't buy out dying/barely competing companies.

[–] dani6h@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Back in 2005, they started paying Mozilla to promote the Google search engine via their browser. Chrome still wasn't a thing back then. The weird thing is that they never stopped those payments even today, they even increased them on almost a yearly basis.

That was back then.. Why would they do it now that it no longer makes financial sense since Mozilla is just 3% of the browser market? No clue

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

So there is competition. Firefox goes away there is no other browser and Google is a monopoly.

[–] rumbleran@suppo.fi 2 points 1 year ago

They dropped xul extensions to have extension compatibility with chrome a few years ago.

I still miss XUL extensions because they could properly modify UI of the browser instead of just being pieces of JavaScript run inside tabs.