Just about the title question. Google has now legally been declared a monopoly so they no longer have a reason to be paying Mozilla. And Mozilla never had to slut themselves (and us) for Google in the first place.
Hush money? Google is silencing Mozilla about something?
If this goes through, Google may be forced to not pay Mozilla anymore, which would nuke Mozilla’s biggest source of income. This may genuinely cause big problems for Firefox.
It’s fine to criticize Mozilla for taking money from Google, but you would also have to accept that Firefox wouldn’t exist without it. Google revenue is something like 80% of the revenue Mozilla receives in a year.
Google has now legally been declared a monopoly so they no longer have a reason to be paying Mozilla.
In fact it may be that Google is no longer allowed to pay Mozilla to make Google the default search engine on Firefox. If this is the case you will get to see how well they do without that money.
To be clear, I don’t like that Mozilla is taking this money either, but the only way they’re going to be able to stay afloat is by taking money from someone. Unless everyone who uses Firefox donates regularly to Mozilla.
I hope whatever remedies the court decides upon to weaken Google’s monopoly end up helping Firefox, otherwise it’s just making Google a bigger monopoly. But this case was mostly about search, and I don’t really trust the Justice Department or the courts to be this keenly aware of the state of web browsers.
Are you willing to fund Mozilla… Oh wait 😆
Na, the payments were never about monopoly on Firefox it was always about being the default.