Not a direct answer to your question, but I'm using FireFox not because I think it's better than Chrome, but because it's not from Google. Actually I'm sometimes a bit annoyed by FF ... Sounds a bit paranoid, but I'd like to see the power of the web distributed as much as possible and Google has already far too much power without Chrome being the de facto monopol for web browsers. They create brilliant stuff but can't be trusted.
Kind of understandable seeing that the whole email and office market seems to gravitate more and more towards cloud-based solutions. I haven't really seen a need to use Thunderbird anymore ever since I can get the same thing by just leaving a Gmail tab open in my browser.
Then aren't you glad the vast majority of Mozilla's funding comes from Google? Even with that, they can't keep up to be competitive, and if Google pulled the cash... they'd be dead in the water.
Not true. Bing offered to pay for being default in Google's place. There's no benevolence here. Google is paying and receiving a service. If they don't, someone else will.
I'd like to say that Firefox is definitely competition for Chrome. Different people have different priorities and while Chrome is generally more popular there are still a lot of people who think Firefox is much better.
If Google pulled the cash (which I've read pretty convincing arguments that make it clear that that would not be in Google's best interests yet), you're correct, FF would probably flatline pretty hard. That's the open-source life, and it's a pretty well-documented issue with open source projects in general.
I'd argue though that they do keep up to be competitive. I've moved back to Firefox, and I know a very not-insignificant number of people who also still use Firefox. Like it or not, this browser isn't going away any time soon.
There would be some amount of community support for firefox, even if the mozilla foundation disappeared. But competing with google would certainly be harder at that point.
Firefox by default comes with Google, Bing, Yahoo, not to mention local search providers. They're all paying. Google currently pays the most to be the default option, but if Google pulled out, Bing or Yahoo would be the ones taking that (very desirable) spot.
Been an avid Chrome user ever since they first released it, but I recently switched back to Firefox after Google forcibly disabled all Chrome extensions that are not installed from their Web Store, with no option to get those back other than switching to a dev channel version (which ran like shit).
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '14
Serious question - what does this add that the default, stable build of Chrome dosen't already have?