How does it work anyway? I mean, how does Firefox make money? Are they paid per google search or something like that?

And, do they make money if I use forks of firefox and use Google on them?

And, what are the total number of active users for Mozilla and do the forks account into this count?

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        That’s a common misconception. Microsoft paid Apple so they would drop a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of stealing concepts and ideas from Apple’s MacOS and putting them into Windows. Which was ironic because Apple had stolen them from the Xerox Palo Alto research lab previously. Gates anecdotally told Jobs “Steve, it’s like I broke into a house to rob it and found out you’d already cleaned out the place”.

        But it was Apple not Xerox or Microsoft that had put those concepts on the market first and they would’ve had a strong case. So Gates paid for it to go away and also arranged some cross licensing so it wouldn’t happen again.

  • mustbe3to20signs@feddit.de
    3·
    2 years ago

    Afaik the deal between Mozilla/Firefox and Alphabet/Google is that Mozilla receives funding for setting Google as the default search engine. When the user decides to change that after install it has no influence on that contract.

    My guess is that the deal is based on Firefox’ market share, so as long as the fork identifies as Firefox by user agent, this shouldn’t influence it at all.

    There can be only estimations, either based on market share analysis or build-in telemetry.

    • pipariturbiini@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      2 years ago

      There is an NPO called The Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox

      Just to be precise, Firefox development is lead by Mozilla Corporation, which in theory is a for-profit company; however it is fully owned by the Mozilla Foundation, and all profit is reinvested to the Mozilla project.