Re: [LUG] Mozilla losing the plot a little bit further

On 20 November 2014 13:17, Martijn Grooten <martijn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 08:52:17AM +0000, Simon Avery wrote:
> I do actually care about Mozilla, having been a user and
> supporter for a very very long time.

Same here. I used it back in the days when IE had a 98% market share or
something (early 2000s).

I'd been toying with Opera for a while then - which was very quirky, and FF was a big step forward from everything else around it. It has a number of milestone improvements that we take for granted in all browsers now.Â

I think Google's dominance on the search engine market is equally
unhealthy even if I think that Google is pretty good. And that's why I
think this is a good move.

I understand, but disagree. I think it's a poor choice for users and a retrograde step.

Yahoo/Bing are at least as likely to use and abuse your data. Allowing for the fact that I am a mildly biased fan of them, Google are nowhere near as anti-competitive or anti-innovative as almost any other large technology company. Sure, they want to own everything and do everything because they think they can do it best - and I understand that annoys some people a lot. (It did me for a while too)

I accept that choice is a good thing, and that G's dominance is reducing that. But would I personally choose to reduce my options by boycotting them, even knowing they (like everyone else) is farming my information? No. I want the best search engine, and on a technical level, there is no decent competitor.

I think this choice is down to money for Mozilla. That's fine - I'm not a communist - but it's being done at the harm of the usability of its own product. That's not sensible business. To me, shows a company in trouble that's choosing the short-term benefit at long-term cost.

Clearly from the response here, and that the servers powering the mozilla article I linked to were grinding to a halt yesterday as news spread, means that this isn't a meekly accepted decision by the users and contributors (remember them?) in the project. They're pretty upset by it too and I suspect some will stop helping develop it.

For anyone who really cares, it is trivial to switch to a different
search engine (if Google wasn't already the default, which it is in all

Fair enough. That is something positive.

but three countries). For the remaining 98%, this will make the search
engine market a bit more diverse. And thus a bit more healthy.

I see what you mean, but I think it will end up with lesser informed and more frustrated users rather than raising the level of the competition.