Would this apply to services offering to "promote" your post/listing to the top of the page. Like what is the legislation and logic here.
cf. Mozilla Firefox Is Dying (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44939271 and a list of posts from 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303736
> US federal and state competition authorities recently asked the court of appeals to overturn the part of Mehta’s ruling that permits these payments.
You get the "competition authorities" you pay for. Decades of government-bashing, bureaucrat-bashing, sidelining and shit pay give you this level of institutional competence.
Google should still be split, but along different lines, e.g.
- google workspaces / gmail / maps / search / chrome
- search index / cloud / datacenters
- android
Everyone's only in it for the money. There are no good or bad people anymore, only...unfortunates. (that last line I stole from The Equalizer 2).
That said, the terms of the contract are not public, and it's possible that it was restricted in a fashion which did not permit such usage.
Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of some Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both).
But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time).
It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets ignored or taken for granted.
I'm aware that this very revenue is what Mozilla is complaining about. But the CEO could get off his fat ass and do his job finding an actual business model instead of just being a parasite.
However, I don't see who picks up the reigns if Mozilla dies. Like it or not, Firefox is essential for a somewhat (increasingly less) open web, and (at least for now) Mozilla is essential to Firefox. For those who want to see Mozilla die but Firefox live on, what are the more likely outcomes in your opinion if Mozilla went down? Do you see a big corp (which it increasingly seems is the only way to keep up with the needed pace for a browser) stepping up?
We would end up in the same place if everything is based on Blink/WebKit; arguably we're partway there already.
Hopefully Servo will provide a competitive browser engine and full browser in the future as well, with the bonus of being great for embedding. But it's not quite there yet. And other potential competitors have their own problems. Firefox is, for the moment, the most popular and only viable browser not based on Blink/WebKit.
also, previously on android, when apps were cleared from desktop, the browser used to quit. now you need to go to menu->quit. otherwise it will keep opening new tabs.
a non-tech friend of mine was once complaining about their phone being very slow. i looked at their chrome and -- i kid you not -- it had 800 tabs open.
non tech folks are a goldmine for the data stealers, and firefox likely implemented that 'enhancement request' to make it easy for them, not for the user.
Not their first foray into this case I suppose:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/amicus_b... (May 2025)
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/defendin... (Sep 2025)
I don’t think Firefox survives as a community based project.
"Nibbling at the edges" is what the competition authorities are proposing.
If there's only one browser engine the Web immediately closes up like a giant impenetrable clam. All of humanity will be left outside, doomed to scrape forlornly on the shell with our nails and dream of the pearls within.
I often wonder if the current model has been driving away contributors, since it _feels like_ contributing effort to support someone else's paychecque.
It might appear that FOSS has won, however in reality what happened is that corporations have managed to control the message thanks to business friendly licenses.
pessimizer•42m ago