Comment by mike_hearn

Realistically Google is doing Mozilla a favor and the money is a donation.

Firstly, Firefox's remaining userbase is pretty technical. They aren't the sort of people to blindly use defaults because they don't know how to change them. Even if Google cut Mozilla off entirely, tomorrow, 90% of Firefox users would continue to search on Google by default.

Secondly, what would Firefox switch to? Bing? What if MS don't care about paying Mozilla either, or only are willing to pay a fraction of what Google pays? What's Mozilla going to do? They'd have to go with Bing anyway because it's that or nothing. There are no other search engines willing and able to pay lots of money for browser traffic.

So Mozilla would be in a double bind: even if MS paid them to replace the Google deal, (a) most of their users would change the default back again, so they'd refer very little traffic and (b) Microsoft could cut them a very bad deal and they'd have to take it anyway. They'd still suffer a huge drop in income overnight.

No matter what Mozilla does, they will be depending on one of two companies BOTH of which make competing browsers and frankly, both of which would be quite happy if Mozilla just went away and died, given that from their perspective Mozilla's primary contribution to the web is telling the Chrome/Edge teams they can't do things.

I don't get the anti-trust angle. There is browser competition: Chrome, Edge, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. If Mozilla tried to claim that Google ending their deal was anti-competitive, they'd just immediately lose in court.

My guess is that Google continue to be Mozilla's sugar daddy for legacy reasons. They've done it for a long time, cutting Mozilla off would upset a lot of techies and the money is irrelevant to Google. But one day that calculus will change.

What might cause the calculus to change? Most obviously, if Google decides that Mozilla is no longer actually developing their browser properly, or if Mozilla's management just upsets the relevant point-person at Google badly enough. Baker obviously stopped caring about web browsers years ago, if she ever did at all, and is now treating the Google deal as a piggybank for pushing her political ideology. All it takes is for the person responsible for the Mozilla deal to be replaced by someone who hates anti-white wokeness and they've got all the ammo they need to just defund Mozilla completely. A less sympathetic organization is hard to imagine.