Google's been paying Mozilla for search traffic for more than 20 years, just like the other major browsers. It's not out of kindness any more than paying Apple for Safari traffic is out of kindness. It's literally payments for search traffic and reported to the IRS by Google as "traffic acquisition cost" or TAC. Google doesn't do it for "keeping Firefox afloat," it's about Google grabbing even more search traffic and dissuading browsers from sending their traffic to alternatives, or creating their own search engines, and always has been.
But Google was a mostly reasonable partner to browser makers until they got into the business themselves. After Chrome shipped, Google properties started mysteriously becoming slower or broken in Firefox in ways that had no good technical support and that consistently siphoned large numbers of Firefox user over to Chrome before being addressed. It happened over and over on major Google properties like Gmail and Docs all through the 2010s. Jonath's Twitter thread is gone but the reporting isn't https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
> Google's been paying Mozilla for search traffic for more than 20 years
Well, and Mozill gladly accepted the deal, being passive and without even trying to be self-sustainable. The (only) culprit here isn't Google. Mozilla's mismanagement has played a big role.
Mozilla had 10 engineers a total team of about 20 and about $1M in the bank and a few dollars in donations coming in when we made the Google search deal. Take that deal away in late 2004 and Mozilla dies by 2026. It seems like you don't actually understand any of this and are just bluffing.
