Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Does Mozilla actually benefit from me using Firefox?

So there are calls to boycott Firefox because its CEO has made anti-gay political donations.

My question: does my using Firefox actually benefit Mozilla or its CEO in any way?  I didn't pay for it.  I'm not being shown any advertising.  Does it actually have any impact on them?

This question is not purely academic.  As I blogged about before, I don't want to use Chrome because I don't like Google's sneaky attempts to manipulate me into using it.   But if we should be boycotting Firefox too, what am I supposed to do?  Use a subpar browser?  (I've used IE and Opera, and find them both less useful than Firefox or Chrome.)

On one hand, it seems more important to choose not to use Chrome, because my reasons for doing so are directly related to the company's business practices as they affect me as a consumer.  They keep inconveniencing me in an attempt to get me to use their browser, so I shouldn't reward this by using their browser.

On the other hand, you can't let convenience overrule a political boycott, or that completely defeats the purpose of a political boycott.

On the other other hand, if Google so very badly wants me to use Chrome (which users don't pay for either), there must be some benefit to a company if people use their browser.  Although Google and Mozilla have different corporate structures. Google has shareholders and stuff, whereas Mozilla doesn't. The internet tells me that the Mozilla Corporation is not non-profit, but its profits support the Mozilla Foundation, which is.

Normally I'd go ahead with the boycott, but in this case the user-friendly alternative is something I'm already boycotting.  Not sure what to do here.

Any thoughts?

Update: Some info via @AmyRBrown on Twitter (you can see the full conversation here):

A primary revenue source for Mozilla is money paid to them by Google when people access Google via the Firefox search box.  (The FAQ of Mozilla's 2012 Annual Report confirms this, and adds that they also get search box revenue from "Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and others".)

So an effective economic boycott would be not to use Google or any other revenue-generating search function in the search box.

Changing the search engine to Duck Duck Go should generate the same results without Google involvement, and there are also unofficial Google toolbar add-ons for Firefox that don't pass through the search box and therefore generate revenues.

I haven't yet figured out if my own preference of Wikipedia in the search bar generates revenues, or if there are other benefits to my using Firefox even if I'm not generating revenues for them.

4 comments:

laura k said...

These kinds of political decisions are always tough. People who call for boycotts seldom suggest viable alternatives. (Tangent: that is why I like emails from the David Suzuki Foundation. They suggest alternatives!)

Sometimes the people who want a boycott haven't even investigated the alternatives... which are sometimes just as bad.

I assume that your using Firefox benefits Mozilla because of advertising. But I don't know for sure.

I wish there was a good third choice - Firefox, Chrome, or... what?

M@ said...

I was at a tech geek lunch a while ago and happened to be sitting at a table with a guy from Toronto who works for Mozilla. Their main source of income is from search engine referrals -- when you use the search bar to search through Google or Bing or whoever, Mozilla gets a tiny fee for referring people to that search engine. So yes, they do benefit from you using Firefox.

I don't know if there's another decent option out there, unfortunately.

impudent strumpet said...

I don't know if it shows up for people reading with RSS, but I updated the post yesterday with some information I got from twitter about that search referral revenue model and possible ways to use to it do an economic boycott while still using the browser.

But now the CEO has resigned, so the whole thing is moot.

It was really interesting to learn about how these things work though!

laura k said...

Cool. Thanks for the update. I have to get caught up on this whole story.