You think Mozilla really has much leverage in a situation like this? Google is the best search engine and everyone knows that. Mozilla would do their users a disservice by switching to Bing or something, and this could even be seen as a positive thing by Google due to the theory that it would drive more users to Chrome.
While I agree you can also look at this from a perspective of mutual benefit, it's certainly not an obvious open-and-shut deal, especially not with Chrome in the mix. It's simply a matter of priorities, and as I noted in the grandparent, it's easy to conceive a situation where this perspective may shift.
Also, I think that executives care about the opinions of shareholders about as much as Congresspeople care about the opinions of constituents, i.e., they don't care at all unless it looks like something will cause a major disruption to their continued employment.
Mozilla has a lot more leverage than you think. They could stop giving their browser away and sell an "ad-free" version for $5, which bundles Adblock and blocks google ads. Mozilla would survive, Google would be forced to drastically change. Google would be bat shit crazy to give up its leverage over Mozilla. It would be so insane that no one at Google would reasonably consider it.
While I agree with you that Mozilla would survive without Google, it wouldn't continue in its present form for long-term (more than 5 years) without a similar deal from someone else (i.e. Microsoft). And this:
> They could stop giving their browser away and sell an "ad-free" version for $5, which bundles Adblock and blocks google ads.
Simply isn't enough to make up the difference and may even end them if they tried it. Paying for free features and inferior browsers? (Yes I use Firefox but also Chrome.) What is this, 1993?
There are a lot of possibilities beyond just switching a default from one competitor to another. For example, a differently-designed UI could make it easier to get results from multiple search engines. For one illustration, see http://clarkbw.net/tmp/Firefox-Awesome-Search.html
You really think people are going to change their browser just because their favorite search engine is not the default? It takes exactly two "clicks" of the mouse to change the default search engine in Firefox.
Mozilla would switch away from Google in a heartbeat if the money was right.
If Mozilla switched Firefox's default search engine from Google to Bing, I would how many Firefox users would manually switch back to Google. I also wonder how many users would even realize that they were using Bing instead of Google. <:)
I doubt many people would bother I change it back unless they started getting really bad results to queries. Bing is a pretty solid search engine, most wouldn't really notice a quality change.
>Also, I think that executives care about the opinions of shareholders about as much as Congresspeople care about the opinions of constituents, i.e., they don't care at all unless it looks like something will cause a major disruption to their continued employment.
Yep, Larry, Sergey, and Eric has dual-class stock AFAIK. I think the real problem with this comes from the greedy legacy MBAs who abuses this.
Google is the best search engine and everyone knows that.
A massive percentage of the internet using population do not know what a search engine is. I've seen people put "www.facebook.com" into the google search bar. People do not know the difference between the google search bar and their address bar.
While I agree you can also look at this from a perspective of mutual benefit, it's certainly not an obvious open-and-shut deal, especially not with Chrome in the mix. It's simply a matter of priorities, and as I noted in the grandparent, it's easy to conceive a situation where this perspective may shift.
Also, I think that executives care about the opinions of shareholders about as much as Congresspeople care about the opinions of constituents, i.e., they don't care at all unless it looks like something will cause a major disruption to their continued employment.