Hrm, I guess I should've looked into them a bit more during the Firefox-Cliqz debacle. I still think it was the wrong move for Mozilla BUT it's also sad that we lost another player in search engine diversity.
I also wonder what will happen to Ghostery, considering they were acquired by Cliqz :/
> There's a lot of FUD regarding this. We outline what happened here: <Link provided>
Yep, I still stand by the statement that it was a debacle and was a poor decision by Mozilla. All parties should have known that users wouldn't appreciate the privacy violation and as a user of Firefox it was disheartening to see.
For what it's worth, I also still stand behind the idea that this just dropped search diversity and user options. There also seems like other things that Cliqz did helped further user privacy and rights. Sad to see that go
When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense.
I don't think this was a good decision by Mozilla, especially as Germany is very privacy focused and its marketshare in Germany was quite good. The very next year I believe marketshare dropped in Germany substantially.
This was another Mozilla self-own, and it was painful to watch from inside while I worked there.
> When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense.
I don't see where I made this "clarification".
Let's be clear. Firefox was trying to test switching from Google to Cliqz (where it had a stake). Mozilla had a difficult time trying to break the golden cage they find themselves in. To their credit, they did try. Ultimately the Cliqz-Firefox integration was, unilaterally, cancelled. If your main source of revenue comes from your “competitor” you are slowly pushing yourself to irrelevance.
And also, the privacy issue again: I addressed a similar question in another comment in this thread [0]. If you want to spread FUD, please make a proper case.
> Mozilla had a difficult time trying to break the golden cage they find themselves in.
They could have partnered with Yahoo (and in fact did, at least temporarily), or Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Any of these search engines would be chomping at the bit to become the default for a browser as popular as Firefox.
I also wonder what will happen to Ghostery, considering they were acquired by Cliqz :/