Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, used his personal blog to urge Firefox users away from Google and to use Microsoft's search engine Bing, instead. Dotzler cited privacy concerns, specifically pointing to comments recently made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
"I think judgment matters," said Schmidt. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Dotzler then links to the Bing add-on for Firefox, stating that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's (and notably fails to mention Yahoo at all).
Schmidt was talking about laws in the US, but the way he worded his beliefs did not sit well with privacy advocates—and a whole lot of other folks—including Dotzler. Microsoft has to respect the Patriot Act and other laws just as Google does, but after seeing Schmidt's comments, Dotzler decided that Firefox users need to be reminded of Bing's existence.
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Dotzler's statement further adds to the unstable relationship between Google and Mozilla. Firefox has had Google as the default search engine for years, and the default Firefox Start Page homepage is really just a rebranded Google search engine webpage. Mozilla has always made sure that the Google search engine was easily accessible from Firefox.
One of the reasons for this is that the larger majority of Mozilla's revenue has always come from Google (about 97 percent). In November 2009, we noted that most of Mozilla's revenue was still being generated through search deals with Google and other popular website operators (one of the reasons why Dotzler can't simply push for Bing becoming the default search engine in Firefox).
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