They benefit from firefox OS being basically a thin client, which requires services being located in the web. That is one of the google's main attraction points. Most of the competition on the other hand focuses on installed native software.

And islam has similar rules, segregating non-muslims in places where they are not treated well, while in other places they were treated VERY well, encouraged to settle and left alone to practice [insert religion that wasn't deemed able to displace main religion] without restraint.

Wait, were you talking about how similar christianity and islam are? We certainly seem to agree on that point.

By that logic, same should apply to christians.

So when are people like you going to start taking responsibility for things like butchering done by various christians in middle east, genitalia mutilation done by christians in middle east, terrorist acts by Breivik et al, and so on?

Fact is, these people have a lot more in common with the extremist islamists (and also extremists [insert religion here]) worldwide. We have buddhists murdering the hell out of people in Burma, hindus butchering people in India and so on. Common element? Extremist religion.

Not so common element? The actual name of the religion. Moderate islam is pretty much like moderate christianity - take a look at former CIS countries that didn't get murdered by saudi-funded wahabbists, most of the muslims in Europe and Northern America. And before you explode at that one spamming extremist references, compare the extremists to, for example, christian laestadianism, which does most of the extremist stuff from suppression of women's rights to arranged marriages for children to paedofilia - and these people outnumber muslims in my country about 10:1, and they're pretty damn scary - I have a friend who to quote his words "managed to escape his family's grasp".

Fact is, christianity is about as much a "religion of peace" as any other large organized religion, be it buddhism, islam, hinduism, thaoism or any other. And you can mod me "troll" as much as you want - that particular fact will not go away no matter how much PR bullshit keeps getting spewed from TV screens. The only difference is that people like you view christianity as inherently righteous, and anyone who isn't doing it like you think it should be done is "doing it wrong". At the same time you do not accept that other religions should get the same right, and instead put them all under the same umbrella, extremists or moderates.

And in the end, like most hypocrites, you claim righteousness to be on your side.

Christianity has similar rules for non-christians. Research the word "ghetto" and its origins to find out more.

Burning oil sand. Not sand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands

And what exactly would this competitor hope to achieve? Vast majority of IE users don't use bing, to which it defaults - they use google. Most of mozilla's value to google is search referrals. This wouldn't change in any way if a competitor decided to oust google from mozilla. Most users would just switch default engine to google and keep on trucking.

And since most competitors want the same things as google from FF - minimal power to user, maximum power to the page itself, interface that is as close to their own browser's as possible while being obviously inferior to provide as little differentiation and desire to switch as possible and no actions that would block things like tracking or advertising, I'm having trouble seeing any kind of meaningful threat to google from completely losing control over mozilla. Other than FF starting to look like inferior IE instead of inferior chrome.

It's far worse than that. Google pays for search referrals. It's well known that most people in the world prefer google as their main search, including users of IE which defaults to bing.

In other words, any changes would likely cause most people to switch default search engines back to google, and mozilla wouldn't get any significant sums of money from the competitors. Which is why it's completely dependent on google for funding.

Because vast majority of people do not do this, your actions are akin to the idiot facing the huge tsunami and telling it he doesn't see the issue because he has the surfing board in his hands.

For quite a long while the only reason to use FF has been extensions. Even IE is better in vanilla state.

And for last of those many, many years we've seen firefox project made from a distrinctly different browser into inferior google chrome clone. We've seen mozilla abandon several anti tracking and anti advertisement initiatives. We've seen mozilla use funds to create utterly pointless things like mobile OSs obviously designed to fail from the start because they're built specifically to benefit google by being essentially thin clients completely reliant on web services (google's business model).

This is starkly differentiated from days when google clearly didn't exercise its power over mozilla years ago.

When you are paid by an entity, you are called "bought" in real world. Because that means that such an entity effectively has unlimited power in guiding your actions, by simply threatening, or even implying of pulling of funding. Effectively the entity becomes an existential requirement, with unlimited control over the subsidiary.

That is the position in which google and mozilla have been for a while. The only thing that changes is that over last few years, google clearly started using this position. You can see this in most mozilla's actions, ranging from dumbing down their browser interface from clearly differentiated and easily customizable to an inferior clone of google chrome, their abandonment of of various anti tracking and anti advertising initiatives and so on.

To conclude: mozilla is currently completely dependent on google. Most importantly - quite significant salaries of people in charge of mozilla are completely dependent on google. As a result, google actually has more control over mozilla than if it directly owned it, simply because the human drive to "please the guy who pays your big salary" will drive such people to push for changes they might think their "boss" would even remotely approve of. It's a well known business tactic and why certain kind of outsourcing where entity doing outsourcing work is completely dependent on single client is often more efficient than internal entity doing the same work.

I'm rather surprised that in this day and age with all the outsourcing issues someone would even bother arguing otherwise. It would require complete ignorance of reality.

Firefox is already an inferior version of chrome, so you can upgrade to it now if you want. Not because firefox wasn't one, but because it was intentionally made into one over last couple of years.

That is like arguing that if your neighbors business has a client that supplies 90% of revenue and profit and one that supplies 10%, losing the 90% one means that 10% one will step out.

In real world, that usually means bankruptcy.

This shows that they are in fact completely "dependent" on google.

Biggest "independent" (of major multinationals) browser right now is probably opera.

The point is that they effectively made firefox from a very functional and clearly differentiated power user browser into an inferior chrome clone ever since 3.6.x batch. That is indeed selling out.

No one is arguing about whether they need the money or not. The argument is that they sold out for that money.