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Right now it’s already set as the default search engine and you have to work to change it to something else as I understand it. I’m proposing that no default is set and that the user is asked to select one upon first installing Firefox from an ordered list of search engines. If that’s already the case (it’s been a while since I installed Firefox from scratch), then I’d argue that’s fine. And it allows other search engines to contribute to be higher up in the rankings.
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I can’t think of anything that would replace the revenue that Google pays Mozilla that sustains the development salaries to hopefully keep Mozilla competitive and hopefully making it the best performing, convenient and private browser.
While I find your assertion inspiring and very worthy of consideration, I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development. Apple sells the hardware that goes with its OS(es), so they get the hardware revenue (not to mention the App Store and iCloud subscription revenues). They would have to start charging devices to use their operating system or something, and I have to wonder if that would be possible under open source licenses.
I would love an open, sustained, and even open source, secure operating system for phones that’s the target of app development. I think the Linux stack should should develop an NPR/PBS type ecosystem public funding of development (with maybe the corporate underwriting of those networks being equivalent to contributions from corporate employed developers to the open source code) and I’d love for it to be a real competitor in the smart phone market (knowing the Android stack modifies and sits on top of Linux).