Yahoo Sues Mozilla For Breach of Contract -- So Mozilla Counter Sues Yahoo (betanews.com) 112
Mark Wilson writes: Mozilla and Yahoo have started a legal spat about the deal that existed between the two companies regarding the use of the Yahoo search engine in the Firefox browser. On December 1, Yahoo fired the first shot filing a complaint that alleges Mozilla breached a contract that existed between the two companies by terminating the arrangement early. In a counter complaint, Mozilla says that it was not only justified in terminating the contract early, but that Yahoo Holdings and Oath still have a bill that needs to be settled.
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With the number of people who say Mozilla is irrelevant, I can only assume you're mining for some karma. As such, how does it feel to be a sycophant?
Myself, and quite a few friends prefer Firefox as it's the only browser that I'm moderately confidant isn't mining every mouse move I make over its window sending every detail to a faceless corporation so they can mine every last bit of info about me to increase their earnings a few cents a quarter.
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LOL. "I don't like those numbers so I'll just handwave them away."
new extension-less version of Firefox
*Checks his add-ons* Nope, they're all working just fine, thanks. You need to troll better.
so if your website is broken in Firefox
I'll bet you $20 those numbers are even more trivial than the ones you just dismissed.
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*Checks his add-ons* Nope, they're all working just fine, thanks. You need to troll better.
Congratulations on not using any addons of consequence, then. Most people lost the majority of their extensions, with no way to get them back in the new Firefox, because the APIs they used are simply gone. The ones that do remain are pale shadows of themselves. The new "NoScript" is a joke, compared to the old one. A ton of features are simply gone. But, hey, you can still see the little S in the toolbar, so I guess the new API allows for that much.
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Actually, I'm enjoying the new interface more than the old one, and it works just as well as it did before.
No, it doesn't. The new NoScript is missing a TON of features that the old one had. It's missing them because the new WebExtension API makes it impossible to implement them. Just because you're too oblivious to notice doesn't mean they're not there.
Also, complaining about the the lack of addons only a couple weeks after the release of 57 is churlish.
There's been far more time than "a couple of weeks" to port extensions. The reason extensions aren't being ported is that, in the majority of cases, it's been flat-out impossible. The extensions aren't going to be ported because it's simply impossible.
In fact, No
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So many you couldn't even mention one? Wow, how exhausting.
There's been far more time than "a couple of weeks" to port extensions.
Deosn't really change the fact that you're still like a kid at christmas whining he didn't get enough toys.
And I'm not talking about the horrible new UI
You mean the one that has minor changes from the old one? Jesus, the hyperbole on you.
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What a rich fantasy life you lead. I post a couple snarky comments on a dead website, and all of a sudden I'm the poster boy for what's wrong with "the Firefox community".
Here we have users very clearly explaining
Clear as mud maybe. If only your standards for logical arguments were as high as your standards for web browsers.
without users even getting any benefit fro
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Incorrect.
No one else is dumb enough to think that a cost of "free" justifies shit software.
Nice strawman.
Judging by your level of butt-hurt-ness, you must be involved in developing firefox
Ooooh, strike two.
How much are the asshole, slap-the-monkey, shitbird advertisers of the world paying you to kill NPAPI and/or force HTML5 down our fucking throats?
Aaaand you're out!
A very precious few of us know what you're doing and wh
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Notice how I don't care, coward?
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Well there's your problem. You don't want Noscript, you want someone to wipe your ass.
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*This* is the reason I quit using Firefox. After the third time it broke all the extensions I used to keep autoplaying malware launchers from killing my bandwidth, I switched browsers. A few switches later, and Palemoon seems a good fit.
Funny but since 57 came out I find that there is much less of the crap happening without having to block stuff. So far no sites have made noise at me without my permission or a stupid click in the wrong place. 57 seems to block the porn site inspired hover_over_sound cursor blues and site redirects that once were the scourge of web browsing sites that use all sorts of js hooks with animations plastered all over the page like this site that at one time was unusable without a firefox extension to block the on [usedvancouver.com]
Re: Pissing War (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the CEO of Yahoo or the CEO of Mozilla trolling Slashdot?
Lets face it both are the Distant 3rd place players in their respected areas. With Microsoft being #2, and Google being #1.
I have found 3rd place to be an interesting place. Where you are big enough so you can innovate new ideas because you are not tied to the old idea, because it didn't really work out that well. Or you just try to fight for what you had slowly dying.
We won't find the Next generation browser or search engine from Google or Microsoft. They have too much to loose if they change it too much. But the #3 players have the ability to do something new.
Firefox Quantum is a good step, but I wouldn't call it next generation, and Yahoo is just declining.
Re: Pissing War (Score:5, Informative)
Is the CEO of Yahoo or the CEO of Mozilla trolling Slashdot?
The ghost of Marissa Mayer strikes again [recode.net]. When Mozilla signed their contract with Yahoo, she put in a clause that gives Mozilla the right to walk away from the deal at any time if they don't like whoever aquires Yahoo -- AND -- Yahoo would still have to pay Mozilla $375 Million a year till 2019.
I'm guessing that Yahoo's new corporate overlords at Verizon aren't happy about this.
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I can hear Marissa laughing now. [youtube.com]
Yahoo and Microsoft brought bad management to FF? (Score:2)
Mozilla's bad management.... (Score:1)
dates all the way back to when they were till netscape.
But it REALLY turned into a mess those first two years the Mozilla Foundation was formed, when they decided to throw out the old C based browser and replace it with an entirely new C++ browser which took two years to develop. People often forget about that. They had a worked browser they could have almost released in 1998, but chose instead to throw the whole thing out, which lead to IE dominating for the next 4 years, only beginning to get displaced on
That's a good direction for further examination. (Score:2)
"From there it was a constant churn of improvements combined with an even bigger pile of new bugs. Bug reports and even patches were ignored as the codebase rapidly bloated."
"Google thre
Mozilla Foundation: Where does the money go? (Score:2)
Firefox isn't in 3rd place. It's much worse. (Score:1)
Based on the latest browser market share stats [caniuse.com], Firefox isn't in 3rd place. It's much worse than that.
Yes, Chrome is the leader, without a doubt, at about 60% of the market, including both mobile and desktop devices.
Second place goes to Safari, with about 12% of the market.
UC Browser for Android is at about 8%.
So at this point we know that Firefox is at best 4th place, at around 4% to 5% of the market.
Things get hazy at this point,
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I'm not sure it was supposed to instantly gain users.
It makes sense that it lost some with the extension breakage, but the goal is to stop or release the slow bleed.
I use it, and it's better, I'm less frustrated at it. The change of default search didn't effect me because it was an upgrade, but that is major, bing was so bad it made me angry about 1 in 5 searches (stupid things like not recognizing a search as for an address and requiring me to click the maps tab).
For the average user FF is now competitive
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Being competitive isn't enough, not having hateful search isn't enough.
But it is, for the first time in years, meeting both of those criteria.
Maybe one day it will be better, maybe it will slowly die out, but for now at least, it is not definitively worse, that is a dramatic improvement.
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so, one logical mistake invalidates the rest of someone's statements? SOMEONE dropped out before finishing their philosophy degree.....
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He who gets the market share, controls the development.
We had a mountain of browsers that look like Netscape (A lot of buttons for a lot of features), Then the UI changed to look more like IE (Icons without button borders), then they all changed to look like Chrome as little buttons as possible and just one big location bar that does duel job (yes google took that from Firefox), and the Tabs take over the blank part of the window borders.
What Yahoo? (Score:2)
Didn't Yahoo go bankrupt by now?
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Didn't Yahoo go bankrupt by now?
Not that I'm aware...it did get bought by Verizon/Oath though, and from reading the article that is a lot of what has led to the current issues before the court - the new owners and Yahoo! were not honoring the contract themselves. Me? I always change the setting from Yahoo! to Google anyway as I suspect most people using FIrefox do. So Mozilla finally reverting back to Google by default just makes life easier. And yes,I'd set IE and other browsers to use the Firefox Google page to try to help contribute t
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Wow, I made a mistake surfing /. at -1 today.
That's ok on this thread you might not have to look at your own posts for very long that way!
Yahoo should lose and lose hard (Score:3)
IANAL, but I think Mozilla was 100% justified in claiming a total lack of faith just on the way that Yahoo handled its data breaches. The fact that they were having their own problems with the search side and Yahoo dealt so poorly with its users in an equally important area of their business is a perfectly reasonable basis to conclude that Yahoo just doesn't care.
Termination under the contract (Score:5, Informative)
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As for Yahoo, so lame, so lame. Take a page from Mozilla and get back to what made you good from the start
Problem with this possible Yahoo strategy is that what made Yahoo good in its early years was that it did an excellent job at meeting the needs of web users of 1995 - 2001 or so. It was one of the best search engines of the time, and Yahoo Groups was far superior to anything else in replacing pre-Web BBS technology. But then the world changed.
We've seen this in other growing technologies. For example, by 1950 steam locomotive technology had become very sophisticated, but was then replaced by diesel electri
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this is mostly FUD
Safebrowsing and geoip are features that can disable if you want,
Safebrowsing is very useful for most people as they aren't tech experts to recognize a fake programs os sites... it's enabled by default and it should be. This is a trade between security and (a limited, as it's only download URLs) privacy lost.
GeoIP DB is used when a site requests your location and YOU accept it (or enabled accept always)... it's not enabled by default
next, the external companies:
- "Adjust" is the "newrelic"
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That is why you should use FireFox instead of Chrome.
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Would be nice to have a new Browser project which is a bit more concerned about User's Security Policy than whatever w3c says how the Internet is "supposed" to work. If, for some reason, I am opposed to the Internet, and want the browser to only extract and display the text (using only a bitmap font), show a clickable button instead of an image or iframe (or anything more complex), run only first-party scripts under an interpreter, giving the Script only what it needs in terms of DOM manipulation to keep the Script happy (and to display the desired results), and validate any certificates the website shows [even if I am the CA and am only using the browser on an Intranet] -- I should be able to do that. Moreover, the browser's software components should be coded simply enough that its minimalistic browsing mode should be verifiable.
Here is the perfect answer to your dreams [browser.org]. It still works perfectly well and does almost all of what you desire perfectly and very securely if you run it without root priv.
Just wanted to point out something (Score:1)
Yahoo has gotten a little quirky lately. New firefox gets bombarded with malicious redirects while on their site, meanwhile chrome hangs and in some cases gives you a oh snap! screen. Something tells me that a large portion of Yahoo's servers are compromised. I think they should pay a little more attention to the potential shitstorm they're about to get hit with rather than this legal bullshittery because they are repeating previous mistakes....again.
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Insanely bad contract for Yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)
The contract contained a nearly insane provision that if Yahoo was sold (which Marissa Mayer did not think would happen), that Mozilla had the right to no longer use the Yahoo search engine AND Yahoo had to continue paying Mozilla $375 million per year through 2019! So Yahoo is suing in hopes that they can at least no longer have to pay Mozilla since they aren't even using Yahoo anymore. Yet another testament to the brilliant business acumen of Marissa Mayer.
So essentially Mozilla is double-dipping here, and getting paid by both Yahoo and Google to use Google's search engine.
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Don't worry, I'm sure she's a genius at business just like Susan Wojcicki is too..and it's just coincidence that they got shoveled into those positions as diversity hires to make the company look good along with all of the "social" programs inside the corporate company to make it seem hot and trendy. And it has nothing to do with either of them seemingly being incompetent and crashing both companies with few survivors.
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Yeah, women are so useless at this sort of thing. Male CEOs manage to lose ten times as much value in half the time, destroy the company and walk away with all the loot before the women have even got their makeup on.
Nobody said that. The difference is also that those male CEO's are generally hired based on their ability and said ability to present themselves and their skillset. The vast majority of female CEO's so far have been hired based on their gender and appearances to look "progressive." In other words, hiring shit people is doing more harm then good.
Dinosaurs are suing each other? (Score:2)
Re:SCO lawyers (Score:5, Funny)
Mother: Of course you can. Where do you think lawyers come from?
Score:-5, Pwned (Score:1)
Witness BitZtream getting pwned! [slashdot.org]... twice [slashdot.org].....three times..... [slashdot.org] four times! [slashdot.org]
SCO... (Score:3)
Re: SCO lawyers (Score:5, Informative)
SCO was wrong. In too many ways to count. The court ruled in September 2007 that the copyright on "SCO's" code actually belonged to Novell. Novell had already released SCO's copyright claims earlier against IBM. The "code that is in Linux" is actually IBM's own home grown code. IBM wrote a filesystem called JFS for AIX, an implementation of Unix. Later IBM ported the JFS filesystem to OS/2. Later, IBM ported the OS/2 version of JFS to Linux. SCO claims that the JFS for AIX becomes AT&T copyrighted code because AT&T owned Unix. AT&T publicly claimed this was not the case, that if IBM or others wrote their own code and linked with licensed Unix, that they continued to own their own copyright on their own code. Therefore SCO claim against IBM is barred by promisary estoppel. (eg, you can't claim something publicly, as AT&T did, let others take business actions based on that promise, and then go back on it -- as SCO which claims to be AT&T's successor in the copyright interest in Unix.) The court ruled that SCO is NOT the successor in interest to the Unix copyright but Novell is. So SCO simply doesn't have standing to even bring the 2003 lawsuit. It took a separate trial (by Judge Alsup!) to positively confirm the ruling in Judge Kimball's court that ownership of the Unix copyrights belong to Novell, not SCO.
It is SCO that kept moving the goalposts, not open source community. SCO ammended it's complaint. Then again. And again. It tried to morph it's case into "methods and concepts" instead of copyright. It was SCO claiming that "code doesn't count" but rather "methods and concepts". The "methods and concepts" was a huge laughingstock on Y! SCOX stock boards for several years.
It was not IBM that kept dragging the case out, it was SCO. Clear back in 2003, IBM demanded SCO to produce the evidence of what SCO was claiming. If copyrighted code was in Linux, then produce exactly what Files, Versions and Lines of code that identify exactly what code SCO is suing over. SCO wouldn't IBM kept moving the court about this, and the court had to ORDER, THREE TIMES for SCO to produce some actual evidence. The third and final order was for SCO to disclose all allegedly misused materials by the FINAL deadline of Dec 22, 2005. SCO reluctantly produced a huge pile of hand waving and obfuscation. The magistrate threw 2/3 of this out without the primary trial judge even seeing it. The magistrate judge commented about the remaining 1/3 along the lines of: well, technically this is allowed but really? Is this trivial nonsense what you are claiming? (parphrased)
IBM tried to speed up the case by dropping IBM's four patent counterclaims. I forget which year that was in, maybe about 2005. But it was clearly SCO that kept dragging this out. Meanwhile SCO kept claiming very loudly and publicly that SCO was anxious for it's day in court. Finally, after several devastating rulings from the court, SCO was due to get it's day in court on a Monday. In 2007. I think it was Sept 17. On the Friday afternoon before the court date, SCO abruptly declared bankruptcy. Even though SCO was not actually insolvent. (what? bankruptcy fraud?) Then by gaming the bankruptcy court, SCO kept this farce alive for over ten years to this very day. The zombie corpse of this farcical fraud is still alive to this very day, stuck in appeals. But it looks like the end is near. SCO trolls are obviously still haunting various online forums.
SCO has done nothing but abuse the legal system with this farce.
I am only pointing out the highlights above. The tip of the iceberg. There is much, MUCH more beneath the surface for anyone who spent years following this outrageous nonsense.
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SCO was right, though. Their copyrighted source code is in Linux. The problem is that the open source community kept moving the goalposts, claiming that the code doesn't count. Meanwhile, IBM's lawyers dragged the case out excessively to bankrupt SCO. It was quite an abuse of the legal system.
Comical revisionist history on slashdot. A wonderful take on what happened indeed! You should work to the POTUS he is very high on this kind of take on the facts. As was HITLER!! SCO DID FUCK ALL TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE LINUX KERNEL on the contrary they tried desperately to prove there was use of proprietary secret header files from their version of a Unix kernel, which in reality was under copyright with Novell. Anyone who codes knows what actually occurred is complete and utter bullshit, because a header is