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It was on Mozilla.org before redirecting to getfirefox.com. Now, Mozilla has acquired Firefox.com and that’s the new canonical home.
See
When did Firefox Sync start using accounts.firefox.com for their login site? One assumes they’ve owned it since at least then, if not before. https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amozilla-firefox%2Ffirefox... says 2014? So probably earlier than that, though I don't know for sure when.
Seems like up until last month firefox.com redirected to mozilla.org/firefox. Now they're finally using their .com domain!
It was always getfirefox.com for many years. Was someone simply squatting on the firefox.com domain and asking some exorbitant price from Mozilla to relinquish it?
It was owned by a UK company called Firefox.
They actually linked to both Mozilla and Get Firefox for many years as a landing page.
When the company shut down, the owner owned it and redirected it to getfirefox.com instead of making a profit from it.
That‘s… commendable… or foolish?
I would have rented or sold it to the highest bidder.
Whoever you sold it to would have to have a valid Firefox trademark in a different field like the original owner did, or Firefox would be to snag it via a trademark lawsuit.
Or you could sell it to a malware site, who would lose it fairly quickly but might be able to make some cash in the meantime. I can't imagine they'd earn much though. The old firefox.com didn't have Google juice until after the transition.
The only value in the firefox.com domain is the ability to shake down Mozilla for a sum less than the cost of filing a trademark lawsuit. Which is significant, but not extremely so.
https://nissan.com/ even after his death didn't sell out to the car manufacturer (https://www.nissan-global.com/).
But Firefox is a for profit company worth millions? Why would you just donate it like that to a corporation? For the longest time I thought Mozilla was a non profit org but it doesn’t seem to be the case and they have millions in the bank? I would sell it for a fair price for both parties.
It's my experience that people who look for a way to profit off of every situation they encounter are usually both wealthier than me and also generally quite miserable, lonely folks. Also ironically, they usually are only as wealthy as they are due to generosity given to them earlier in life they would never give to others.
Not said with judgement, just observing.
> Not said with judgement, just observing.
Seems more like speculating than observing. Unless you can elaborate on what proof you have that each of the individuals you've "observed" (which doesn't include GP) were lonely and had handouts.
In this day and age anyone going against profit motive is commendable. the default is "fuck people over but not care because you're abstracted away from them". It's the tragedy of our times. Big respect for anyone who's willing to fight it.
many times it is rationalized as "fuck people over because even if I don't, someone else will, so I might as well be the one to profit". An attitude that scales well from individuals to big corporations.
And what, have it serve as malware/phishing?
Thankfully most people still seem to have morals and not fallen prey to pure capitalism
You are thinking all wrong, I wouldn't want to connect some hardcore wirefraud to myself.
I would have found someone on upwork to write me a firefox fork that contains a crypto miner.
The website would have some small print checkbox, making end users actively consent to mining crypto as payment for using the browser for free.
Pretty good place to download Chrome or IE, depending who bought it.
>I would have rented or sold it to the highest bidder.
Do you also steal from the library? Mozilla isn't some big bad corporation.
Personally, I'd be a little wary of pissing off the hackers who are fans of that browser using my meatspace name, but hey, you do you. Maybe when you're done you can stroll on down to the local motorcycle bar and kick over some Harleys and see how far that takes you in life.
Relax dude, it’s just a domain name
Am I the only one with deja vu? I distinctly remember a story, shortly after Firefox's initial launch, of a firefox.com domain owner gifting it to Mozilla. Maybe it was getfirefox.com and I'm just getting old and confused.
Where was it before? Been using Firefox non stop for 20 years but last time I went to the website was probably when I still used Windows XP.
I always liked https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ but that's not the primary consumer page.
I hear that they don’t embed tracking metadata in those builds on the FTP, but I haven’t confirmed that.
The normal download page embeds a unique tracking alphanumeric string in your build that is reported to the organization on a regular basis when the telemetry phones home unless you disable this manually and clear the values.
> I hear that they don’t embed tracking metadata in those builds on the FTP, but I haven’t confirmed that.
I believe it was getfirefox.com, which I remember primarily from adding banners to websites I ran back in the day. I forgot who previously owned firefox.com but I recall them adding a link to getfirefox.com on it back in the day.
In other words, the download page used to be:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/And mozilla-europe.org in Europe for some reason, a long time ago at least.
At a time when you'd also install spybot and ccleaner.
Yeah same.. I have no clue where it was hosted and been using it for 2 decades too.
Last time I downloaded it it must've been the mozilla website
People will still search "firefox" and click the first Bing Search Paid Ad to install it
So now we can finally expect marketshare to explode all the way up to 3%?
Finally! No more "You know, you should really get Firefox, it's super easy. First you need to go to this other website though. Yes, I know, I know. Just trust me, okay?"
Chrome = Google.com
Edge = Microsoft.com
Safari = Apple.com
Seems like Firefox is now the outlier, not the other way around.
Now Firefox is the only browser with a home page domain the same as its common name.
(Note: I’m not saying that I think it’s a bad thing.)
That may be, but mozilla.org isn't exactly a brand like google.com. Most people have never heard of it.
If you're trying to get non-technical people to try an underdog browser, simplicity helps. A single, straightforward brand name is better.
Literally everyone I know who isn't technical calls Firefox "mozilla". Including older people.
It's in the window title in desktop shortcuts and gets appended to every tab in the task bar: -- Mozilla Firefox
chrome.com redirects to www.google.com/chrome/
No one has to download Edge or Safari.
Technically Edge can also be installed on macOS/Linux/iOS/Android.
No one wants ...
FTFY
Opera had opera.com back when they were an actual browser (they still have it now, too). Vivaldi has vivaldi.com and Brave has brave.com.
Opera, Vivaldi and Brave are the names of the companies that own the browser though?
chrome.com redirects to https://www.google.com/chrome/ for whatever it's worth.
hahaha, indeed. but i always can't remember mozilla (i don't even know i spelled it right), the other is really to remember, and automatically you know google has a chrome browser, etc.
I mean, doesn't everybody just google the thing they want and click the first result? I don't think I've heard of people just guessing "<some brand name>.com" since back in the days before the browser address bar doubled as a search bar.
I do, but I also disabled the URL bar doubling as a search bar. When I want to find the official site, I'm using apt show though.