comments claiming mozilla doesn’t need the money make me feel i’m crazy. you actually think making a modern web engine that competes with chrome in terms of performance and compatibility is easy? that relying solely on donations from individuals and voluntary work are gonna cut it? if it was that easy, we’d have more than just gecko, webkit and webkit fork – but we don’t.
it also truly drives me insane when people bring up the forks, as if they’re anything more than re-skins.
without financial backing, mozilla is dead, firefox is dead, and the web will be 100% google’s. no project as large and complex as firefox stays afloat without corporate-level money.
The majority of Mozilla’s money actually does not go towards Firefox. They have a crazy amount of side projects.
looking at their 2023 financial report, unless i’m misinterpreting something, they spent around 200 million paying “program staff” (i suppose that’s the developers) and 130 million paying executives, which is more than i was expecting. still, if their revenue gets slashed in 90%, just firing every single executive wouldn’t be enough. they’d still have to fire firefox staff
No but maybe the C-level guys don’t need multiple millions while the actual developers don’t hardly get paid in comparison.
i might be mistaken, but mozilla’s executives get paid about 15% of the total revenue. it’s a lot, but it’s not the problem here
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I sometimes wonder if this really would be the case or if people would step up. Realistically I’m afraid you need a big team to develop a browser that can do everything from videocalls to online docs and 3d games (not very good but it’s kinda amazing).
Large team? Yes. hundreds of millions in operating budget per year? No.
Nah there is no way that Mozilla isnt 90% bloat at this point. The google deal needs to go if Mozilla wants to survive long term.
Who else would work such magic as making sure there is an AI integration panel, or a cool new logo.
What about the advocacy team that will bend over to whatever dodgy shit megacorporations want
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Yeah, I really don’t know about responsibly managed. The new owner might be better than Google, but it’s unlikely for Chrome to be bought by a charity. Ergo the new owner will want to make their money back and enshittify accordingly.
Personally I have just always really liked the firefox icon
They need to get the fuck rid of that executive. Whoever has been running FF the last couple years has done a terrible job in picking directions for them to go, IMHO.
The problem lies in the board and the company culture
They’ve gone though enough CEOs for me to suspect that there is a bigger issue.
Despite those choices, I’m not sure there were many other directions that could ever bring in the profits that Google does.
What the fuck would a non profit need to pull google level profits for?
Mozilla should have been a gatekeeper for open web standards and made a browser that catered exactly to that. The rest is window-dressing.
What did they do with the Google money, tho? Eye-watering packages for their MBA/Lawyer executives and compromise after compromise with DRM peddlers in the name of “market cap”.
Fuck em, and let it be a lesson for other non-profits. FSF doesn’t seem to be any worse off for not paying cOmPetiTiVe rAtEs to get some clueless execs to betray the mission to chase trends and funds.
I don’t see how being a non-profit suddenly makes it cheaper to build a secure, modern and compatible browser. (Although I know lots of people underestimate how much effort that takes. But just consider that already Mozilla’s doing it for far less money than Google invests in Chrome, for example.)
Running a community-centred nonprofit is inherently more efficient resources-wise than paying managers and execs piles upon piles of cash in a for-profit scheme
That’s the kind of thing that sounds nice, but in practice I don’t think that’s what evidence points towards.
They changed CEOs just last year…
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Isn’t that a fork of Firefox that still relies on Firefox development? Would it continue to exist if Mozilla shutdown and Firefox was no longer maintained?
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LibreWolf strips Firefox of telemetry, adds privacy and security tweaks, disables Pocket, and ships with uBlock Origin by default. It’s basically Firefox with hardened defaults and no Mozilla connections.
If Firefox ever collapsed, libreWolf couldn’t continue independently long-term, they rely entirely on Firefox’s upstream codebase. They don’t maintain their own engine (Gecko), so they’d lose the foundation their browser is built on. It’d be the end unless a fork of Gecko emerged.
Don’t bother replying. That user is an absolute fucking moron.
It’s ok. We teach our “morons”, not berate them. <3
Isn’t that a fork of Firefox that still relies on Firefox development?
Yes. And it seems like a lot of people who shill for it don’t understand that. If every Firefox user switched to LibreWolf then there would be no more Firefox and then no more LibreWolf. Firefox has done some questionable things lately but all of us jumping ship to something like LibreWolf isn’t the answer.
Would it continue to exist if Mozilla shutdown and Firefox was no longer maintained?
Nope.
This is a very stupid comment. Librewolf literally takes Firefox and hardens it. If there is no Firefox, there is no Librewolf.
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Huh? You’re literally recommending a fork of Firefox that won’t exist without Firefox. How can i be any more clear? Your comment is absolutely ridiculously stupid.
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Ah i get it. You’re a fucking clown who comments in bad faith and doesn’t listen to feedback. Typical.
Have you considered that maybe you could have worded your comment in a different way without just saying it was “stupid”? You are correct about Librewolf but there was no need to reply it that way
surely. until sites start breaking hard and severe security vulnerabilities get found. without maintenance it won’t be all that useful
MOZILLA could be doomed. Firefox? Not so much
They provide like 99+% of the development work. You won’t easily replace that with volunteers.
Literally the other way around.
Mozilla can continue to be an irrelevant little NGO with a tiny little office in SF pestering people and shouting into the void and setting up booths at tech conventions on very, very, very little money. A few million a year, much less than they stand to be able to earn from their investment fund returns annually.
Firefox on the other hand requires Mozilla’s hundreds of paid full time developers. Its codebase is nearly the size of Linux, as a browser it’s constantly patching security issues, adding in new features, fixing things that break for small amounts of the web, etc.
There is simply no organization waiting in the wings that has the money and the interest in making a privacy-preserving web-browser that can just pick up that slack.
If Mozilla is doomed, so is Firefox. You underestimate how complex Firefox is. It’s almost as complex as the Linux kernel.
But isn’t google search fucked?
Heres a fucking idea. Why dont you fire the execs that need all that cash, use that 10% to pay the devs and operate as a non-profit, foss company should?
Exactly, at this point it’s becoming clear that Mozilla is the problem. The amount of money it would take to simply fund a team of devs actively working on FF is a fraction of the money Mozilla pulls in. Most of that money is spent on execs, middle management, and random projects that they come up with to justify their existence.
I never really understood why mozilla insists on being a corporate entity in the first place. Tons of (if not most?) it’s development comes from volunteers already. Just scale down to doing basic development moderation and rely on donations / collaborate with other open source orgs.
Mozilla is the most profit-oriented non-profit org I’ve seen.
I think you’re grossly overestimating the share of volunteer contributions if you think it might even be over half. It’s amazing what contributors do, but the vast majority, and especially thankless-but-important work like web compatibility or security, is done by paid staff.
In terms of contributed code, obviously yeah. But there’s a lot more work involved in development than just that, plus all the basically necessary addons.
That is true, but all that wouldn’t be able to survive if Mozilla were to significantly scale back development.
Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
I fail to understand how they haven’t figured out a way out of this seems to me they’re using all the money they from Google as if there is no tomorrow… Why on earth also if Firefox is so clearly their main product does it seem to not always be at the centre of their attention? I get doing other products but they seem to not be going anywhere. Honestly, to a layman like me it seems they’ve been doing the same stuff as Google without having the massive ad revenue but with the search revenue. Where did the Firefox OS go ? They never followed through like Google did with their Pixels for example. Why?
On cross-examination by the DOJ, Muhlheim conceded that it would be preferable not to rely on one customer for the vast majority of its revenue, regardless of the court’s ruling in this case. And, he agreed, another browser company, Opera, has already managed to make more money from browser ads than it does from search deals. But while that may be a potential pathway to diversifying Firefox’s revenue, he added, scaling up such a business at Firefox may look different, in part because of the privacy-preserving approach it takes to products.
I don’t love that response. What are Opera’s ads like? There are two reasons I use Firefox : opensource and ad blocking… I honestly think Firefox should offer more branded services like their Pocket, VPN or email with thunderbird, why not even a cloud in a continuation of their Firefox Send service? Or just try to ask for donations from time to time with some transparency about the budget… I’d personally love to better understand why there is a corporation and a foundation.
I fail to understand how they haven’t figured out a way out of this seems to me they’re using all the money they from Google as if there is no tomorrow… Why on earth also if Firefox is so clearly their main product does it seem to not always be at the centre of their attention?
The answer to the second question is the answer to the first - there have been a ton of attempts at alternative sources of funding, but it’s hard to come close to the ~half a billion USD the default search deal provides. So far the branded services you’re calling for don’t seem to have been able to pull it off, and I haven’t seen any signs that donations would be able to either.
(Although as for email with Thunderbird…)
How does Mozilla get money apart from the Google search deal? Are there no other search engines willing to pay to be the (even country specific) default? Also if Google sell Chrome wouldn’t that mean they’d be able to keep the deal? In a sense they are no longer the monopoly?
On the second question: no one bids as high as Google, simple as that. Others may emerge, but no one’s gonna pay that much, and with Google out of the race, the bids can get even lower.
Is that the executive paid 10 million a year? Or maybe one of the few millions a year ones?
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Firefox makes enough in its portfolio to maintain its core. It doesnt need all the new bullshit that is only looking to spend money
Open source aint going anywheres, no worries here
The code is one thing. 300 skilled developers is another. Most of those could be full-time too.
Fire the highest paid exec first and I bet you there’s at least 30 devs paid for right there
Browser codebase is really complex and requires dedicated dev effort.
Open-source projects like this require dozents of full-time developers. It will be dead without a company like Mozilla running it. Imagine the Linux kernel with only hobbyist developers…
Dont worry im sure mozilla the ad company will be able to figure out a way to keepntheir CEO well paid.
