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.
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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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
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).
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
Large team? Yes. hundreds of millions in operating budget per year? No.
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…)
Jeez why are mozilla execs the dumbest people in the fucking room! Next they will say the earth is a spheroid.
I fail to see how this is new news, we have known this for years now, no?
I looked at their finances --which anyone can do-- and even if Google were to remove their funding tomorrow, Mozilla still has about 2-3 years of reserve capital they can burn through. Not optimal but it is not like they will disappear in a year.
Clearly, not a position they would want to be in, but they are not disappearing overnight.
And with it the open web.
If (and it’s still a big if) Google is forced to sell Chrome they’ll sell it to either Facebook, AltmanAI, Microsoft (lol), or else some shady tech company that has no reason to want to own it but is an even thinner rubber mask for the CIA/FBI/etc.
This is why I’m sure it’ll happen (dooming hard). The US government wants web control and censorship and one big thing standing in the way is the open web Firefox fosters. Kill that off and the rest falls in line for corporate/government surveillance, control, and the end of anonymity and anything resembling free speech to the disliking of the aforementioned parties.
Firefox abandoned the open web over a decade ago. jwz » Mozilla’s Original Sin
They’re not good, I admit that. But there is no better at present.
Your choices are Google, Safari (Apple devices and OSes only), or Firefox. It’s as simple as that. Pretending otherwise is living in a fantasy land. There’s no easy road out of here realistically. New browser engines take years (perhaps the better part of a decade at this point) to make and the inherent complications of web standards and their volume means I regard things like Ladybird as a silly meme sucking up nerd and venture capital dollars rather than a serious endeavor.
The effort to build a web browser from scratch today compared to 15 years ago has scaled massively and I think that’s intentional on the part of companies like Google and Microsoft to shut out the competition and to shut out small actors and to control the web for themselves and western governments.
The last decent bits of Firefox are the ones holding back a tidal wave of bad things from coming to destroy the sickly remains of the open web in very quick fashion. Right now I can block ads, I can shut up my browser from phoning home, my browser isn’t made by an ad company, and it’s not made by a company that has a vested interest in completely airtight DRM because they own a video platform and/or are friends with big Hollywood studios (yes they implement DRM, no it’s not done as tightly as Chrome, the fact major streaming platforms restrict it to 720p should show you that).
They’re not the hero we need, but they’re far from the worst villain and when they are gone much as I have criticized them we are going to be fucked because no one can replace them.
The 90s ideals of an open internet that persisted into the 2000s that led to Firefox have vanished, replaced by various grifts that call themselves web 3.0. The illusion the liberal capitalist west was weaving of human rights and freedom which resulted in space for many good things is being clawed back now that their hegemony is under threat.
Frankly I don’t see the EU or China or some large, benevolent, very wealthy organization stepping in to build a new browser that’s privacy respecting, not full of backdoors, not totally in the thrall of the worst corporate interests. And I don’t see Mozilla selling Firefox to some benevolent org. Not in the near term, in 8 years who can say but we’ll spend many horrible years wandering in the wilderness during that and the web will permanently enshittify in ways that Firefox could have at least slowed.
I see two options in the present and they are Firefox somehow managing to continue to exist without completely compromising things to the point that librewolf devs and others give up because the soil is too toxic or it not doing that, collapsing entirely, stuffing itself full of ads and spyware that’s very hard to remove to attempt to stay afloat.
It’s like shrugging at a law gutting union protections and saying “revolution, revolution, revolution” indifferently to the suffering coming down the pipe and the uncertainty when the conditions for what you want to happen aren’t near, when you’re staring down the barrel of worsened oppression and even the potential of salvation is years, a decade away. That’s how I regard people indifferent to Mozilla imploding.
Do I wish there was a way to snatch Firefox away from them? Yes. But there isn’t. In fact if anyone was able to they could right now, it’s opensource and they could just fork and get to work and start making something better. The idea that the void will be filled by good things is “hand of god, hand of the markets” liberal capitalist brained thinking.
Most people don’t give a shit about web privacy, about not seeing ads online, about controlling how websites display, about not having all their data sucked up or about companies pushing evil web standards that take away control and hand it to abusive governments and corporate actors so this isn’t going to lead to some revolutionary push-back, it’s going to lead to the collapse of the last militant hold-out for privacy advocates.
Frankly I see a nightmare scenario where Chrome is bought by a company that takes it closed source (even partially) or buries the spyware and bad things in so deeply they can’t be removed by open source fork maintainers due to the burden while simultaneously Firefox either simply ceases to be developed or enshittifies and deploys its own ads and spying. At that point we’ll have nothing. There aren’t enough nerds who care about privacy to fund a privacy respecting, standards compliant web browser that manages to not be blocked by most websites. As it is if Firefox came out 5 years ago and wasn’t grandfathered in from their good old days of being a big boy player they probably wouldn’t have the sway they have on the internet standards council and would probably be blocked a lot more aggressively.
Should Mozilla be restructured and stop acting in such a lousy fashion? Absolutely. Do I see any way for us random web users to force that? Not at all. It’s a lousy situation but one which can get much, much, much worse.
Websites already blacklist firefox and is sickening
Firefox has experienced declines in profit and market share, while the CEO’s compensation has increased. This situation raises questions about the company’s performance and priorities.
Is that the executive paid 10 million a year? Or maybe one of the few millions a year ones?
Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation.
But Plohman (via the last link) is. According to this (PDF warning), that’s $415,519 total.
On the for-profit side, who knows! It’s anybody’s guess.
MOZILLA could be doomed. Firefox? Not so much
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.
They provide like 99+% of the development work. You won’t easily replace that with volunteers.
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.
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.
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.
They changed CEOs just last year…
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.
