Firefox makes enough in its portfolio to maintain its core. It doesnt need all the new bullshit that is only looking to spend money
Orgs have to wean themselves off big tech dollars. Painful, but has to happen. They’ll have to restructure and refocus. Maybe cut out the AI stuff and focus on core functionality?
What wouldn’t I be able to access without compatibility investments? Spotify, LinkedIn? I think I’m fine.
Besides, what’s the point of OSS that is owned 85% by a big company?
Linux Mint puts out a great OS for a few thousand per month. With the start it’s got, Firefox could go on for decades without more income.
Mint is based on Ubuntu which in turn based on Debian.
Mint is neither developing OS, or Linux kernel from scratch.
On the other hand, Mozilla is maintaining Firefox browser and most importantly Gecko JS engine all by itself.
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.
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.
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
15% of their revenue just for the fucking CEO (a string of really bad ones at that) is a huge fucking problem.
But isn’t google search fucked?
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.
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?
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.
It’s one that doesn’t yield any benefit to Google, in the now.
This is a very stupid comment. Librewolf literally takes Firefox and hardens it. If there is no Firefox, there is no Librewolf.
What a stupid reply. Use it in the interim to spite Google.
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.
You’re putting forth an utterly moronic reply, yet again. No surprise. I don’t care if the fork dies, or Firefox. In the moment though, using it benefits neither Google or Mozilla.
Just try to read it again slower, put your fingers over the words.
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
Open source aint going anywheres, no worries here
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…
Browser codebase is really complex and requires dedicated dev effort.
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
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.
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
