Jeez why are mozilla execs the dumbest people in the fucking room! Next they will say the earth is a spheroid.
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…)
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.
I have to imagine competing with a de-Googled Chrome is also a concern. I wouldn’t think this apples to the majority of users, but a lot of people currently using Firefox today are only doing so because of a dislike of Google (and Microsoft), who might be willing to go back to a responsibly managed/truly FOSS Chrome.
Personally I have just always really liked the firefox icon
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.
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.
MOZILLA could be doomed. Firefox? Not so much
If Mozilla is doomed, so is Firefox. You underestimate how complex Firefox is. It’s almost as complex as the Linux kernel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
