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.
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.
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.
Firefox makes enough in its portfolio to maintain its core. It doesnt need all the new bullshit that is only looking to spend money
But isn’t google search fucked?
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.
Websites already blacklist firefox and is sickening
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…)
MOZILLA could be doomed. Firefox? Not so much
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.
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?
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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.
They changed CEOs just last year…
And how much is the new one raking in? They swapped out the person, but kept the problem.
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.
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.
“What a stupid reply”. There’s some feedback for you. Remember the fingers next time you need to comprehend something.
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
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
It’s one that doesn’t yield any benefit to Google, in the now.
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.
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 wan.
Edit: nvm, I just remembered they completely shut off the advocacy division. Probably will shut off a bunch of other shit before they touch the execs.
Large team? Yes. hundreds of millions in operating budget per year? No.
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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.
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?
