Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case.
Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]:
> Expenses
1. Program 'Software Development'
2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M
2. Management 'General and Administrative' :
2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M
I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses.
Let's ignore inflation and COL and ballooning costs, etc. If we look at just the ratio of expenditure. We have an NPO (on paper at least) that just went from spending a ratio of 4 to 1 between developers and managers to spending a ratio of almost 2 to 1.
I am not familiar with what is typical in American NPO's but I can't help but feel that my money will not be spent on the right stuff.
I know your intention is probably well placed but we do though need to factor in revenues:
Year Revenue
---- -------
2007 $75M
2023 $653M
I bring this up because G&A of big companies (in general) always outpaces R&D once they hit scale ... and in an ideal situation - your revenues should outpace R&D expense because you're getting economies of scale (which further dilutes the R&D to Other Business Function comparison).
And Mozilla has hit scale / become "big company" - with those kinds of revenues.
The reason why G&A outpaces R&D, is because now you have all kinds of work to do that you don't have to do when your small/underdog, like:
- regulatory compliance
- legal
- privacy
- advocacy
- public relations
- etc...
When you're the underdog, you don't have to deal with these activities and as a result, your expense base is more heavily skewed toward R&D.
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out the percentage is around 91%
That was the year their lawsuit with Verizon finished and they got paid their remaining due for the Yahoo search deal. Related, I think most their money from 2017 also came from Yahoo.
Imagine if a competent CEO had been at the wheel. Instead of spending quite literally billions on who knows what (certainly not a significantly better, more competitive Firefox), Mozilla could have instead transitioned to an endowed foundation model and built a sustainable, long-term future that could weather a scenario like today’s DOJ case which was not impossible to foresee (US v. Microsoft was in 2001 after all).
Again not diminishing Firefox's efforts but it's difficult not to compare with other _leaner_ open-source projects.
As an example the Linux foundation [0] had 270M in expenses in 2023. Of which even we aggregate international operations and corporate operations the expenditure is less than 21M in G&A equivalent activities.
You’re not wrong, but people get this mixed up because Firefox was a continuation of Netscape which did have a 90+% market share in 95. Mozilla however is a completely independent entity that continued to work on an open sourced browser created by a different entity.
This was wild to contemplate and I was about to raise my finger and say "Really?! 'G&A' at that scale?!" but at the same time even if those kinds of roles are over-hired - they have to be responding to need and within a realm they found risk-averse.
Having said that I just have had the same kinds of questions/trouble as OP about Mozilla's wild spending and budget compared to seeing their devs at grungy linux confs in the midwest when I was an undergrad in the 00s.
You did help point out what I really wondered about also and didn't understand, so thanks.
I agree with up that you have to take revenue into account as well. However, as an NPO Mozilla has no mandate to grow at all costs.
What’s the benefit of having Mozilla be this huge? How does it compare to the risk of shutting down if their revenue dries up, which is looking like a possibility?
Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit but Mozilla Corporation which develop Firefox is a for-profit entity.
There are other subsidiaries under the foundation umbrella like Mozilla.ai and MZLA/Thunderbird. This isn't something uncommon for large entity and there are many advantages. For example, it gives more freedom in term of decision making and spending to projects that aren't targeting the exact same consumer segment. Think about Thunderbird. Under Mozilla Corporation, it was always in the shadow of Firefox. Now, it's striving as an independent project.
The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million. Enough to keep a few dozen people employed.
The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc.
I wouldn't. And I'm a user! Mozilla needs to be restructured. And ideally they diversify their commercial ecosystem as well. Because they are way too dependent on Google.
If you look at Rust, created by Mozilla, they are set up in a more sane way. There's a foundation. It's well funded with sponsorships from the big companies that use and depend on Rust. Those companies employ people that contribute to Rust. Many OSS organizations are set up like that. It works. The diversity of contributors and commercial sponsors ensures neutrality and longevity. No single company has veto power. As long as valuable tech comes out, companies stay involved. Some disappear, new ones come along. Linux development works like that as well.
Ironically, Chromium at this point is better positioned to become like that. The main issue is that Google still employs most of the developers and controls the roadmap. But there are quite a few commercial chromium based products: Edge, Brave, Opera, etc. that each have development teams using and contributing to it. Add Electron (has its own foundation, based on chromium) to the mix and the countless commercial applications using that and you have a healthy ecosystem that could survive Google completely disengaging if they'd be forced to split off their browser activities.
I use Firefox mainly because of the iron grip keeps over Chromium and it's clear intent to cripple ad blocking, grab user data, and exploit its user base. But I worry about the dysfunctional mess that is Mozilla.
> The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc.
Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know that Mozilla funds things that are wildly not Firefox-related, like feminist AI conferences in Africa. Meanwhile Firefox looks more and more like an also-ran compared to its competition. All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser, not this.
I'm not sure how common this sentiment is, but I had a discussions with colleges who will NOT donate unless they can guarantee that their money is going to the development of a chosen product or even more granularity to a chosen feature.
There is very little probability that your friend would donate any money even if they could have a say at the feature. But even if it was the case it would not be enough to fund the development. And finally you don't manage a company like that.
I think it is more up to Mozilla to put its act together and implement more transparency. So that people start trusting the organization not to waste their donations on executive salaries.
How much did Mozilla spend on this conference? They sell badges to attendees, who must also pay for their own accommodations and airfare. Were there other sponsors?
I'm not sure this is the smoking gun you think it is.
And to do so in bad faith, no less - the event seems to have had 2-3 sessions related to feminism (out of a couple dozen), but no connection beyond that.
"Bad faith" just means "I disagree" huh? That "2-3" should be zero. Activist woke BS needs to be excised from Mozilla. It all brings nothing but conflict, waste, and censorship. Tech companies need to focus on tech. Go peddle your cancer somewhere else.
It is impressive indeed that you people get to throw the DEI card anywhere you don't like now. "Because of DEI, my browser got bad, the planes are falling of the skyes, and woke people are aiming a homo-ray at everything!"
God forbid those evil enterprises for spending an infinitesimal portion of THEIR money on trying to do the life of some people a slightly better, after years of the life of those same people being treated like excrement by people like you.
DEI has nothing to do with the failure in Mozilla being not sustainable. CEO/grand figures salaries, on the other hand...
> Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know that Mozilla funds things that are wildly not Firefox-related
It's not just that: Mozilla can't use any of your donation on Firefox. Firefox belongs to the for-profit, and money cannot flow from the non-profit to the for-profit. So in a way all of the random stuff that they do do as the non-profit is the inevitable outcome of their structure:
They have a product that people who care know is struggling to survive and so those people want to donate. Mozilla now has money that they can't spend on the product, so they have to find somewhere else to put it.
One might reasonably ask why the org whose primary purpose is maintaining the one independent browser engine is structured in a way that makes it impossible for donations to flow to the browser engine. I don't have a good answer that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory.
According to their 2023 form 990 (the 2024 one isn't published yet) those sort of donations are usually on the order of 15k. You don't get much browser for that money.
That's hardly an isolated example though, plus who knows how many staff hours went into evaluating various proposals and facilitating the conference. The big question is why. It's not like there are a dearth of social justices non-profits out there. It couldn't be easier to donate directly to such projects. Why can't we have a single non-profit focused entirely on preventing a total browser monopoly?
> The big question is why. It's not like there are a dearth of social justices non-profits out there. It couldn't be easier to donate directly to such projects.
Where do you get "a few million"? Do they only have less than 20 developers? Why denigrate Mozilla?
> If you look at Rust, created by Mozilla, they are set up in a more sane way. There's a foundation. It's well funded with sponsorships from the big companies that use and depend on Rust.
Firefox isn't used by companies, but by consumers.
The better news are, Mozilla gets around $30 million as investment income ($37M in 2023 [1]). Some people argue that it’s not enough to maintain Firefox but that sounds weird to me.
Chromium is not a good alternative: 95% of Chromium commits come from Google. [2]
Chromium is not a good alternative: 95% of Chromium commits come from Google.
Or ... Chromium is the perfect alternative ... as long as it remains open source and privacy invasion can be easily stripped out of it. Let Google fund most of the development of a privacy respecting browser (i.e. Brave).
And if it doesn't remain open source? Then it's time for a fork --- just like it is now with Firefox.
Bottom line: If you reject Chromium, shouldn't you also reject Mozilla/Firefox? Virtually all development over the past decade was funded by Google.
Chromium extends Google’s control over the web platform.
Google engineers write specs for new APIs. They get rejected by Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds. Google implements them anyway. Other Chromium-based browsers get these APIs as a result. Then they start popping up on sites showing Safari and Firefox “failing” to implement them. Then web developers ask why Safari and Firefox are so “behind” in implementing “web standards”.
This mechanism is how the web standards process is being subsumed into “whatever Google wants” instead of being a collaborative effort between multiple rendering engines. Google should not be able to unilaterally decide what is and isn’t a web standard.
Brave is based on Chromium and it still supports manifest v2.
Brave offers everything Firefox does and more --- like privacy by default (which Firefox could but won't do for obvious reasons) --- all without millions in direct Google payola.
Brave supports manifest V2 because the Chromium upstream hasn't removed it for enterprise use yet. As soon as that changes, Brave does not have a plan to continue maintaining V2. What you call Google payola is really the independence that allows Mozilla to develop a browser engine that isn't being actively crippled by Google's initiatives. That's the important piece. Brave is not a sustainable play because they have no way to fund a forked version of the chromium browser engine when Google inevitably cripples it to invade our privacy even further.
Safari's extensions had a similar change-over to a ManifestV3-like system, with the same arguments: increases performance (very important for mobile) and puts more safeguards on extensions doing funky privacy-hostile stuff.
Yes, ManifestV3 nerfs adblocking, and Google loves that side effect. It will hamper Brave' internal adblocking engine.
I think the big interesting question is: if Brave figures out how to add improvements to ManifestV3 that aid adblocking without sacrificing performance or privacy/security, will Google accept the PRs?
No, it's inferior in every way possible because it's not meant to be used to enforce privacy but to allow multiple users on a same computer to use a same browser without seeing each other history and setting.
For each profile, you would have to install again every extension, set every setting, every bookmark,.. of course no sync between your main profile and others.
Can't right click on link to open them in another profile.
No automatic opening of profiles when you go on a specific url
And so on.
On the other hand, brave will push it's crypto crap, web3 and 'bat coins' everywhere.
The founder of Brave, Brendan Eich, had a very interesting tenure as CEO of Mozilla, resulting in his stepping down. For me, I can't support a product founded by someone who can work along side the same people he wanted keep oppressed. The same way I can't shop at Walmart because they don't pay a living wage.
If you're interested in Brave, and social issues affect your choice in who or who not to support - check his wikipedia.
> When Google asks them to remove manifest v2, what do you think they'll do?
It’s even more pointless than removing it from Chromium though: Firefox users would just switch to a fork that still supports it, or to a fork that supports blockingWebRequest APIs on v3 extensions, or to a fork that implements some other ad blocking method. With Chromium, they at least have Chrome users, many of whow wouldn’t want to even bother. (Those who do have migrated to forks already)
> Bottom line: If you reject Chromium, shouldn't you also reject Mozilla/Firefox? Virtually all development over the past decade was funded by Google.
This is a non sequitur. Google supplies Mozilla with money, but Mozilla decides how to deploy that money. This is significantly different than Google directing the development of Firefox, which they clearly don't do. They absolutely do direct the development of chromium, however. It makes no sense to trust an advertising company to direct the development of your browser, but not to trust a nonprofit. Conversely, it makes perfect sense to place more trust in a browser developed by a nonprofit, even one funded by an advertiser, over a browser developed by an advertising company. Web attestation and manifest V2 are both examples of exactly why this is the case.
but they sure as hell will try to push users off the web.
???
Google's revenue stream is almost wholly dependent on the web and the privacy invasion it facilitates. Pushing users off the web would be self defeating.
May be… the OP means mobile apps? Apps are easier to instrument with massive data mining and tracking capabilities and the core distributor is also google for at least the Android ecosystem. If you try to sideload or provide OSS apps, generic users will be frightened by google’s mafia banner warnings … “I see you trying to install an app from outside playstore, would be a shame if it had infinite spy and tracking malware, we can’t protect you unless you come over here and only use our apps from playstore…”
My understanding is that donating to Mozilla doesn't actually fund anything explicitly. You donate to the foundation and then they spend it on whatever. So there exists no actual mechanism to do what you state "could easily be funded"
260M is not for firefox entirely, e.g. Mozilla AI (and VPN) is part of that. I don't think there are official numbers for firefox alone but i doubt it's over 30%
I welcome the oncoming hate, but THIS is what DAOs are for…
A DOA specifically setup to build a user-respecting browser run by a Foundation where token holders could vote out the waste we’ve seen Mozilla and the like do, could work.
And for those crypto-haters, I’m not sqying token-based as an speculative investment, I’m saying here token specifically here for voting rights to control asset allocation and business decisions
> I am not familiar with what is typical in American NPO's but I can't help but feel that my money will not be spent on the right stuff.
I would agree with you there.
Sadly the art of troughing is a well known feature of larger NPOs.
That's why (IMHO) people should never blindly donate to NPOs without first taking a quick look at their financial accounts to get a feel for how much troughing is going on. Honestly, if I had my way, I would make it law to have a simple-to-read one-page summary of that data for every NPO.
I also do not buy the oft-cited argument "well, we have to attract talent by paying them 'competitively' ".
Well no. If the "talent" wants a fat paycheck, they can go work in the private sector. If they are going to work at an NPO, then they should WANT to work for the NPO, not just see it as another spot for their CV. In many (most?) cases they will be in charge of an army of well-meaning unpaid volunteers, its not a good look for the C-suite to roam around in private cars, businssess-class flights, have fancy "away days" etc. etc.
In general it has been my experience that administrators primary functions are to justify administrators jobs. Usually by any ill considered and ill researched manner as possible.
In this landscape I'm curious if any amount of money can overcome the oligopoly advantages of owning the OS (with no anti-trust enforcement) or owning the most popular web properties.
Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference?
Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?
Yeah, this is my takeaway as well. Folks in this discussion are saying “why can’t Mozilla just focus on making Firefox” and my response would be “because that’s the path to eventual death”.
Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs or whatever the demand of the day is won’t change that.
The thing I think will bring in users is search. Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links. The easy Google money makes it unattractive.
It will take some time for enough users to be blown away by how useful this is.
I wrote a simple user script one time that subscribes me to all discoverable rss feeds I run into while browsing. It seemed rather random but I was blown away by how interesting the websites I visit are to me. You can imagine it, now multiply that by 10 000 and you have a good estimate.
Google has to index 130 billion pages and is barely able to deliver half interesting results. If you query it with something like "Firefox" or "Google" it will find zero interesting pages. Stuff so boring you won't even bother.
In your history there might be hundreds of interesting articles, discussions, lectures, publications etc interesting to you specifically!
That obscure website you once visited, that one without any traffic, visited by Googlebot one time per week which then bothers to index 5% of it and puts the results on page 20 of the search results. Why it even bothers to index it no one knows.
Now say you want to read it again or you are searching for that obscure thing again 5 years later it is there in your history.
Mozaïk had full text history search in 1994 when hard drives were 5 mb and the www had 10 000 pages. The www now has a hundred thousand times as many pages but drives are a million times larger. Unlike 1994 you won't be able to visit a single digit percentage of it.
I would argue the reason so many people do that is because every time you visit a Google property it prompts you to do so. Mozilla doesn’t have the advantage of owning sites that are part of people’s daily routines either.
All that money for years put into an income-producing endowment could pay for firefox and tbird indefinitely. Desktops aren't going away, even if mobile outgrew them.
Honestly, from observing my close family and friends as well as passing by strangers, everyone uses whatever default comes(i.e. Chrome on Android) or again Chrome(on iOS because they saw some banner ad somewhere to install it to access their password stored previously in android life).
The core portal to internet currently appears to be the blue-F(aka Facebook) icon which has an interesting search. People search in Facebook for specific topic and then will reluctantly move over to browser and again search on Google(always default). So, in summary no, everyone uses Chrome and does not know the difference.
Some of my colleagues seem to use Brave and Linux die-hards use Firefox(comes default with ubuntu last I tried ubuntu).
People aren't motivated to change the defaults, unless they're told they should change by "clicking here" in prominent (non-ad) banners. Mozilla cannot buy the OS defaults nor such brand positions.
The solution is to keep adding management layers until the company implode. The problem is that when it has gone too far all the people who are left are those that do not take responsibility.
Considering how much money is routinely set on fire by the US tech industry, this is a bargain for the best web browser currently in existence.
What alternative do you suggest? Google and Microsoft are certainly worse. Firefox is vastly superior to the offerings of these multi billion dollar companies. Chrome and edge are exactly the prisons that these companies designed them to be.
What specifically should laypeople do to regain something resembling a usable Internet? Firefox and ublock origin is the only answer I have.
Excise the wokeness eating away at Mozilla. It's taking money and time away from making Firefox better, stifling independent thought, and keeping talented devs away. Nobody sane wants to work at a company full of Rust types. One piece of wrongthink and your life is over.
We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left.
Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox.
Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced devtools, Google having a team of "evangelists", course material is Chrome-based, test-automation, etc. So developers too can ignore Firefox.
Some argue that it's good to have an independent rendering engine. Here too Firefox plays no role at all. The only counter force to Google's web feature roadmap is Apple/Webkit, not Mozilla.
From a privacy preserving perspective, Firefox has no unique value. Install Brave, say no to the one-time crypto pop-up, and you have a very decent and fast browser that also consistently renders along with Chrome and Edge.
I use Firefox. If I ask myself why, it's muscle memory and because uBlock Origin still works.
Those arguments all sound like "We nearly have a monoculture so let's embrace the monoculture and give up". The downward curve needs to be counter-acted, not accelerated.
I use Firefox for Container tabs. It’s useful for sites where I can’t have multiple tabs opened to same site but different login. That’s my main reason for sticking to Firefox.
Their current market share is 3%. What do you think it will be once they add tab history tracking, and every other feature under the sun that you think their browser should have?
It's not even on the same level. Container tabs as the name implies are all in the same window, and you can program them, for example always open up google.com domains in my Google container, while opening amazon.com in my shopping container.
This keeps the cookies separate and means you are tracked less. Yes you can manually do this with Chrome profiles, but before this feature was introduced into Firefox I had a dozen or more Chrome profiles to keep all my work, community and personal Google/Microsoft logins separate.
I wish they improved the UX so that it is as easy as possible to switch between profiles and to always launch certain websites on isolated profiles that you set for them
With profiles can you use the same window for multiple tabs? Based on a video I saw, the entire window is only used for that profile and switching between profiles will lose your other profiles tabs.
Mine too, but they have existed for a while now and seems their development is stuck and left to rot, there's many improvements around them that could be made to help improve privacy.
Firefox has always been ahead of the game when it comes to devtools. It's pretty recent that Chrome has differentiated itself from Safari-tier crap devtools
Firefox on iOS has a feature called “Turn on Night Mode” which can color invert any page. I use it about 100x a day and couldn’t find it anywhere else. A perfect example of why we need options.
I use Brave and am satisfied with it. The occasional hassle involved in turning things off when a new unwanted feature shows up or when I have to install it on a new machine is worth it for uBlock Origin and the Chromium performance and compatibility.
However the theoretical downside of Brave is that as Google continues changing Chromium's codebase, there's incentive for them to make it harder and harder to maintain a manifest v2-enabled fork. Wouldn't be surprised if extensive refactors randomly happen that multiply the effort needed to merge changes from upstream while maintaining the v2 capability. And how motivated is Brave to do all this labor? At some point they're going to say the tax is too high, we have a nice built-in ad blocker anyway, just use that.
A well-maintained, funded, and focused Firefox would be a good thing for when that day comes.
Right but in my non-scientific test I found uBlock to work better so I don’t use the Brave blocker. My prediction is that Brave will eventually say that it’s too costly to maintain v2 in their fork and that people should just use the Brave blocker.
Brave has built-in functionality that can replace uBO, but it doesn't replace all of the other Manifestv2-only extensions that are not necessarily adblockers. For example https://libredirect.github.io/faq.html#chrome_web_store
> We can't publish LibRedirect to the Chrome Web Store as it requires Manifest v3, which removed essential features that LibRedirect needs.
uBlock Origin is just the tip of the iceberg since it's the most popular one, there is an entire ecosystem of Mv2 extensions that can never be replaced by Brave's built in functionality
> Some argue that it's good to have an independent rendering engine. Here too Firefox plays no role at all. The only counter force to Google's web feature roadmap is Apple/Webkit, not Mozilla.
I'd like to understand this point better. Does Firefox use the Chromium engine under the hood?
Nope, Firefox still uses its own rendering engine and JavaScript engine—except on iOS, where it's essentially Safari with a UI wrapper. But that’s due to Apple’s ToS, not Firefox’s fault.
I assume the previous comment was about market share. It’s low, yes, but I still think Firefox has influence despite that. Having a third rendering engine is valuable—especially now, after Microsoft killed IE/Edge and turned it into a Chromium fork. The percentage might not be high, but the people who use Firefox are usually the ones pushing for keeping the web an open standard.
It doesn't use Chromium. I think that their point is that Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko, can only have an impact on the rendering engine space proportional to its user base, which they have argued is insignificant.
I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least
I've been bringing this up in every single thread about Chrome and Manifest V3 pops up. I'm been using Firefox, 100% of the time, on three different operating systems, for probably six years at this point.
I can remember a single time I had to swap to Chrome for something, and it was three years ago, and involved some flavor of WebAssembly, I believe.
If anyone can point out a current website that is acting up under Firefox and not Chrome, please post it. I just want want to know that the "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.
> "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.
IMO this isn't the argument. Firefox users aren't discussing superior or inferior, but sites that accidentally or purposefully break or over-optimize for Chrome, making Firefox users second class citizens.
I commented about YouTube and Google Suite on another thread, but your webassembly example reminds me of the GCP dashboard and in browser virtual machine, which is also horrible in anything but Chrome if you plan to use it day in day out. I was spending my life there for a few months, and sure enough a dedicated Chrome instance made my life a lot better.
I do agree with you about what the argument actually is, I should have worded it differently. Any time someone brings up Firefox, it always seems to be an ex-Firefox user talking about compatibility issues. Even your GCP, I've personally used GCP with Firefox with no issues, but I have no doubt you spent more time in it than I have. But it does make me wonder if maybe there are platform specific issues with Firefox.
It's still interesting to contrast my personal experience re: Firefox with everyone elses when it comes to the "Manifest V3 ! Abandon ship, but to where?" conversation.
I think having a browser managed by one of the most powerful company in the world is the core of the issue, albeit in indirect ways.
I have no insight into Firefox' technical foundations, but to your point I've been using it since the IE days and never had critical performance issues or compelling reasons to use another browser short of company specific sites: Google properties is one: while Firefox works, Google has obviously no incentive to make it work better than Chrome, and potentially incentives for the opposite.
Companies' internal sites and tools are another: fixating on one specific browser has been an (unwise) long lasting trend, and for a company Chrome being backed by Google has a lot more appeal than Firefox. That was the same dynamic that cemented IE6 in it's position.
Perhaps Firefox missed the V8/electron train that would have made it in the same position as Linux: a platform to run other things on. But I don't know the history around that.
There’s one feature on LinkedIn that doesn’t work in Firefox (you can’t reorder skill list in your profile – dragging doesn’t do anything). That was the only time I’ve opened Chromium in the past couple of years, though – apart from testing my own websites, of course.
I've been interviewed by podcasters using Riverside a bunch these last few months, and it just wouldn't load on Firefox and would scream for Chrome (and the latest Chrome version, at that). I had to use Brave in the end.
Firefox works pretty well on most sites. Web standards are IMHO in a good enough Shape that anything properly developed will be fine.
Firefox doesn't work well on Google properties (for obvious and non obvious reasons). It's decent, but in my experience it 's significantly slow and resource intensive in most of Google Suite and subpar on YouTube[0]. Useable, but definitely heavier than Chrome. I ended up with a dedicated Chrome instance for meet and Sheets.
Recently I found Notion to be more and more sluggish, it might be because of cache and other relics as I spend my life in Notion, but fresh Chrome instances behave better. All in all, Notion has become worse and worse, so it might be just part of that trend.
Many enterprise extensions currently won't work at all in Firefox. It's in no part Firefox's fault, and enterprise software has always been shitty, but this is becoming a reality to me.
[0] I don't have the link at hand, but it was notably due to Google intentionally screwing up Firefox last time I looked into it...
I switched to firefox when Firebug came out. I haven't switched since, although I spend a lot of time on iOS so maybe half my browsing is FF.
I'm sure I've seen a few things not work on FF, but not many, and likely things that would break on Safari too (I've had govt stuff just not work on tablet safari for sure).
Let me introduce you to Microsoft's Office 365 or w/e this pile of garbage is called. Especially Teams. This fiasco of Web chat programs is the reason I have to keep two browsers open.
Chrome users are often really familiar with Chrome's devtools and think Firefox is behind because they have trouble finding their way around FireFox's devtools. Truth is that Firefox built a reputation for itself amongst developers specifically because of it's very advanced devtools. Chrome has mostly caught up, but I'd still place Firefox ahead here
Besides that, uBlock Origin, Bypass Paywalls Clean, and AdNauseum working have been enough of an argument for me to be able to convince my friends to make the switch.
No thinly-modified version of Chromium is going to save us from Google having almost unilateral power over the implementation of web standards, creating a browser monoculture. None of these forks is making substantive changes to the browser engine; it's often just Chromium with a few configuration tweaks and cosmetic enhancements.
It's to the point where there doesn't seem to be much left to lose. Anything is worth trying. Their CEO should definitely be out the door. Still, I won't be holding my breath. They're hostile to their community, developers who want to work on web technologies, and to the open web.
Also it's just a Chrome / Blink derivative. They don't actually have an independent web stack like Mozilla does. That independent stack requires a lot of developer effort to maintain.
This polls suggests that there's some decision holding back Mozilla from ditching Google, and that with enough pressure, they'll finally do it.
They're long aware that they should. They made the strategic announcement some 7-8 years back if I remember correctly. Since then they tried to diversify and failed miserably.
Sure enough incompetence is involved but we should also consider how very hard it is.
Making hundreds of millions from a new tech product in the consumer space is impossibly difficult. You're up against Big Tech and a generally very competitive and saturated space where any idea can be easily replicated. And you're up against consumers that really don't want to pay, hence ads.
That said, I do feel Mozilla barely tried and wasted a lot of money on distractions. They're way too comfortable raking half a billion for effectively doing nothing at all: keep the search box pointing at Google.
>I wish my miserable failures brought in $65 million annually.
HN users complain about that $65 million constantly. Mozilla is stuck in a spot where the same angry nerds that want them to diversify away from Google won't actually let them spin up diverse sources of revenue.
I wonder how many of this angry crowd donate. Mozilla do accept donations.
Or maybe the idea is that employees/developers don't need to eat, which is incredibly ironic given who HN users typically are. There isn't a single line in this petition dedicated to how Mozilla should raise funds instead.
Maybe signing the petition should be behind a paywall, I would be very interested to see how many votes that would gather.
You're getting downvotes, but I'm not sure why. It's trivial to say something like "wean off Google" and it's another thing to suggest an alternative source.
The truth is, there are no actual ideas on how to replace it. Donations is not the answer. You can't replace hundreds of millions of $ simply with donations.
Equally you can't just reduce spending by firing swathes of people Twitter style. And even if you could FF would still not have enough to "just pay programmers" (like they work in some kind of vacuum.)
It's really easy to run a business from outside - you can make a lot of obvious points, and ignore realities or accountability.
There's lots of "you should do xxx" in the petition with 0 suggestions on how to fund it.
I don't agree that you are downvoted without being offered an explanation, that's just a gross misuse of the privilege to downvote that seems to be more and more frequent on here. :shrug:
I also don't agree that donations are the only way to support Mozilla. As others have mentioned they have spent time and effort contributing to Firefox/Mozilla's projects, and many probably have advocated for the use of Firefox — all of that is value to Mozilla and the community.
I don't have any experience starting an organization, let alone one that has that kind of revenue, but as a user, whether you donate or not, if Mozilla is getting that kind of money and their track record and reputation just seems to go downhill, I'd be surprised that people who are invested in it are not upset.
I donated a lot of time, code, and at least a little money to early Mozilla and Firefox. They were a lot more dynamic and engaging when they were a small nonprofit. Now it feels like thanks to Google money they have become fat and lazy. Unable to take risks because it might threaten their income stream or their relationship with Google. It makes me sad and angry to see what they have become. Maybe a diet will help, but I fear the patient is beyond help at this point.
They've been pretty hard at work to offer services that will let them wean themselves off of Google money. This is how much of their income came from search royalties yearly according to their independent auditor reports
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out (which is normally at or near zero) the percentage is around 91%
One one hand, they are criticized for taking risks - being risks, inevitably many don't work out - including their AI project. On the other, now they don't take enough risks.
I guess it's the usual lifecycle most organizations go through, and generous funding has accelerated the process. The only upside is that, in theory, anyone could fork Firefox and continue development within a healthier structure. It's a critical project for the Internet. Hopefully, Ladybird will be viable soon, adding a bit of redundancy. Else, we risk becoming a Chrome monoculture.
Marc Andreesen owes his riches to Netscape whose ashes became Mozilla. I don’t understand why he doesn’t give the Mozilla foundation and endowment such that the interest on the endowment would fund work solely on the browser. They could then just work on the browser and nothing more.
No need to do marketing, have a venture arm, millions for management, etc. it could be a group of 10 or 20 really awesome engineers and maybe a bunch of passionate open source folks contributing.
Will he do it? No. Do I wish he would? Yes. Would I if I could? Hell yes because there needs to be a viable alternative to chrome and how is that possible when chrome butters their bread and pays their bills?
Or! The some hundreds of millions they did get from Google they just out in an endowment and then shrink staff (start with management) until they can live comfortably off the interest…
Right. The money would be a gift to a foundation where he couldn’t control it. A no strings attached 100% tax deductible gift to the foundation with the only strings that they focus on the browser and survive on the interest, and lay off unnecessary management (10-20 dedicated web engineers and a PM and an HR person what else do you need).
But do you also want the browser beholden to the parent company of its direct competitor?
This is a fantasy land hypothetical of course as we know exactly the kind of guy Marc is, he’ll want a say.
If it does go the foundation model as I’ve suggested (purely paying bills on the interest earned by the endowment and by donations) then perhaps it can’t afford to pay for 350+ engineers. That’s just the facts.
> Now is the time for Mozilla to take bold steps to reinforce its identity as a privacy-centric nonprofit
Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model was to sell reports about the internet browsing habits of firefox users to advertisers.
The problem was never Mozilla's dependence Google. The problem is their dependence on the surveillance of internet users.
As far as I know Mozilla hasn't disclosed how much money they spent buying up Anonym, but they'll want a return on their investment. I don't think they're going to abandon it as quickly as they did their ideals.
Just a few days ago, they updated their android application info and stated they're going to share location data with third parties for "Advertising or Marketing" purposes...[1]
They also removed a promise to "never sell your data" in their FAQ[2] 2 weeks ago.
They opted firefox users into a data collection scheme they call PPA which works kind of like FLOC and uses the browser to gather information about what you do online, then they sell that data to advertisers by first sending it to yet another a third party who will assemble that data into reports for the advertisers. Then they basically said firefox users were too stupid to be trusted to opt-in, and it would be too hard to explain to such dumb users how selling their data was a good thing, so Mozilla had no choice but to force it on everyone by default without telling them about it. (https://web.archive.org/web/20240715112635/https://mastodon....)
I don't understand what you're talking about. Do you have a reference? All I can find are UI experiments, AFAICT "what impact to telemetry does this UI change make?"
I see some have addons.. but actually my point is precisely that I don't understand it - these addons can be auto installed? They can make requests? They're not on searchfox?
Sorry for being cynical, but this "petition" sounds like telling depressed people to "just be more positive." Sure, just find more revenue streams. Just be sustainable. It's so easy!
This seems like a weird time to be making noise about this. Mozilla has been trying to become less Google-dependent for a long time. In this past half decade especially they've made huge strides with less and less of their total revenue coming from Google royalties:
2023: 75.8% of revenues from Google royalties
2022: 86.0%
2021: 87.8
2020: 88.8
2019: [^a]
2018: 95.3
2017: 95.9
This data is based on their independent auditors reports.
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out (which is normally at or near zero) the percentage is around 91%
And every time they try to get an alternate revenue stream, someone on HN will then shout "just focus on the browser!!". Mozilla can't please the crowd no matter what they do.
Agreed. Mozilla has problems, but bleeding funds from Google to fund their competition has a satisfaction factor. I'd rather sign a petition to keep the Google daddy fund going until the very end.
This is a good idea. I don’t think I should change the petition now that it’s signed by a significant number of people, but I agree targeted donations could help somewhat (although mainly I think we need to urge Mozilla to direct its other income into Firefox development, too).
This is a good idea on paper. But it turns out that having a for-profit corporation (as Mozilla Corporation is) accept donations, especially donations earmarked for certain purposes, is understandably tricky from a regulatory and tax standpoint. You can do it, but it comes with lots of rules and restrictions, and constrains the company in weird ways that kind of make sense, since it's kind of similar to money laundering. (And I'm not talking about tax deductible donations, which are a no go for obvious reasons. "Don't pay us $50 for our product, donate $50 and we'll give you the product for free, and you'll lower your taxes!")
The Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, and you can do it because it's a non-profit. But it doesn't make Firefox. It owns Mozilla Corporation, which does. And it can't just dump donated money into Mozilla Corp either; regulators are not naive.
There’s nothing to prevent them from allowing people to donate without a tax deduction AFAIK, but they don’t allow it. In the US, most donations no longer actually get deducted from taxes anyway due to the greatly increased standard deduction since 2017. I think something like 85-90% of people now just use that and don’t itemize.
No idea about earmarked donations, but I don’t think Corp would have any problem with donations in general. Designate it as “sponsorship fee” if you must.
But yeah, part of the problem is probably the fact that the Mozilla Foundation isn’t the one employing Firefox devs.
A gaggle of governments with conflicting interests are less fearful than some private individuals with simple goals - like getting rich.
Currently private companies rule the browser world and they wield incredible power over everything from standards to PKI. Their interest is a world that depends on them even more.
They don't have to tell them how to run it. But it would be for the benefit of everyone if they could give grants to Mozilla to help them wean off of Google
Mozilla has been less and less dependent on Google and is now working on a VPN, MDN Plus, and other revenue streams that are also helping it become more independent. But the truth is that if all Google money suddenly stopped today, there would be no more Mozilla
As a European citizen, why would I want my taxes to fund a browser built by a US entity and still subject to the whims of the current US administration?
Unless you mean that Mozilla should move completely to Europe, sure. But the part about the EU not telling Mozilla what to do is naive. If my taxes pay for it, of course I want the EU to tell Mozilla what to do.
The problem is that the people in power to remove the funding are the same people who are pushing for chat control and removal of encryption. Even if say the terms says that the funding is just a sponsorship, it would encourage few government folks to look out for more knowing the company would die if they stop funding.
The non-gov approach has been the last decades. I don't find the result convincing to be honest.
The path you're proposing has been pushed by the community for about how long the Mozilla foundation existed. I'm not sure asking them one more time will make a big difference.
Have you asked the people who pay in the end (the taxpayer) if they want that?
The very last thing I want my taxes to go to is anything that has "no strings attached". Its by definition a gift and gifting taxes should be a crime.
Then taxes could be used to pay government employees whose job is to contribute on a specific project. That could apply to Linux, a browser, maybe AOSP. Sure it'd require funding, but spent on employees within said countries you get it back and it does give Europe as a whole the ability to contribute its vision, both positive and negative.
Whether the people are employed by the government directly or a different entity isn't relevant at all, the relevant part is taxes being used for something that has an undefined benefit for the people who are forced to pay for it. (And in case of "no string attacked" even has an undefined goal.)
>give Europe as a whole the ability to contribute its vision
Who's vision? The peoples vision? Or the vision of bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists etc.
State involvement tends to come with strings attached. The EU would insist on the browser to implement mechanisms to 'limit the spread of mis-, dis- and malinformation' where it is up to the whims of the politicos in Brussels to decide what the populace is allowed to see and what is to be suppressed. To that I say a loud and clear 'thanks but no thanks', I prefer my technology to work for me instead of it being an enforcement mechanism for the powers that be.
Possibly but right now you're being guided to whatever information makes the most ad revenue. A choice of two compromised mechanisms might be better than none.
No, that is not the issue here - this is not about which sites I frequent but about whether the browser I use to do so tries to keep me from going there. The content of those sites can be influenced by advertising (which I rigorously block, no exceptions) but the browser as of yet does not attempt to keep me from visiting site A nor does it change its contents (other than by means of the content blocker which I have control over) to match some ideological goal. An EU-financed browser could end up doing these things which is why I do not want the EU to get involved in this way.
Currently Firefox does not do any of those things out of the .deb/.tar.gz. I'd like to keep it that way, hence my resistance against involvement by parties which have shown to be either susceptible to or directly calling for censorship. This is also one of the many reasons why I wanted to see Mitchell Baker disappear from the organisation as she clearly was calling for active censorship.
I frankly do not understand all the resistance against a call for a politically neutral tech infrastructure. To all those people frantically pressing that down-vote button, do you really desire for your tech infrastructure to be ideologically driven? Do you even understand what such a thing means and what it will lead to?
Governments are not necessarily all about politics - the electricity system isn't and the road network isn't.
Private organisations that have great power over important bits of the internet are also not necessarily politically neutral and there is no level to control them.
In California they were shutting the water off from houses where people had parties during lockdowns. Governments absolutely will abuse their powers and should never be trusted.
The EU could step in for the browser, that bit of common, required infrastructure needed to provide modern government services. If that was the task given, EU bureaucrats could be the best choice for managing it. Any attempt to step beyond that immediately fails at the planning stage, because conflating the infrastructure component with anything else creates a ball of mud and a political and technical black hole. Like your example, where the EU couldn't even consider it because member states haven't given the organization that particular power.
It's Chromium with the Google bits ripped out, Vivaldi has their own sign in/sync functionality, built in ad blocker, and custom UI. It's based on Chromium but has quite a bit different going on, as much as Brave or Edge.
They basically just want to keep the copyright to their UI. You can see the source but they don't want anyone to rip off their UI.
And let's be real, every browser (even Firefox) has closed source server side code.
Also, the comment I initially responded to was about why isn't there a European browser not controlled by "big tech"... Vivaldi is an independent company in Europe making a browser.
So? Blink is a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KDE's web engine. It's all open source anyway. The point isn't that the code must be unique, only that it's not dependent on a large US tech firm. They might benefit from Chromium development but the option to hard fork is always there.
a block of countries is what makes them far less worrisome. They're too busy competing with each other - none is going to want the others spying on it's own citizens for gain.
I've read the petition. I'm not convinced. However, this must be the single most harmful petition I've ever read (IMO).
I believe that Google money is a huge net positive for Firefox: free money for basically nothing asked in return.
Additionally I think that the biggest problem of Firefox have been Mozilla for 10-15 years and there is no sign of improving, only getting worse and worse. I wish Firefox could ditch Mozilla (and probably keep Google money flow if possible).
There’s also Waterfox and Librewolf (which are more vanilla).
There’s a problem, though: there’s little to no core development happening in any of these forks. If Mozilla comes crashing down, somebody will have to pick it up.
That is precisely the question that should be asked, and not rhetorically.
Firefox is important, the peoples le who make Firefox are important. If someone can form a lean organisation that can fund the development they should do so. Open source allows the potential to abandon a bloated governing structure, but it has to be done with eyes wide open and fully committed to providing the resources to continue development.
It is a very hard problem, but not an intractable problem. It is certainly better than asking managers to decide against their own self interest.
Yes. If you believe in the open source concept, the current situation calls for nothing less.
Let's be real, Mozilla leadership is not going to slaughter their cash cow. They have no incentive to place anything above the needs of Google.
It's already proven --- the user base and market share have been effectively abandoned for lack of impact to the bottom line. Plaintive demands from users now carry no real weight and will most likely be met with marketing doublespeak/lip service while business as usual continues.
Sorry but it's too late now. Any debate over the direction of Mozilla is a done deal settled a decade ago.
1) Non-personalized (aka context sensitive) advertising. Advertising by itself is not the inherently evil part --- the collection of personalized data is. Context sensitive advertising doesn't require any personal data.
2) As an alternative for those who prefer it, allow users to pay a small annual fee for AD BLOCKING.
I'd pay for something that is truly private and blocks personalized ads and the associated data collection. Given a little reasonable incentive, I think there are others who would too.
Google's vision of the web is a choice, not a requirement. Mozilla could put forth a real alternative vision --- but they won't for obvious reasons.
To be honest browser is not that important for me. It collects a lot of data about you, but I think search engine is more important for society. It is the lens through which we see the world.
I have already seen that many folks switched to using several engines, because you see more that way. Personally I like searxng. There is gpt also obviously.
My default uninformed assumption would be that Google is paying Mozilla for making Google the default search engine for Firefox. Does anyone know if this is the case, and if so, what the likely magnitudes are? Because it seems like Google can throw quantities of money at Mozilla that would easily overwhelm whatever pressure this petition might put on them.
Yes, this is correct. Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars annually to be the default search engine. This makes up the vast majority of Mozilla Corporation's revenue. It's somewhere in the ballpark of 85% of all their annual revenue last I heard.
They've tried hard in recent years to get out from under Google by diversifying into other areas. For example, they have a VPN service that is a wrapper around Mullvad, and they've made some privacy tools that you can pay to use, also largely wrappers around other companies' tools.
I was an employee of Mozilla Corporation and saw first-hand the effort they were making. In my opinion, it's been a pretty abysmal failure so far. Pulling Google funding would effectively hamstring Mozilla Corp.
Mozilla just lost government funding (which is ok).
Keeping the machine as it is also by ditching Google is probably infeasible, and in that case do a company slimming care.
I think shipping Google is fair. It's not forced upon anyone, and much better than collecting data themselves, or advertising their own services, or making proprietary software.
"Firefox needs new revenue streams to be sustainable. New products and services under Mozilla’s umbrella should reflect the same commitment to privacy that defines Mozilla."
This is admirable, but how what would Mozilla replace the 85% ( $555M) revenue with by ditching Google?
I'm assuming a portion of the 15% of revenue is from Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, etc and also the pay packets of the executives needs to significantly decrease.
But this isn't enough to fill the 85% hole for when Mozilla ditches Google.
The whole point of their foray into adtech was to figure out a privacy-preserving way to do it that doesn't involve wholesale selling people's browsing history.
How is that fundamentally different than what Google's done with chrome and the topics API? If you don't trust Google's solution, why would you trust Mozilla's?
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out (which is normally at or near zero) the percentage is around 91%
This won’t happen overnight, of course – in the meantime they’ll have to try and be leaner (which isn’t a bad thing, if you ask me).
Basically, I think that’s the only way Firefox even has a fighting chance: the alternatives are (1) always be the 5% browser Google wants it to be or (2) come crashing into the ground if the DOJ does go through with the search payment ban.
It does not have to happen overnight. Make a 5 years plan, reduce exposure to Google at 20% of the whole thing per year. Agressively pursue other revenue streams. If it fails, slim down your operations progressively and cut costs year after year. It's not that complicated. The problem is that Mozilla will suck the teat as long as it can because execs directly benefit from it. They will burn Mozilla to the ground and leave for their next opportunity when the time comes.
That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever!
Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special.
Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :)
It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.
$250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.
The guys I work with are on about £95k and the good ones are very good.
I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc. (oh, and being left alone by interfering management!)
I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.
Firefox has way more than 20 developers. Looking at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/mots/index.html, if I'm not mistaken in my count, there are currently 147 module owners and peers alone. Some of those might be volunteers, but I think the large majority of them are Mozilla staff. On top of that there are probably a number of further Mozilla staff developers who aren't owners or peers, QA staff, product managers, sysadmins and other support staff…
I know they have way more than that but I'd argue that you don't need that many.
Hypothetically, if I was given the money and asked to build a team to fork Firefox I'd be more focused. Way more!
The current devs work on stuff I'd scrap like Pocket, telemetry, anything with AI, and so on. I bet there is a load of stuff in there that I'd want out! There's probably a bunch of things in Firefox Labs they're working on too.
So, I'd argue that 20 good devs (again, a number I pulled out of the air!) split into, say, 4 smaller teams could achieve a shit load of work under the right circumstances, with the right leadership and so on.
I'm currently a senior architect with over 50 devs below me. Most are mid-level at best (not a slur, just where they are in their career!) but the few good ones are very good. A team of 20 of those could pull it off!
It'd be a tall order building a browser from scratch with 20 devs maybe but it's already built.
There's someone else right now who is going to important organizations they obviously don't understand, making wild claims about 'I could do it for much less', and cutting personnel drastically.
You severely underestimate the engineering cost of modern web browser. Assuming a sufficient value-addition fork, a team of 20 cannot even catch up the Chromium upstream. Good luck coming up with a new engine compatible with Chrome; MS tried it and finally gave up.
>Maybe they will find out you don’t need $555M a year to make a web browser.
The only other browser spends significantly more than that. If it's so much cheaper, you'd expect organizations like Microsoft to have stayed in the game.
>First good step would be to fire that useless CEO.
The one who stepped down a year ago? Or do you have some issue with the interim? They're still looking for a permanent one
And that's precisely the problem people have been talking about for a decade now. If it was just the browser, maybe it wouldn't have lost 90% of its former market share.
They lost a lot of users because websites were getting heavy and Firefox used to be single-threaded when Chrome appeared and was blazingly fast due to its multi-process design.
I still vividly recall the frozen UI as another tab loaded or did work. And if one tab crashed they all went with it. Annoyed me every time.
After many years[1] they sorted it out, but in my view it's clear that's what really killed their momentum, as it was such a sacrifice to stay with Firefox compared to using Chrome.
Firefox lost market share because they kept antagonizing their users. It's easy to read Chrome as the boogeyman to blame for Firefox' failure, but that's... also not correct.
Mozilla is, rather frustrating for those that lead it I'm sure, chosen largely based on principles that people found they couldn't get from Google. Things like "don't profit from me the user", "don't track me" and "don't do things in my browser without me knowing about it". These aren't things people point towards the Chrome browser with because if you expect any of this to not be done by Google, then you're kidding yourself.
Mozilla meanwhile has a pretty wide history of just... doing things that break this promise[0][1][2] (listed is mostly recent stuff, but they have been doing it since forever, going back to the forced Pocket integration).
Chrome users don't care about this stuff (since they already use a Google product), Firefox users by virtue of picking Firefox did. And when it comes to optimization, Chrome does beat Firefox pretty handily, so people started abandoning Firefox because at that point, both Mozilla and Google offer the same value proposition.
Their recent ventures into adtech are probably going to annihilate their biggest potential userbase gain, which is Google tightening the screws on adblockers and uBlock Origin in particular not playing ball with them on it. (UBOL is a joke and the UI by design makes it look like a "kiddie"/unprofessional adblocker.)
Google didn't kill Firefox (they want it alive to avoid antitrust lawsuits). Mozilla did.
Normal users like my parents were completely unaware of all of these shenanigans. They do notice sites and their OS's nagging them to use Chrome/Edge/Safari.
Or we need effective antitrust regulation. Firefox would be in a very different position if Google hadn’t been allowed to make the YouTube experience worse for Firefox users (promises around WebM, proprietary web components) along with the heavy marketing push.
Word of mouth worked fine in Firefox’s favor for a few years.
I switched to Chrome years ago because it ran so much smoother than Firefox, and anecdotally I know of many others who did the same. With the switch, so did the recommendations.
This was before website's and OS's were consistently nagging people to switch to their own browser. And when the everyday browsing experience varied more among different browsers.
And now things are kind of going full circle, because part of the reason why Mozilla/Firefox increased their scope was to create services that would capture marketshare from a specific audience; which seems to be those who care about their privacy, though executive pay isn’t apart of that, and I don’t know if theres a viable defense for that.
Just to provide one example, if Firefox suddenly no longer has bookmark/history/password syncing because Mozilla has refocused on its core products (Firefox/Thunderbird/MDN), suddenly you'll see Firefox's market share dwindle even more, because ordinary users are accustomed to every browser having a bunch of bells and whistles like profile syncing.
The set of features people expect from a modern browser is really big now. To their credit, the Mozilla web standards people actively fought against a lot of the scope creep like "webpages should be able to flash firmware to USB devices" or "webpages should be able to talk to MIDI keyboards" but they lost, and now those are things a web browser is expected to do.
I've seen people argue that Mozilla shouldn't be offering cloud services and should just build a browser that never phones home to any servers at all, whether it's telemetry, automated updates, or profiles. I think all of those are part of shipping a modern browser, personally.
Maintaining all those cloud services raises your company's operational costs a lot, you now need people on-call 24/7 to maintain everything, you need webdevs who can wrangle postgres or redis or whatever, you need security experts to make sure the cloud stack is secure end to end, etc. So I think it's also fair for people to call this cloud stuff out as a cost center for Mozilla.
Which cloud services? I don't see how automated updates nor sync count as "cloud services" (and I'll note that the sync server used to be open source, so you could pull from the community like Mozilla claims to be part of).
A very large portion of the money goes directly into the pockets of senior managers who, based on Mozilla's dismal and falling market share, add absolutely no value to the business.
More than 1% of revenue (not profit; revenue) goes straight into the pocket of the CEO.
Something that this petition does not mention at all are possible alternatives to Google search as the default search engine. If Google isn’t the default, who should be the default?
Sounds like EU defined "sale of data" to mean a lot of other things besides selling data, like transferring information. And now Firefox cannot so definitively say they don't "sell your data", because they allow you to transfer webpages over the network.
Where are you getting this? All Mozilla says is that "the LEGAL definition of 'sale of data' is extremely broad in some places". They don't that it's the EU and definitely not that the EU has defined "sale of data" to include any use of a computer network, which would be absurd.
Mozilla's greatest contribution to the web could well end up being a fork of Firefox with an accompanying standard for html and CSS which halts the march of SPAs and curtails interactivity, cookies, etc. Call it HTML4+.
It wouldn't need hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve, and if it took off it'd hurt Google and their ilk massively.
At the moment the Faustian pact is that they act as a competition fig leaf in the browser space: Google can point to a nearly-as-good browser and say "look, we don't control everything" while they steam ahead setting standards that largely benefit themselves. The reason they can do this is the sheer capital intensity of the exercise: nobody can keep up or catch up. So a captive competitor makes perfect sense.
Shedding that capital intensity - by means of devising a simpler to implement, slower moving standard - is the only real escape hatch. Mozilla won't get anywhere by begging forever, and it'll lose its character if it doesn't keep it's nonprofit status.
Not a single mention of the fact Google contributed to 89% of Mozilla's income since 2005 [1]. Good luck convincing Mozilla to bite the hand that feeds it.
Sorry for that! There was a nasty bug which I’ve worked around for now (and tomorrow I’ll switch over to a backend I host myself).
Does it work now? If you’re still running into errors, please let me know your name / website and I’ll add you to the list! (or send to mozillapetition@ale.sh)
Mozilla needs to operate like NPR by having pledge drives and seeking charitable investment by organizations and nations because depending on for-profit arrangements means inevitable corruption just like any other corporation.
Organizations always grow, since the entire point of an organization is to exist for the sake of its stakeholders. The bigger it is, the better for stakeholders.
Willingly burning 85% of your revenue and downsizing isn't something that stakeholders want.
Odds are Mozilla will simply die and their browser with it, since the Chromium based ecosystem is much more robust.
I think you are confusing organizations and companies. Yes, under capitalism, companies only exist to reek in profits, but from a non-profit organization you'd expect something else...
Stakeholders include employees, and it is all organisations.
NGOs and government organisations follow the same pattern. They all expand, hire, and the people within each org all have a vested interest in the organization expanding and keeping them all employed, given raises, etc...
Sadly, the "companies only exist to..." version of capitalism is about as accurate as the "Santa only brings presents to Nice little ..." version of Christmas.
Substantial Organizations - whether capitalist, non-profit, or other - give a great deal of power to their leaders, and jobs to their workers. Those folks - most especially the former - may give lip service to the org's supposed mission...but their for-sure #1 priority is looking out for their own interests.
Haha, "Mozilla, please commit suicide". Whatever they're currently doing is fine. They've succeeded in their aim and now they're searching for a new thing to target affiliated with their space given their revenue numbers. Pretty logical thing to do for them. Good luck to Mozilla.
Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]:
> Expenses
1. Program 'Software Development'
2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M
2. Management 'General and Administrative' :
2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M
I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses.
Let's ignore inflation and COL and ballooning costs, etc. If we look at just the ratio of expenditure. We have an NPO (on paper at least) that just went from spending a ratio of 4 to 1 between developers and managers to spending a ratio of almost 2 to 1.
I am not familiar with what is typical in American NPO's but I can't help but feel that my money will not be spent on the right stuff.
[0] https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2007-audi...
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
And Mozilla has hit scale / become "big company" - with those kinds of revenues.
The reason why G&A outpaces R&D, is because now you have all kinds of work to do that you don't have to do when your small/underdog, like:
- regulatory compliance
- legal
- privacy
- advocacy
- public relations
- etc...
When you're the underdog, you don't have to deal with these activities and as a result, your expense base is more heavily skewed toward R&D.
CEO's largest accomplishment since 2007 was to put Mozilla on the brink of shutting down anytime Google's money stops flowing in.
That's a massive difference. Their revenue grew by $60m while the amount of money they got from Google decreased (by ~$15m).
Things do seem to be going in the desired direction
EDIT: some more history
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out the percentage is around 91%That was the year their lawsuit with Verizon finished and they got paid their remaining due for the Yahoo search deal. Related, I think most their money from 2017 also came from Yahoo.
And selling user data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43209768
As an example the Linux foundation [0] had 270M in expenses in 2023. Of which even we aggregate international operations and corporate operations the expenditure is less than 21M in G&A equivalent activities.
[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/lf_annualrepor...
The allegation of throwing is too light. They’re complicit in covering for Google’s obvious monopoly.
Having said that I just have had the same kinds of questions/trouble as OP about Mozilla's wild spending and budget compared to seeing their devs at grungy linux confs in the midwest when I was an undergrad in the 00s.
You did help point out what I really wondered about also and didn't understand, so thanks.
What’s the benefit of having Mozilla be this huge? How does it compare to the risk of shutting down if their revenue dries up, which is looking like a possibility?
Why does mozilla.ai exist?
Didn't we like a trust the product more in 2007 than we do now?
I mean, yay for scale, but haven't we lost something here?
There are other subsidiaries under the foundation umbrella like Mozilla.ai and MZLA/Thunderbird. This isn't something uncommon for large entity and there are many advantages. For example, it gives more freedom in term of decision making and spending to projects that aren't targeting the exact same consumer segment. Think about Thunderbird. Under Mozilla Corporation, it was always in the shadow of Firefox. Now, it's striving as an independent project.
AI threatens both browsers and search engines, is why. Apple, Google and Microsoft all have their own efforts.
Mozilla working on local-first AI isn't a bad idea.
The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc.
I wouldn't. And I'm a user! Mozilla needs to be restructured. And ideally they diversify their commercial ecosystem as well. Because they are way too dependent on Google.
If you look at Rust, created by Mozilla, they are set up in a more sane way. There's a foundation. It's well funded with sponsorships from the big companies that use and depend on Rust. Those companies employ people that contribute to Rust. Many OSS organizations are set up like that. It works. The diversity of contributors and commercial sponsors ensures neutrality and longevity. No single company has veto power. As long as valuable tech comes out, companies stay involved. Some disappear, new ones come along. Linux development works like that as well.
Ironically, Chromium at this point is better positioned to become like that. The main issue is that Google still employs most of the developers and controls the roadmap. But there are quite a few commercial chromium based products: Edge, Brave, Opera, etc. that each have development teams using and contributing to it. Add Electron (has its own foundation, based on chromium) to the mix and the countless commercial applications using that and you have a healthy ecosystem that could survive Google completely disengaging if they'd be forced to split off their browser activities.
I use Firefox mainly because of the iron grip keeps over Chromium and it's clear intent to cripple ad blocking, grab user data, and exploit its user base. But I worry about the dysfunctional mess that is Mozilla.
Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know that Mozilla funds things that are wildly not Firefox-related, like feminist AI conferences in Africa. Meanwhile Firefox looks more and more like an also-ran compared to its competition. All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser, not this.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozfest-house-zambia-...
I'm not sure this is the smoking gun you think it is.
https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/plaza
It is impressive indeed that you people get to throw the DEI card anywhere you don't like now. "Because of DEI, my browser got bad, the planes are falling of the skyes, and woke people are aiming a homo-ray at everything!"
God forbid those evil enterprises for spending an infinitesimal portion of THEIR money on trying to do the life of some people a slightly better, after years of the life of those same people being treated like excrement by people like you.
DEI has nothing to do with the failure in Mozilla being not sustainable. CEO/grand figures salaries, on the other hand...
Good. I'm going to donate some money then (to both parties).
It's not just that: Mozilla can't use any of your donation on Firefox. Firefox belongs to the for-profit, and money cannot flow from the non-profit to the for-profit. So in a way all of the random stuff that they do do as the non-profit is the inevitable outcome of their structure:
They have a product that people who care know is struggling to survive and so those people want to donate. Mozilla now has money that they can't spend on the product, so they have to find somewhere else to put it.
One might reasonably ask why the org whose primary purpose is maintaining the one independent browser engine is structured in a way that makes it impossible for donations to flow to the browser engine. I don't have a good answer that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory.
According to their 2023 form 990 (the 2024 one isn't published yet) those sort of donations are usually on the order of 15k. You don't get much browser for that money.
Managers like to build empires?
It's $260M.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43341830
Where do you get "a few million"? Do they only have less than 20 developers? Why denigrate Mozilla?
> If you look at Rust, created by Mozilla, they are set up in a more sane way. There's a foundation. It's well funded with sponsorships from the big companies that use and depend on Rust.
Firefox isn't used by companies, but by consumers.
Chromium is not a good alternative: 95% of Chromium commits come from Google. [2]
[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
[2]: https://chromiumstats.github.io/cr-stats/authors/company_aut...
Or ... Chromium is the perfect alternative ... as long as it remains open source and privacy invasion can be easily stripped out of it. Let Google fund most of the development of a privacy respecting browser (i.e. Brave).
And if it doesn't remain open source? Then it's time for a fork --- just like it is now with Firefox.
Bottom line: If you reject Chromium, shouldn't you also reject Mozilla/Firefox? Virtually all development over the past decade was funded by Google.
https://eligrey.com/
Google engineers write specs for new APIs. They get rejected by Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds. Google implements them anyway. Other Chromium-based browsers get these APIs as a result. Then they start popping up on sites showing Safari and Firefox “failing” to implement them. Then web developers ask why Safari and Firefox are so “behind” in implementing “web standards”.
This mechanism is how the web standards process is being subsumed into “whatever Google wants” instead of being a collaborative effort between multiple rendering engines. Google should not be able to unilaterally decide what is and isn’t a web standard.
Brave offers everything Firefox does and more --- like privacy by default (which Firefox could but won't do for obvious reasons) --- all without millions in direct Google payola.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
Yes, ManifestV3 nerfs adblocking, and Google loves that side effect. It will hamper Brave' internal adblocking engine.
I think the big interesting question is: if Brave figures out how to add improvements to ManifestV3 that aid adblocking without sacrificing performance or privacy/security, will Google accept the PRs?
- Replacing ads on pages without owner's intervention, under the guise that they were offering owners a cryptocurrency
- Inserting their own referral codes on websites
- Installing their VPN software on Windows machines without consent
They also introduced a Tor mode into their browser that sent DNS requests unmasked to your ISP. I don't know why you would trust Brave at this point.
Genuine question from a FF user.
For each profile, you would have to install again every extension, set every setting, every bookmark,.. of course no sync between your main profile and others.
Can't right click on link to open them in another profile.
No automatic opening of profiles when you go on a specific url
And so on.
On the other hand, brave will push it's crypto crap, web3 and 'bat coins' everywhere.
If you're interested in Brave, and social issues affect your choice in who or who not to support - check his wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
Do you think that in open source there's no ownership?
*When* Google asks them to remove manifest v2, what do you think they'll do?
It’s even more pointless than removing it from Chromium though: Firefox users would just switch to a fork that still supports it, or to a fork that supports blockingWebRequest APIs on v3 extensions, or to a fork that implements some other ad blocking method. With Chromium, they at least have Chrome users, many of whow wouldn’t want to even bother. (Those who do have migrated to forks already)
This is a non sequitur. Google supplies Mozilla with money, but Mozilla decides how to deploy that money. This is significantly different than Google directing the development of Firefox, which they clearly don't do. They absolutely do direct the development of chromium, however. It makes no sense to trust an advertising company to direct the development of your browser, but not to trust a nonprofit. Conversely, it makes perfect sense to place more trust in a browser developed by a nonprofit, even one funded by an advertiser, over a browser developed by an advertising company. Web attestation and manifest V2 are both examples of exactly why this is the case.
Why would they do that? (I mean, they wouldn’t stop it in one go, but they sure as hell will try to push users off the web.)
> If you reject Chromium, shouldn't you also reject Mozilla/Firefox? Virtually all development over the past decade was funded by Google.
Which is exactly the problem :-)
If Chromium can live on without Google – I don’t mind it. My primary concern is Firefox, though.
???
Google's revenue stream is almost wholly dependent on the web and the privacy invasion it facilitates. Pushing users off the web would be self defeating.
These numbers are highly unrealistic.
Mozilla spends that on development, but firefox is only a small part of that.
A DOA specifically setup to build a user-respecting browser run by a Foundation where token holders could vote out the waste we’ve seen Mozilla and the like do, could work.
And for those crypto-haters, I’m not sqying token-based as an speculative investment, I’m saying here token specifically here for voting rights to control asset allocation and business decisions
I would agree with you there.
Sadly the art of troughing is a well known feature of larger NPOs.
That's why (IMHO) people should never blindly donate to NPOs without first taking a quick look at their financial accounts to get a feel for how much troughing is going on. Honestly, if I had my way, I would make it law to have a simple-to-read one-page summary of that data for every NPO.
I also do not buy the oft-cited argument "well, we have to attract talent by paying them 'competitively' ".
Well no. If the "talent" wants a fat paycheck, they can go work in the private sector. If they are going to work at an NPO, then they should WANT to work for the NPO, not just see it as another spot for their CV. In many (most?) cases they will be in charge of an army of well-meaning unpaid volunteers, its not a good look for the C-suite to roam around in private cars, businssess-class flights, have fancy "away days" etc. etc.
Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference?
Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?
Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs or whatever the demand of the day is won’t change that.
It will take some time for enough users to be blown away by how useful this is.
I wrote a simple user script one time that subscribes me to all discoverable rss feeds I run into while browsing. It seemed rather random but I was blown away by how interesting the websites I visit are to me. You can imagine it, now multiply that by 10 000 and you have a good estimate.
Google has to index 130 billion pages and is barely able to deliver half interesting results. If you query it with something like "Firefox" or "Google" it will find zero interesting pages. Stuff so boring you won't even bother.
In your history there might be hundreds of interesting articles, discussions, lectures, publications etc interesting to you specifically!
That obscure website you once visited, that one without any traffic, visited by Googlebot one time per week which then bothers to index 5% of it and puts the results on page 20 of the search results. Why it even bothers to index it no one knows.
Now say you want to read it again or you are searching for that obscure thing again 5 years later it is there in your history.
Mozaïk had full text history search in 1994 when hard drives were 5 mb and the www had 10 000 pages. The www now has a hundred thousand times as many pages but drives are a million times larger. Unlike 1994 you won't be able to visit a single digit percentage of it.
I’ve built something similar myself. It’s quite annoying that the browser only saves like 3 months of history.
Honestly, from observing my close family and friends as well as passing by strangers, everyone uses whatever default comes(i.e. Chrome on Android) or again Chrome(on iOS because they saw some banner ad somewhere to install it to access their password stored previously in android life).
The core portal to internet currently appears to be the blue-F(aka Facebook) icon which has an interesting search. People search in Facebook for specific topic and then will reluctantly move over to browser and again search on Google(always default). So, in summary no, everyone uses Chrome and does not know the difference.
Some of my colleagues seem to use Brave and Linux die-hards use Firefox(comes default with ubuntu last I tried ubuntu).
Every single Windows and Mac user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download Chrome. Why didn’t they decide to download Firefox?
What alternative do you suggest? Google and Microsoft are certainly worse. Firefox is vastly superior to the offerings of these multi billion dollar companies. Chrome and edge are exactly the prisons that these companies designed them to be.
What specifically should laypeople do to regain something resembling a usable Internet? Firefox and ublock origin is the only answer I have.
Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox.
Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced devtools, Google having a team of "evangelists", course material is Chrome-based, test-automation, etc. So developers too can ignore Firefox.
Some argue that it's good to have an independent rendering engine. Here too Firefox plays no role at all. The only counter force to Google's web feature roadmap is Apple/Webkit, not Mozilla.
From a privacy preserving perspective, Firefox has no unique value. Install Brave, say no to the one-time crypto pop-up, and you have a very decent and fast browser that also consistently renders along with Chrome and Edge.
I use Firefox. If I ask myself why, it's muscle memory and because uBlock Origin still works.
This keeps the cookies separate and means you are tracked less. Yes you can manually do this with Chrome profiles, but before this feature was introduced into Firefox I had a dozen or more Chrome profiles to keep all my work, community and personal Google/Microsoft logins separate.
Web developer here, and Chrome dev tools suck balls. I exclusively use Firefox.
However the theoretical downside of Brave is that as Google continues changing Chromium's codebase, there's incentive for them to make it harder and harder to maintain a manifest v2-enabled fork. Wouldn't be surprised if extensive refactors randomly happen that multiply the effort needed to merge changes from upstream while maintaining the v2 capability. And how motivated is Brave to do all this labor? At some point they're going to say the tax is too high, we have a nice built-in ad blocker anyway, just use that.
A well-maintained, funded, and focused Firefox would be a good thing for when that day comes.
That said, uBlock Origin works best on Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
> We can't publish LibRedirect to the Chrome Web Store as it requires Manifest v3, which removed essential features that LibRedirect needs.
uBlock Origin is just the tip of the iceberg since it's the most popular one, there is an entire ecosystem of Mv2 extensions that can never be replaced by Brave's built in functionality
You can have all the usual ublock origin behaviour custom filter lists and all that, about:adblock
I'm not too sure why it's majorly relevant. The fact that it's not popular doesn't make it any less of a desirable option
> From a privacy preserving perspective, Firefox has no unique value
Similarly, the fact that it's not unique is somewhat irrelevant. Though the thing that's scary is what they removed from their terms and conditions.
I'd like to understand this point better. Does Firefox use the Chromium engine under the hood?
I assume the previous comment was about market share. It’s low, yes, but I still think Firefox has influence despite that. Having a third rendering engine is valuable—especially now, after Microsoft killed IE/Edge and turned it into a Chromium fork. The percentage might not be high, but the people who use Firefox are usually the ones pushing for keeping the web an open standard.
I can remember a single time I had to swap to Chrome for something, and it was three years ago, and involved some flavor of WebAssembly, I believe.
If anyone can point out a current website that is acting up under Firefox and not Chrome, please post it. I just want want to know that the "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.
IMO this isn't the argument. Firefox users aren't discussing superior or inferior, but sites that accidentally or purposefully break or over-optimize for Chrome, making Firefox users second class citizens.
I commented about YouTube and Google Suite on another thread, but your webassembly example reminds me of the GCP dashboard and in browser virtual machine, which is also horrible in anything but Chrome if you plan to use it day in day out. I was spending my life there for a few months, and sure enough a dedicated Chrome instance made my life a lot better.
It's still interesting to contrast my personal experience re: Firefox with everyone elses when it comes to the "Manifest V3 ! Abandon ship, but to where?" conversation.
I have no insight into Firefox' technical foundations, but to your point I've been using it since the IE days and never had critical performance issues or compelling reasons to use another browser short of company specific sites: Google properties is one: while Firefox works, Google has obviously no incentive to make it work better than Chrome, and potentially incentives for the opposite.
Companies' internal sites and tools are another: fixating on one specific browser has been an (unwise) long lasting trend, and for a company Chrome being backed by Google has a lot more appeal than Firefox. That was the same dynamic that cemented IE6 in it's position.
Perhaps Firefox missed the V8/electron train that would have made it in the same position as Linux: a platform to run other things on. But I don't know the history around that.
(I actually had that exact issue yesterday; I managed to do it on the Android app, and didn't think this was an issue with Firefox specifically.)
This is the only reason I keep the Slack "desktop app" around.
Which has made a knock on effect that if I’m using Firefox and something doesn’t work - I very much wonder if it would work in Chrome.
It’s burned into my brain now.
Firefox doesn't work well on Google properties (for obvious and non obvious reasons). It's decent, but in my experience it 's significantly slow and resource intensive in most of Google Suite and subpar on YouTube[0]. Useable, but definitely heavier than Chrome. I ended up with a dedicated Chrome instance for meet and Sheets.
Recently I found Notion to be more and more sluggish, it might be because of cache and other relics as I spend my life in Notion, but fresh Chrome instances behave better. All in all, Notion has become worse and worse, so it might be just part of that trend.
Many enterprise extensions currently won't work at all in Firefox. It's in no part Firefox's fault, and enterprise software has always been shitty, but this is becoming a reality to me.
[0] I don't have the link at hand, but it was notably due to Google intentionally screwing up Firefox last time I looked into it...
I'm sure I've seen a few things not work on FF, but not many, and likely things that would break on Safari too (I've had govt stuff just not work on tablet safari for sure).
Also Slack.
Besides that, uBlock Origin, Bypass Paywalls Clean, and AdNauseum working have been enough of an argument for me to be able to convince my friends to make the switch.
https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Firefox/
So I am glad to see this page full of signatures. It might not help, but it won't hurt either.
Crypto [1].
[1] https://brave.com/wallet/
Instead of selling their default search engine they do their own and capture the value themselves.
EDIT: Brave is opensource
[1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-core
[2]: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit
[0] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit
They're long aware that they should. They made the strategic announcement some 7-8 years back if I remember correctly. Since then they tried to diversify and failed miserably.
Sure enough incompetence is involved but we should also consider how very hard it is.
Making hundreds of millions from a new tech product in the consumer space is impossibly difficult. You're up against Big Tech and a generally very competitive and saturated space where any idea can be easily replicated. And you're up against consumers that really don't want to pay, hence ads.
That said, I do feel Mozilla barely tried and wasted a lot of money on distractions. They're way too comfortable raking half a billion for effectively doing nothing at all: keep the search box pointing at Google.
I wish my miserable failures brought in $65 million annually.
HN users complain about that $65 million constantly. Mozilla is stuck in a spot where the same angry nerds that want them to diversify away from Google won't actually let them spin up diverse sources of revenue.
Or maybe the idea is that employees/developers don't need to eat, which is incredibly ironic given who HN users typically are. There isn't a single line in this petition dedicated to how Mozilla should raise funds instead.
Maybe signing the petition should be behind a paywall, I would be very interested to see how many votes that would gather.
In the light of ToS changes, I'm sad and feel let down without an option.
The truth is, there are no actual ideas on how to replace it. Donations is not the answer. You can't replace hundreds of millions of $ simply with donations.
Equally you can't just reduce spending by firing swathes of people Twitter style. And even if you could FF would still not have enough to "just pay programmers" (like they work in some kind of vacuum.)
It's really easy to run a business from outside - you can make a lot of obvious points, and ignore realities or accountability.
There's lots of "you should do xxx" in the petition with 0 suggestions on how to fund it.
mozilla probably could.
I also don't agree that donations are the only way to support Mozilla. As others have mentioned they have spent time and effort contributing to Firefox/Mozilla's projects, and many probably have advocated for the use of Firefox — all of that is value to Mozilla and the community.
I don't have any experience starting an organization, let alone one that has that kind of revenue, but as a user, whether you donate or not, if Mozilla is getting that kind of money and their track record and reputation just seems to go downhill, I'd be surprised that people who are invested in it are not upset.
I think Google has that problem too.
No need to do marketing, have a venture arm, millions for management, etc. it could be a group of 10 or 20 really awesome engineers and maybe a bunch of passionate open source folks contributing.
Will he do it? No. Do I wish he would? Yes. Would I if I could? Hell yes because there needs to be a viable alternative to chrome and how is that possible when chrome butters their bread and pays their bills?
Or! The some hundreds of millions they did get from Google they just out in an endowment and then shrink staff (start with management) until they can live comfortably off the interest…
But do you also want the browser beholden to the parent company of its direct competitor?
This is a fantasy land hypothetical of course as we know exactly the kind of guy Marc is, he’ll want a say.
Of course we all believe "But what I think is best for them is a good thing!".
Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model was to sell reports about the internet browsing habits of firefox users to advertisers.
The problem was never Mozilla's dependence Google. The problem is their dependence on the surveillance of internet users.
As far as I know Mozilla hasn't disclosed how much money they spent buying up Anonym, but they'll want a return on their investment. I don't think they're going to abandon it as quickly as they did their ideals.
I hope you realize that happened in 2006.
Recent developments can only improve the situation, actually, if it makes Mozilla more independent.
They also removed a promise to "never sell your data" in their FAQ[2] 2 weeks ago.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326230
[2] - https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Naturally not everyone was happy about it:
https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-fea...
Where telemetry is what I linked above.
I see some have addons.. but actually my point is precisely that I don't understand it - these addons can be auto installed? They can make requests? They're not on searchfox?
Sorry for being cynical, but this "petition" sounds like telling depressed people to "just be more positive." Sure, just find more revenue streams. Just be sustainable. It's so easy!
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out (which is normally at or near zero) the percentage is around 91%
With less than 3% marketshare, Mozilla doesn't exist now for most people --- mainly just for Google.
Alternative browsers are available based on Firefox source code. The same is true with Chromium.
The Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, and you can do it because it's a non-profit. But it doesn't make Firefox. It owns Mozilla Corporation, which does. And it can't just dump donated money into Mozilla Corp either; regulators are not naive.
But yeah, part of the problem is probably the fact that the Mozilla Foundation isn’t the one employing Firefox devs.
It could be a stand alone association ruled by its members or a classic free-for-all whatever goes code talks FOSS project.
Currently private companies rule the browser world and they wield incredible power over everything from standards to PKI. Their interest is a world that depends on them even more.
Mozilla has been less and less dependent on Google and is now working on a VPN, MDN Plus, and other revenue streams that are also helping it become more independent. But the truth is that if all Google money suddenly stopped today, there would be no more Mozilla
Unless you mean that Mozilla should move completely to Europe, sure. But the part about the EU not telling Mozilla what to do is naive. If my taxes pay for it, of course I want the EU to tell Mozilla what to do.
The path you're proposing has been pushed by the community for about how long the Mozilla foundation existed. I'm not sure asking them one more time will make a big difference.
>give Europe as a whole the ability to contribute its vision
Who's vision? The peoples vision? Or the vision of bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists etc.
Endow a working group under Fraunhofer [1]. Their product is simply and solely a browser engine. Nothing more.
[1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/en.html
Also ... private companies can block things they don't like, such as competitors...or alter their search rankings.
I frankly do not understand all the resistance against a call for a politically neutral tech infrastructure. To all those people frantically pressing that down-vote button, do you really desire for your tech infrastructure to be ideologically driven? Do you even understand what such a thing means and what it will lead to?
Private organisations that have great power over important bits of the internet are also not necessarily politically neutral and there is no level to control them.
Vivaldi.
They basically just want to keep the copyright to their UI. You can see the source but they don't want anyone to rip off their UI.
And let's be real, every browser (even Firefox) has closed source server side code.
Also, the comment I initially responded to was about why isn't there a European browser not controlled by "big tech"... Vivaldi is an independent company in Europe making a browser.
What is Firefox's? Accounts and Sync are both open source, and I'm struggling to think of anything else
i.e. https://github.com/mozilla/fxa
Nope, run in the opposite direction. Unsuck from any teat.
As long as the EU doesn't have the equivalent of the Commerce Clause then, sure.
I believe that Google money is a huge net positive for Firefox: free money for basically nothing asked in return.
Additionally I think that the biggest problem of Firefox have been Mozilla for 10-15 years and there is no sign of improving, only getting worse and worse. I wish Firefox could ditch Mozilla (and probably keep Google money flow if possible).
https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/05/13/milestone-phoe...
There’s a problem, though: there’s little to no core development happening in any of these forks. If Mozilla comes crashing down, somebody will have to pick it up.
Wait, they already did that.
Of course, it's never actually too late to add another fork.
Firefox is important, the peoples le who make Firefox are important. If someone can form a lean organisation that can fund the development they should do so. Open source allows the potential to abandon a bloated governing structure, but it has to be done with eyes wide open and fully committed to providing the resources to continue development.
It is a very hard problem, but not an intractable problem. It is certainly better than asking managers to decide against their own self interest.
Let's be real, Mozilla leadership is not going to slaughter their cash cow. They have no incentive to place anything above the needs of Google.
It's already proven --- the user base and market share have been effectively abandoned for lack of impact to the bottom line. Plaintive demands from users now carry no real weight and will most likely be met with marketing doublespeak/lip service while business as usual continues.
Sorry but it's too late now. Any debate over the direction of Mozilla is a done deal settled a decade ago.
There are options:
1) Non-personalized (aka context sensitive) advertising. Advertising by itself is not the inherently evil part --- the collection of personalized data is. Context sensitive advertising doesn't require any personal data.
2) As an alternative for those who prefer it, allow users to pay a small annual fee for AD BLOCKING.
I'd pay for something that is truly private and blocks personalized ads and the associated data collection. Given a little reasonable incentive, I think there are others who would too.
Google's vision of the web is a choice, not a requirement. Mozilla could put forth a real alternative vision --- but they won't for obvious reasons.
I have already seen that many folks switched to using several engines, because you see more that way. Personally I like searxng. There is gpt also obviously.
Sometimes I also search domains I crawled.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
They've tried hard in recent years to get out from under Google by diversifying into other areas. For example, they have a VPN service that is a wrapper around Mullvad, and they've made some privacy tools that you can pay to use, also largely wrappers around other companies' tools.
I was an employee of Mozilla Corporation and saw first-hand the effort they were making. In my opinion, it's been a pretty abysmal failure so far. Pulling Google funding would effectively hamstring Mozilla Corp.
This is admirable, but how what would Mozilla replace the 85% ( $555M) revenue with by ditching Google?
I'm assuming a portion of the 15% of revenue is from Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, etc and also the pay packets of the executives needs to significantly decrease.
But this isn't enough to fill the 85% hole for when Mozilla ditches Google.
Modern adtech goes entirely against their core values.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out (which is normally at or near zero) the percentage is around 91%Basically, I think that’s the only way Firefox even has a fighting chance: the alternatives are (1) always be the 5% browser Google wants it to be or (2) come crashing into the ground if the DOJ does go through with the search payment ban.
=== ANNUAL COSTS ===
20 developers at $150k each = $3M
Other staff costs, like pensions etc. = $1.5M
Someone in charge of overall project = $250k (this doesn't have to be the case. He could easily be a dev on $150k but lets run with it)
Infrastructure for testing and whatnot. Lets say Azure (expensive!) = $1M
2 x Marketing peeps = $250k
Other expenses (travel, rubber ducks etc.) = $1M
I literally pulled these figures out my ass (as you can no doubt tell!) but lets add it up:
$3M + $1.5M + $0.25M + $1M + $0.25M + $1M = $7M per year.
That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever!
Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special.
Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :)
It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.
The guys I work with are on about £95k and the good ones are very good.
I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc. (oh, and being left alone by interfering management!)
I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.
Anyway, this was all just a bit of fun :)
Hypothetically, if I was given the money and asked to build a team to fork Firefox I'd be more focused. Way more!
The current devs work on stuff I'd scrap like Pocket, telemetry, anything with AI, and so on. I bet there is a load of stuff in there that I'd want out! There's probably a bunch of things in Firefox Labs they're working on too.
So, I'd argue that 20 good devs (again, a number I pulled out of the air!) split into, say, 4 smaller teams could achieve a shit load of work under the right circumstances, with the right leadership and so on.
I'm currently a senior architect with over 50 devs below me. Most are mid-level at best (not a slur, just where they are in their career!) but the few good ones are very good. A team of 20 of those could pull it off!
It'd be a tall order building a browser from scratch with 20 devs maybe but it's already built.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/
Anyway, all the heavy-lifting is done: The JS engine, the CSS engine and so on.
The only other browser spends significantly more than that. If it's so much cheaper, you'd expect organizations like Microsoft to have stayed in the game.
>First good step would be to fire that useless CEO.
The one who stepped down a year ago? Or do you have some issue with the interim? They're still looking for a permanent one
Edit: wow, it says here that "Mozilla announced her departure on February 19, 2025" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
Yeah I'm calling it on this new one as well. The interim CEO isn't aligned with the rightful mission of Mozilla either.
I still vividly recall the frozen UI as another tab loaded or did work. And if one tab crashed they all went with it. Annoyed me every time.
After many years[1] they sorted it out, but in my view it's clear that's what really killed their momentum, as it was such a sacrifice to stay with Firefox compared to using Chrome.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-nex...
Mozilla is, rather frustrating for those that lead it I'm sure, chosen largely based on principles that people found they couldn't get from Google. Things like "don't profit from me the user", "don't track me" and "don't do things in my browser without me knowing about it". These aren't things people point towards the Chrome browser with because if you expect any of this to not be done by Google, then you're kidding yourself.
Mozilla meanwhile has a pretty wide history of just... doing things that break this promise[0][1][2] (listed is mostly recent stuff, but they have been doing it since forever, going back to the forced Pocket integration).
Chrome users don't care about this stuff (since they already use a Google product), Firefox users by virtue of picking Firefox did. And when it comes to optimization, Chrome does beat Firefox pretty handily, so people started abandoning Firefox because at that point, both Mozilla and Google offer the same value proposition.
Their recent ventures into adtech are probably going to annihilate their biggest potential userbase gain, which is Google tightening the screws on adblockers and uBlock Origin in particular not playing ball with them on it. (UBOL is a joke and the UI by design makes it look like a "kiddie"/unprofessional adblocker.)
Google didn't kill Firefox (they want it alive to avoid antitrust lawsuits). Mozilla did.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497051
I switched to Chrome years ago because it ran so much smoother than Firefox, and anecdotally I know of many others who did the same. With the switch, so did the recommendations.
The set of features people expect from a modern browser is really big now. To their credit, the Mozilla web standards people actively fought against a lot of the scope creep like "webpages should be able to flash firmware to USB devices" or "webpages should be able to talk to MIDI keyboards" but they lost, and now those are things a web browser is expected to do.
Keeping up with all the scope creep is expensive.
Maintaining all those cloud services raises your company's operational costs a lot, you now need people on-call 24/7 to maintain everything, you need webdevs who can wrangle postgres or redis or whatever, you need security experts to make sure the cloud stack is secure end to end, etc. So I think it's also fair for people to call this cloud stuff out as a cost center for Mozilla.
More than 1% of revenue (not profit; revenue) goes straight into the pocket of the CEO.
(Especially the regulatory things that apply to me personally.)
Why would Google pay to be the default if the majority of users would have a different engine?
If you mean for firefox specifically, that's Google. But, since it's firefox instead of Edge, you've already left the defaults far behind.
https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
It wouldn't need hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve, and if it took off it'd hurt Google and their ilk massively.
At the moment the Faustian pact is that they act as a competition fig leaf in the browser space: Google can point to a nearly-as-good browser and say "look, we don't control everything" while they steam ahead setting standards that largely benefit themselves. The reason they can do this is the sheer capital intensity of the exercise: nobody can keep up or catch up. So a captive competitor makes perfect sense.
Shedding that capital intensity - by means of devising a simpler to implement, slower moving standard - is the only real escape hatch. Mozilla won't get anywhere by begging forever, and it'll lose its character if it doesn't keep it's nonprofit status.
Not a single mention of the fact Google contributed to 89% of Mozilla's income since 2005 [1]. Good luck convincing Mozilla to bite the hand that feeds it.
[1] https://windscribe.com/blog/windscribe-expose-mozilla/
Does it work now? If you’re still running into errors, please let me know your name / website and I’ll add you to the list! (or send to mozillapetition@ale.sh)
What’s a petition without a solution?
This idea is more detached than Mastodon.
Oh, so _they_ are the problem now?
And I thought the problem was that Mozilla was selling user data!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43209768
Silly me!
Organizations always grow, since the entire point of an organization is to exist for the sake of its stakeholders. The bigger it is, the better for stakeholders.
Willingly burning 85% of your revenue and downsizing isn't something that stakeholders want.
Odds are Mozilla will simply die and their browser with it, since the Chromium based ecosystem is much more robust.
NGOs and government organisations follow the same pattern. They all expand, hire, and the people within each org all have a vested interest in the organization expanding and keeping them all employed, given raises, etc...
Substantial Organizations - whether capitalist, non-profit, or other - give a great deal of power to their leaders, and jobs to their workers. Those folks - most especially the former - may give lip service to the org's supposed mission...but their for-sure #1 priority is looking out for their own interests.
/s
EVERYONE should ditch goggle 8-/
but, but, muh g-stuff!!! pathetic, really.
The corps has been for the purpose of user surveilance from the beginning.
If you want your donations to be well spent, send them to a firefox fork maintainer...
But how fund all that is still a major question.
[0] https://medium.com/@mail_18109/mozillas-new-firefox-terms-sp...