[gamjQZnHT53AMa]

Threads about the finances of Mozilla are always full of criticism and begrudging. Yeah, they take money from Google, and that keeps them alive. Yeah, they would love to not be so reliant on them. This is old news. But while they are alive, and while Firefox continues development, Google have slightly less of a grip on the internet. That is undeniably a good thing. Mozilla getting paid by Google is a better scenario than Firefox being abandoned and Google controlling the browser engine space entirely.

[Waterluvian]

I think I mostly agree. But let me play Satan’s Lawyer for a moment:

Google wants to avoid resembling a monopoly on browsers. But they also don’t want competition. Keeping Mozilla on palliative care may actually be worse than letting it collapse, the monopoly becoming obvious, and regulatory bodies forcing corrections of the situation.

(but who am I kidding, that won’t happen… maybe in Europe)

[heather45879]

It’s actually in Google’s best interest to help keep Mozilla alive. Mozilla is an innovator and helps push the envelope with technologies like Rust and WASM. Friendly competition helps prevent stagnation and encourages innovation on both sides.

[yakubin]

Safari has a bigger influence when it comes to stopping Google from total dominance. Firefox is irrelevant market share-wise, however much I like its developer tools.

[soperj]

This is pretty much what they said about Microsoft w/r to Apple in the 90s no?

[pluc]

It's real odd to be the only alternative to Chrome yet be almost entirely funded by it. Google allows Firefox to exist, and Google can decide it's tired of sponsoring competition tomorrow morning. I don't like that Mozilla allows that to be their (and ours, and the web's) reality and isn't more adventurous in monetization. Also that they pay their CEO an outrageous amount of money, but I guess you're free to pick what your kneepads are going to be made of.

[kibwen]

The last time that Mozilla parted ways with Google (in 2014), Yahoo snapped up that spot (if reports are to be believed, for actually more than Google was paying). Yahoo Search may be defunct, but as long as Bing exists, there's an out. Of course, it would be nicer if the existence of megacorp-funded search engines was not an existential prerequisite.

[rtepopbe]

I don't like the situation either, but I find it hard to blame Mozilla for not pushing monetization hard enough. I can't think of anything more I'd like Mozilla to actually do.

I'm rather against being sold out, and suspect most Firefox users feel similarly.

Offering services essentially entirely separate from Firefox could work, but comes with substantial risk. Mozilla will be more trusted than some fly-by-night startup, at least among the techie crowd, but also can't just burn investor money and start over until something sticks. (Ironically, the only thing that comes to mind here for me would be a privacy-oriented email provider.)

The only maybe, theoretically, kind-of, plausible route I see working would be more of an open-core-esque model, where their paid offerings essentially implemented extension-like capabilities that would benefit substantially from deep integration with the browser. Think things that would otherwise be impossible with the extension API, or have substantial performance improvements if only Firefox internals could be messed with.

But. So many buts.

I'm not even sure their organization is setup to allow this kind of thing. I'm sure their codebase isn't, especially if it might require special considerations to comply with their charter.

Mozilla would also gain a bunch of perverse incentives to restrict or cripple base Firefox, which would bite them every time they added a new paid offering. For example, just how much more flack would they have caught for the new extension API if their own offerings wouldn't have to abide by any of those new limitations?

And it seems inevitable that they'll have to spend some serious effort to minimize the amount of browser fragmentation issues that would now occur within Firefox itself.

After all of that, the extensions most likely to get me to buy in - literally and otherwise - to the whole concept, would be ones that would seriously strain Mozilla's relationship with Google and many other companies. Things like deeply integrated ad-blocking and other privacy-focused features would be most likely to get me to not only accept the practice but even spend my money. But step one of weening themselves off Google's money probably shouldn't be "Burn bridges with Google."

So... yeah.

What else is Mozilla supposed to do? I'm not overly enamored with Mozilla these days. Increasingly I feel I'm sticking with them less because of anything they've done, and more because of what Google's done. But still, I find it hard to blame them too much for treading water.

[roenxi]

They have a billion dollars in assets and are making $600 million/annum if I'm reading their financial statement correctly. That is well into the 'corrupt until proven otherwise' range of wealth. Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that, the browser's market share collapsed and it is notable that Eich [0] of all people went on to develop a browser based on Chrome after thinking about what would be the best base for a company. And Brave is at least trying things - it probably won't work but there is a vision there of reshaping the internet and toppling Google's advertising model. That could be Mozilla. It isn't.

There is a lot of room here to criticise this project. It seems to be off the rails, and it is likely to go further off the rails.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

[chomp]

$600 million in revenue (across all subsidiaries), $200 million on software development, $100 million on management, are you upset at Mozilla for running a healthy balance sheet? I'm confused about your complaint. Should Mozilla be packing itself to the gills with software developers for Firefox? It seems like they are trying to broaden their holdings and assets to build wealth for the company and Foundation so that they can become less reliant on Google.

Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015. I'm not seeing how this is can be made to an indictment of Mozilla corruption.

[trap_goes_hot]

>That is well into the 'corrupt until proven otherwise' range of wealth.

What is your best argument for why others should accept such a standard?

> Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that,

Any link to data justifying such a claim?

[mixmastamyk]

> Yeah, they would love to not be so reliant on them.

If they had put a substantial chuck of this money in income producing investments for the last ten or twenty years (instead of executive perks), they could have a nice annuity right now. Could be called an "endowment."

[thrown_22]

>Look Mr. Government, we're not a monopoly. We have a competitor! *

*Who were funding and have neutered to the point where they've lost 90% of their market share in the last 10 years. Have fired all their developers and are spending the money on spending that looks a lot like what GFX did.

Mozilla is a dead weight around the neck of the internet. The best thing that can happen is that it dies and something new, run by people who actually make things, is created again.

When was the last time anyone was excited about a firefox update?

[speed_spread]

Updates to existing browsers should not be exciting. I actually dread Chrome updates because they keep taking useful stuff away.

[dzikimarian]

> Mozilla is a dead weight around the neck of the internet.

How exactly are they dead weight?

[gamjQZnHT53AMa]

The people you are imagining that can make things exist wether it not Mozilla exists. And no one is successfully making a browser project to rival Firefox. So no, I think that isn't the best thing

[chrisseaton]

Almost nobody uses Firefox - it's Safari that keeps balance in the browser world.

[ianbutler]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

To be fair, you are correct in the mobile space, and that is now the lion share of devices, but Firefox does have a healthy 7.5% usage in the desktop space if the metrics on this page are to be believed.

[pmarreck]

I use Firefox across all my devices. It's fantastic. The people who actually care about browsers (and, perhaps, "anonymity", or "doing the right thing") have all largely moved on from Chrome.

[soperj]

Only because people are forced to.