[miki_oomiri]

If I were the CEO, I would:

- focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile - just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS) - other features should be addons - privacy centric - builtin, first-class, adblocker - run on donations - partner with Kagi - layoff 80% of the non-tech employees

I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.

[mgbmtl]

Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just $500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks, etc.

I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps make the project predictable and sustainable.

For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and accounting.

Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned with most users. You need various income sources.

[zihotki]

With 1.3b in reserves, it's enough for funding development for many years to come if they fire most of management and close irrelevant to the browser things.

[account42]

Oh no a nonprofit has to do nonprofit things. Can't be done, I tell you. Impossible.

[quchen]

To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.

[spacechild1]

Yes! I can confirm it works just like on desktop. I'm shocked when I have to use other people's phones. How do they put up with all these ads?

[josefresco]

Can I get details on ad blocking in Firefox on iOS? I have an ad blocker which works well in Safari but not Firefox. What am I missing?

[cpburns2009]

My only complaint about Firefox on Android is it's slow even with ad blocking. Chrome is noticeably faster. Brave gives you the best of both worlds: speed and ad blocking.

[lionkor]

The only issue is that Firefox on mobile is visibly breaking a couple of sites every now and then; if you can put up with that for no ads (I can), then its great.

[BoredPositron]

...on android.

[mmooss]

> Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.

That's always said by the engineers and never seems more than the obvious egocentric bias: What I do is important, everyone and everythying else is pointless.

[miki_oomiri]

Yep. I’ll die on the hill. Engineer and designers. That’s all we really need.

We started with a very very small team and did all the heavy lifting. Then they started adding PM, marketing, market people, HR, …

We were striving when we were not drowning in meetings, KPIs, management, emails, …

[matheusmoreira]

> I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people

> just put engineers in charge

I would like that but is that even possible? Look at Wikipedia. Look at schools. Once an organization develops a bad case of fat "administrator" class, can it be cured or is it terminal?

I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing.

[hamdingers]

Kagi already has their own WebKit based browser, not sure they'd be interested in that partnership.

[robinhood]

No. Kagi uses Google results behind the scenes. Partner with Duckduckgo, yes. Or others. But please stop fueling Google, even indirectly.

[account42]

DDG uses Bing instead, that's not really any better. Ideally a Browser should not partner with any websites. It's always been a deal with the devil even when Google was not as evil.

[thesuitonym]

I don't know that a partnership with Kagi is the move, as great as the two work for me. The last thing you want users to see when starting up a new browser is a paywall. It would be rad to see Firefox treat Kagi as a first-class citizen, but I think a true partnership would be detrimental to both.

Agree with you on everything else, though.

[pndy]

Frankly, looking at the shape of Firefox I don't think that Mozilla cares for it at all - they just hold the brand because it's really well-established.

What would be the best solution today is to convince all these Firefox spinoff projects into combining forces and fully forking Firefox away from Mozilla, and don't look back. But seeing what happens around, how various projects - even the smallest ones are being lead, the moods in communities, I highly doubt that's actually possible.

[broadsidepicnic]

Good, agreed. Let's just hope Anthony will read this.

Also, speaking of trust, return the "never sell your data" to the FAQ.