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...
Year Revenue
---- -------
2007 $75M
2023 $653M
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.
2023 $653M
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
2023: 75.8
2022: 86.0
2021: 87.8
2020: 88.8
2019: [^a]
2018: 95.3
2017: 95.9
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...
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?
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.
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.
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?
My argument, more directly, is that a developer is not just a salary. You need support staff, office space, capital, and actual work for them to do. You need to hire, manage, and tutor them. Comparing developer salaries to money spent on one-time goodwill activities is ridiculous. Internal billing at enterprise corps usually estimate two times salary for "real cost", but that still assumes you're actually holding that cost against a tangible planned project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These numbers are highly unrealistic.
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.
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 can understand the default not keeping forever, for privacy, storage, and performance reasons.
Writing comments takes only slightly less effort than writing a draft for a book. The Twitter or facebook history, even our comments here quickly lose value. It all vanishes into the hole.
In contrast, i once ran into a geocities page created by a very elderly couple in the US about their vacations. They were old enough to tell the story about how the world changed over time from an appropriately mundane perspective. They probably died before I found the homepage. It was an oddly interesting read. In 100 years it would be truly marvelous.
If the software is there we could probably wrap the proverbial Richard Stallman's browser history into a product worth buying. It would be every bit as funny as it sounds.
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?
But yeah that ratio is totally off. Paying the CEO 7 million also won't help.
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.
If chrome is force divested the browser market is going to look very different.
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
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.
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.
ZenDesk is another, related to their SSO logins.
Unfortunately once bitten I become twice shy. These kind of works-in-popular-browser circumstances pushed me to making my own browser navigation switcher, so I never have to worry about any one site again. Of course that also means that even if they fix it in Ff then I won't notice. (It also doesn't help that Manifest V3 has taken a while for me to support and Apple keeps changing things.)
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.
Chrome, Edge and Safari are all bigger than Firefox. But Firefox not in the top ten results? Unless you are counting different versions of browsers as unique entries, I cant imagine what other 7+ browsers are bigger than Firefox.
- Sidebery (tree style vertical tabs)
- userChrome.css editing
- Stylus and all other manifest v2 extensions that Brave won't be developing custom replacements for
- Better performance with lots of tabs/windows
- Container tabs
Firefox is better for powerusers and those who like customization, Chrome is better for those who don't care about customization and just watch Netflix. Pretty much equivalent to the Android/iOS debate.
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.
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.
Crypto [1].
Instead of selling their default search engine they do their own and capture the value themselves.
EDIT: Brave is opensource
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.
This is what Mozilla have to say about it:
> How will my donation be used?
> Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
— https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as...
This quite conspicuously does not include Firefox, nor does it include any kind of revenue stream diversification.
> Don’t Mozilla products, like Firefox, earn income?
> Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.
In short, donations do not and can not directly support Firefox development. Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit that owns the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which makes Firefox. (In my opinion, the Mozilla Foundation does a lot of good work and is worth supporting independently if that's your thing, but it's separate from Firefox.)
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.
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.
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?
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...
Of course, the nuance here is that this was part of a user action, i.e., the user probably wants to search, so they expect data to be sent to Google (although the address bar suggestions are a gray area IMO). However, what hasn't been expected, and the whole purpose of the GDPR, is that Google does store your search history for advertising purposes without user consent.
So, even if it was unavoidable, Firefox has already been selling user data to Google by simply making it the default search engine and getting paid to do it.
BTW, the GDPR is really strict, and I'll know that Firefox actually sells my data (in a way that I don't expect) when I'll see a GDPR interstitial about it for getting my consent. For instance, when you first open Microsoft's Edge in the EU, they inform users that they're going to share their data with the entire advertising industry.
I agree that they should really be asking for consent as well, but they don't seem to be doing that. We've got no way to use legitimate location related functionality and deny advertising related usecases. Remember, consent must be specific and granular.
It'll be a while, until enforcement catches up. It's taken ~6 years for cookie banners to get a "reject" button and those are really easy to review and enforce.
It'll happen though, enforcement is just slow. GDPR is a fairly well written regulation, as far as corner cases and catching workarounds goes. So unless the laws change, enforcement will catch up eventually.
2023: 75.8
2022: 86.0
2021: 87.8
2020: 88.8
2019: [^a]
2018: 95.3
2017: 95.9
I think Google has that problem too.
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!
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.
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
[^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%
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 :)
Still you need to spend at least $250K (which direct compensation would be close to $150K) to hire a competent browser dev. And I'm not speaking about SF... Well you can have better cost efficiency outside American metros, but the reality is that experienced browser devs are rare outside those areas.
> I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc.
Not objecting that disruptions can be done with a small focused team. But here we're talking about dealing with massive complexity, not an emerging market. You cannot "redefine" the problem here, the ecosystem is mess and we've got to live with it for a good time...
> 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.
You will be surprised to know how small the core engine parts are to the total code base. You may argue that most of those are not necessary and perhaps half of them are pretty much ad-hoc complexity but the rest have their own reason to exist. And the new browser engine developers typically learn this hard way then decides to fall back to Chromium. I've seen this several times.
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.
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...
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.)
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
2023: 75.8
2022: 86.0
2021: 87.8
2020: 88.8
2019: [^a]
2018: 95.3
2017: 95.9
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!".
I’m not sure how risky their investments are. Also, I’m excluding donations altogether. If you can help prepare a more realistic model I’d be happy to share it!
[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
Like any other organization, Mozilla consists of people. Some of them might not care about the browser and are just here for the money – of course they want Google’s money, too! But I believe most want to do the right thing – the problem is, the focus has been lost for quite a while now.
Wait, they already did that.
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.
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.
Of course, it's never actually too late to add another fork.
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.
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.
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).
What’s a petition without a solution?
This idea is more detached than Mastodon.
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.
https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
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.
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.
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.
(Or maybe they won’t, depending on how fast they can go from burning through $300M a year to a mere $30M. That’s up to the management, though.)
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!
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)
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.
/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...