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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.

[0] https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2007-audi...

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

I know your intention is probably well placed but we do though need to factor in revenues:

  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.

FWIW, in 2022 it was about 86.00% of their revenue while in 2023 it was 75.79%.

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

>Did they get a $338m grant?

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).

They were competently directing that money into their bank accounts.

> They were competently directing that money into their bank accounts.

And selling user data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43209768

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.

[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/lf_annualrepor...

The Linux Foundation is neither a project nor open source. It's an industry trade group. I don't think there is any feasible comparison.

Fair point actually, governance wise the industry partners are probably not a huge expense because they want a seat at the table anyway.

The Linux Foundation is a bunch of corporate suits trying to steer Linux into their business interests. It doesn't have anything to do with the development really.

G&A = General and Administrative (expenses)

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 is the underdog, though; they're just not acting like it anymore.

I wouldn't call an underdog someone who takes their competitor's money. In sports, that might even be called throwing.

They went form 90%+ market share down to 9%- since taking Google money.

The allegation of throwing is too light. They’re complicit in covering for Google’s obvious monopoly.

Your ratios are correct but your numbers are off. Mozilla peaked at around 35% of market share and is now around 3%.

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.

More like a lapdog I'm right

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.

Isn't Mozilla a non-profit though?

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?

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.

Now if only we had MZLA for Firefox...

> Why does mozilla.ai exist?

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.

I already have this working on firefox. They have an openai integration but I point this to my own server.

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.

> good news is that development could easily be funded by donations

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

this is hilarious

> 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.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozfest-house-zambia-...

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.

Then they should pool funds to pay consulting companies like Igalia to implement these features.

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.

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.

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.

It's unfortunately vogue to mention DEI-efforts to cast bad light on something.

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.

https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/plaza

"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.

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Thankfully it is becoming more popular to call out racism and sexism like "DEI".

> like feminist AI conferences in Africa.

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.

Managers like to build empires?

15k is a sofware developer salary for over a quarter of a year in many parts of the world. That's actually quite a bit of browser.

That line of argument require there to be a line of competent and productive 3rd world developers ready outside the doors of Mozilla HQ. Not just productive developers either, they'd have to be entirely intrinsically motivated and self driven, preferably with projects lined up. They would of course also have to be completely at-will, at risk of being terminated after their quarter year contract. Anything less than that will cost more then the developer salary.

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.

And Mozilla HQ is in SF

> Mozilla funds things that are wildly not Firefox-related, like feminist AI conferences in Africa.

Good. I'm going to donate some money then (to both parties).

> 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.

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Let me repeat myself:

> All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser

Firefox is the best alternative to a Chromium/Google dominated web. As long as Firefox isn't kicking ass and being used by, say, 20% of web users, I argue that Mozilla shouldn't be doing anything else. This is especially prudent when a large part of Mozilla's (and therefore, Firefox's) funding is in jeopardy.

So, yes, I have a problem with Mozilla doing events right now, no matter what event it might be, short of a major product launch.

> As long as Firefox isn't kicking ass and being used by, say, 20% of web users, I argue that Mozilla shouldn't be doing anything else (...) I have a problem with Mozilla doing events right now

Consider it marketing, and think about if the market share would have been even lower if they didn't do outreach. Most people don't select a browser based on technical merits (heck, they don't even consciously choose). Saying they should spend every penny on developers is naive.

What would make for a better impact? A marketing event to increase outreach or not announcing a change in the terms of use that allows Firefox to sell user data?

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> nobody wants to ...

If you don't want something, don't think everyone else thinks the same as you. From my observations, if something is being called "woke", that means it's probably a good thing, actually.

He's right though. The way to get clients long term is to have a better product. Competing in marketing against Google is a terrible idea considering their main business. Firefox should just be a better, more user friendly product because that's the weakness of Chrome, especially now that they're actively messing with adblocking and they're focusing on everything but developing the actual product.

To use the car analogy, if you want to buy a car, and you can choose between 2 models (and from all the features and prices and luxury and build quality they're equal), and it's a choice between a Tesla and a Ford, which would you choose, at this moment?

What if the Tesla is slightly better?

I'm missing your point at the moment but likely Ford due to parts/service center access if they're equal. Depending on how slightly better it is and whether I plan to keep it long term to where I might need to get things on it repaired I might hop over to the Tesla. Can you elaborate a bit on where we're going with this?

I was trying to say, Tesla is now a toxic brand not because of their product quality, but because of what their CEO is doing... at least for a lot of people the behavior of the corporation and people in it plays a role in buying products.

So it's a question of if Firefox and Chrome are just competing in quality. I can see people swearing off Chrome because of Google, as well as the same with Firefox because of its activism.

That's true but the general populace does not care enough unless you commit a PR suicide which is difficult when your company PR isn't bound to a single person.

Most people don't even know who the CEO of Google is so even if he were to be found with 17 mutilated kids in a moldy basement it won't have the effect Musk's 'tism has had.

Most people don't realize how they're being fucked over. My parents use adblockers because I set them up and they're not even that old, a lot of people believe surveillance is good and even on HN where privacy is a big thing many use less private products because the alternative is mildly inconvenient. The best way to convert them IMO is to offer them a more intuitive and snappier experience, especially on cheap older machines where it's really noticeable and nice integrations into things like email, pdf, etc. Just make their life as easy as possible with as little setup as possible.

Tesla every time. Who would want a crappy Ford?

"Nobody" is an exaggeration since there are a few people like you. Most people want Mozilla to focus on making a good browser.

If Mozilla had used the Google billions on improving Firefox instead of fart sniffing, Firefox would be a better browser now and its market share would be above 2.62%.

The misspending was (implicitly) part of the deal: the Google money would stop if Firefox started to seriously threaten Chrome's dominance.

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Nobody is confused about how it's currently working. The whole complaint is that there isn't a way to donate towards Firefox and have any confidence that's where the money will go. There are a million social justice charities out there and zero dedicated to non-chromium browsers. A lot of people are disappointed by that. Anyone who wants to fund Afrofeminist conferences can do so directly.

Sure Mozilla can spend donations how it wants, but donors are free to not donate as well. For years many people have been saying that they want to support Firefox without all of unrelated social projects, but Mozilla has refused to offer that. I expect that a lot of potential donations have therefore not happened.

It does entitle you to warn others not to waste their money by donating unless they're big fans of feminist African studies

Quite a few people would donate for Firefox development, but they can't donate to Mozilla because Mozilla spends the money on other stuff. Until now, as Google's lapdog, Mozilla didn't need donations, so that wasn't a problem (for Mozilla, it did however result in firefox getting 2.62% market share).

To reinforce this, I'm a stingy bastard but I'd give them 5$ a month if I could donate them to the browser development itself since it's the program I use the most.

The question is more "Do these events and keynote speakers in Zambia have anything to do with browser development?" This isn't supposed to be a generic non-profit charity, it's a non-profit for supporting web browser development. If only 5% of the funds are going toward the browser or related technology, the organization is corrupt.

In 2023, Mozilla spend $230 million dollars on software development. And then they also $6 million on "Grants and Fellowships" (which supports many "green field" open source software initiatives), $1 million on Events (under which the event you're worried about probably falls), and $7 on travel (which probably also includes lots of travel to things like C++ conferences and browser standards conferences and other things that you probably would agree are very mission related, along with the event in question).

So—just out of this subset of expenses, there's probably some other stuff you could take issue with—Mozilla spent money in a 94% ratio on browser development, and 6% on "other stuff", of which probably .001% was this conference in Africa. And I think it's arguable that a lot of that "other stuff" is related technology! But even ignoring that, talking about how we can use the open web to improve life for people in third world countries is exactly the kind of thing that I, personally, would like Mozilla to be doing. And I'm happy for them to spend <5% of their budget on it.

Of Mozilla's $653 million in 2023 income, $496 million was spent, but only half was on development ($260). Fair enough. But realize mozilla does not exclusively develop a web browser. Instead, they also make Pocket, Firefox Relay, Firefox VPN, Mozilla Monitor, AI products, ect. So probably only 1/3rd of their income is going to browser development, which is pretty bad.

>So probably only 1/3rd of their income is going to browser development, which is pretty bad.

Only because you assume that they should only be working on browser development.

> Only because you assume that they should only be working on browser development.

Why not? This isn't Oxfam, this is Mozilla. To an outsider, the assumed point for all these other endeavors was to be profitable to provide more money for browser development. When that money doesn't primarily provide for that something seems sketchy.

Mozilla has basically never been 'just' a browser company. It's probably confusing for people who don't pay attention to stuff, but it's not for the rest of us.

They were expressing their own opinion, that's not an assumption. The relevance of opinion to nonprofit organizations is mediated through donation or other forms of support.

Sure but their opinion seems informed by their flawed assumption that a large software company that makes a browser is primarily only a browser company despite that not being the reality to situation. Life is easier if you interact with reality as it actually is instead of arguing against a version you've made up in your head.

"Corrupt" is too strong. Just unfocused. You can say it is disqualifying for making donations personally, and I think that is a pretty reasonable take. Many people have exactly the same quibble with Wikimedia.

Leadership focusing on their own agenda instead of the mission of the nonprofit is a form of corruption.

No, not in general. Only if done dishonestly or for corrupt purpose (e.g. self-enrichment). It also is not totally clear that these activities are actually outside the scope of the nonprofit's mission.

Yes, in general. If we stop pretending that non-profits are purpose bound and just a generic bag of money that is to be used for whatever the board thinks is a good idea then there is little point in having different non-profits in the first place.

The question is how much did Mozilla actually spend on this conference? I'm guessing it may have been a pretty small cost.

It's not about that one conference.

> Do the people in Zambia deserve an open, equitable web any less than Americans or Europeans do?

They deserve an open, equitable web as much as we all do. I'm afraid that Mozilla's tendencies to waste money on such projects instead of using it to improve their main product aren't helping though.

How do you suggest spreading an open web? Just release Firefox and the web will open up?

You think it is done by holding feminist AI conferences in Africa?

Yes, that's part of it. Guys in SV don't need help with access; women in Africa do - that's the place to hold conferences, and probably much more cost effective. (Whatever is mean by 'Africa', a very large area, and I know nothing about the conference.)

Yeah, but what would be the most optimal way to achieve the goals (spreading an open web)?

If we start with the propostion that all people are created equal, and have equal value, then adding some marginal value in SV seems to have lower ROI than transforming lives in a place where people have little access to the resources and people of the IT industry. And in many societies, women face discrimination that tries to exculde them from tech.

Intel isn't hosting a hardware conference in 99% of the world. It's a great opportunity for Mozilla's mission, for those people, and for the world.

5% lmaooooo

Not the OP...

To me I think the issue is "how can Mozilla be self-sufficient without Google?", and that means tightening their focus.

Those things should all get effort, energy and investment - but maybe Mozilla doesn't need to be the one driving it (to that point, maybe Mozilla can advocate for Google funding those things directly?).

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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]

[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...

[2]: https://chromiumstats.github.io/cr-stats/authors/company_aut...

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.

https://eligrey.com/

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.

Chromium is also stripping manifest v2. Firefox isn't. Chromium is open source, but it's not an open source project. It's a Google project.

Exactly. Manifest v2 is the bullet case for why Chromium isn't sufficient. Also, we best not forget their efforts with web integrity

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.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

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?

Brave's internal ad-blocker is custom-made and doesn't depend on manifest v2.

Brave is run by a VC-funded company and will need to show returns eventually. To date, they've tried to make money in a few disappointing ways:

- 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.

Brave doesn't support multi-account containers.

Just make a new profile like all chromium based browser

Can you use accounts just like Firefox containers? E.g. use right click to choose opening a link in a new tab running a different account?

Genuine question from a FF user.

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.

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It's cheaper to extend v3 with additional features than to maintain another browser engine.

It is. Browser engine diversity is important for a myriad of other reasons, though.

That makes no sense. Define "open source project".

Do you think that in open source there's no ownership?

Firefox is open source, but it's not an open source project. It's a Mozilla project --- effectively totally funded by Google.

*When* Google asks them to remove manifest v2, what do you think they'll do?

> 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.

> Let Google fund most of the development of a privacy respecting browser (i.e. Brave).

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.

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…”

> The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million.

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.

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"

> 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.

These numbers are highly unrealistic.

you know keyboard warriors? keyboards CEOs also exist apprently

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$260M isn't a few million.

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%

  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 currently spends $260M on browser development,

Mozilla spends that on development, but firefox is only a small part of that.

What makes you say it's a small part of that?

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 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.

A good start would be to not delete old history without warning like Firefox does now.

Shame they hide the option to keep history forever in about:config. At least there are some add-ons to help set that.

I can understand the default not keeping forever, for privacy, storage, and performance reasons.

If there is one thing users want without knowing it it is the long term accumulation of value.

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.

> Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links

I’ve built something similar myself. It’s quite annoying that the browser only saves like 3 months of history.

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.

People still download Chrome onto Windows. Used to be they did that for Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix.

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.

Yeah, but before Chrome people were doing this for Firefox, just from word of mouth.

Word of mouth is quite a bit different. It's the opinion of many unconflicted friends/family vs the opinion of one megacorp with a conflict of interest.

> Do regular users even know the difference […]

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).

Android is only 30% of the market in the US. I don’t know how much browser usage comes from Chromebooks.

Every single Windows and Mac user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download Chrome. Why didn’t they decide to download Firefox?

Did they make an active choice? Or did an OEM or family member add Chrome to their machine? Or did a Google nag banner convince them to switch?

Which PC OEM ships computers with Chrome? And is it somehow anti competitive because a family member chose Chrome over Firefox?

You're spending money in the wrong place - spend it on marketing instead of dev, and you've got a shot.

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.

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.

How much of that $260m is invested in Firefox? The docs don’t say.

Put it this way: there are a lot more than “a few dozen” engineers working on Firefox.

Makes you wonder where all that extra administrative cost is really going.

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.

Why can't you get away from marketing a free product?

But yeah that ratio is totally off. Paying the CEO 7 million also won't help.

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.

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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.

Container tabs is the most useful browser feature anywhere. Now if they would just add tab history tracking.

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?

I use Firefox and I tell everyone in know about ublock.

If chrome is force divested the browser market is going to look very different.

Container tabs and specifically Temporary Containers are the two things I always miss on non-Firefox browsers

just curious - why not use browser profiles available in Chrome/Brave…?

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.

And then you can use specific proxies (via your VPN) per container, it's a game changer for consuming media

Can you have each tab use a different browser profile?

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.

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

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 is no longer a developer default

Web developer here, and Chrome dev tools suck balls. I exclusively use Firefox.

Same. I absolutely hate using Chrome dev tools. It's because of the dev tools I still use Firefox.

Yeah, the chrome dev tools seem to have gotten worse over the last 10yrs. Basic CSS editing stuff breaks all the time.

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

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.

Brave does not need manifest v2 for it's ad blocker to work. It is not implemented as an extension. It is built into the browser itself.

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.

I’m wondering why Chrome forks don’t just maintain a shared patch enabling MV2.

That said, uBlock Origin works best on Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Interesting. What are you noticing? I might run ublock on top as well if it's worth it.

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

My parent poster and I mentioned specifically ublock origin features

Does the default Brave ad blocker block Youtube ads?

Yes.

You can have all the usual ublock origin behaviour custom filter lists and all that, about:adblock

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.

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.

> 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 still think having an independent browser matters... especially as Google tightens its grip on the web

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.

Drag and drop controls exist on the Web for decades. How did Microsoft mess theirs up so that it doesn't work on Firefox?

(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.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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.

Huddles in Slack don't work on Firefox on Linux: https://github.com/aws/amazon-chime-sdk-js/issues/2044. Works fine in Chrome.

This is the only reason I keep the Slack "desktop app" around.

I have had to use Chrome at least three times.

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.

The Teams web interface is better under Chromium. At least it was and I haven't tried it with Firefox recently - I use chromium like a Teams app.

Snyk

Any feature specifically? I added a project+repo, and it scanned and reported successfully - but this is only the free tier.

IIRC it was related to viewing vulnerabilities or integrations.

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 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.

Also Slack.

For me, webgl/shadertoy stuff as well as webusb and webserial while tinkering with esp32-based boards.

> Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers

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.

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.

> On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile

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.

Firefox wins handily on the following:

- 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.

It's true that Apple has the only independent browser engine that has enough users to make developers cater to it. But it's also true that Mozilla has seats on the relevant standards bodies, and on privacy-related issues, their presence helps act as a counterweight along with Apple.

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.

How does Brave survive financially?

> How does Brave survive financially?

Crypto [1].

[1] https://brave.com/wallet/

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.

They sell traditional browser and search ads. https://ads-help.brave.com/ The crypto thing is more a moonshot.

Instead of selling their default search engine they do their own and capture the value themselves.

good points. I use it for a very specific plugin which the author only makes available on that platform.

Even better than Brave is a "no-name" browser like Ungoogled Chromium made to protect actual privacy, not the interests of some company!

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.

I agree a Firefox or WebKit browser would be better, but give me one.

these threads really are ads huh? hilarious

Neither Safari nor -B- are opensource. Brave is even chromium based.

EDIT: Brave is opensource

Brave is definitely open source [1] (under the MPL)? The source for Safari is closed, but their rendering engine is completely open source [2].

[1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-core

[2]: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Brave appears to be opensource: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

While Safari is not open source, WebKit is[0].

[0] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Yup, Bun uses WebKit. And even credited it for why it was able to achieve such better performance than Node

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.

> Since then they tried to diversify and failed miserably.

I wish my miserable failures brought in $65 million annually.

>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.

I am sure lots more people would donate if the money would go towards Firefox specifically, and not general "mozilla foundation activities"

I at least stopped donations years and years ago to them, because I wanted my money go to browser only.

In the light of ToS changes, I'm sad and feel let down without an option.

> I wonder how many of this angry crowd donate. Mozilla do accept donations.

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.

In the same FAQ:

> 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.)

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.

>you can't just reduce spending by firing swathes of people Twitter style.

mozilla probably could.

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.

Yes, $65M revenue is a decent success. The miserable failure is bloating their expenses to 5x that.

Start selling $100 notes for $50. I am confident you can get your company to $65M revenue.

> 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.

What kind of reports can they generate from the data they collect: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone... ?

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....)

Naturally not everyone was happy about it:

https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-fea...

Searchfox? Not so fast! Don't forget they load "studies" code using so called "normandy" mechanism..

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?"

Where telemetry is what I linked above.

List of experiments I was talking about: https://experimenter.services.mozilla.com/api/v1/experiments...

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?

you can opt-out in the settings btw, but it should be opt-in or at least asked on first run.

> Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model...

I hope you realize that happened in 2006.

Recent developments can only improve the situation, actually, if it makes Mozilla more independent.

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.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326230

[2] - https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

Sure, but my point is that Firefox has been funded by Google since 2006, and by having it as the default search engine, Firefox has been sending suggestion queries and searches to Google.

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.

As I understand, these "data safety" sections are what Google gives app owners to comply with "right to be informed". If they say "we're sharing location data with third parties for Advertising purposes" I'm believing it.

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.

Regarding the Anonym acquisition, every adtech acquisition is a reverse-acquisition. Google didn't really go evil until they got reverse-acquired by DoubleClick.

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

  2023: 75.8
  2022: 86.0
  2021: 87.8
  2020: 88.8
  2019: [^a]
  2018: 95.3
  2017: 95.9

That is the Oath Verizon/Yahoo search contract settlement.

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.

>Now it feels like thanks to Google money they have become fat and lazy. Unable to take risks

I think Google has that problem too.

I still won’t donate unless the money goes to Firefox and not their parties, activism, or side projects (that they inevitably shut down)

Even if they did allow that, a big part of the budget would probably go into another useless UI revamp.

I'm good with side projects. The activism stuff has to stop.

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.

So who are going to fund them?

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!

Agreed. A world where Mozilla ceases to exist due to lack of funding is arguably worse than the current state.

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.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee.

With less than 3% marketshare, Mozilla doesn't exist now for most people --- mainly just for Google.

Regardless of whether people know it exists, the world where it exists is much better than a world where it doesn't and there is only one option.

So open source doesn't work?

Alternative browsers are available based on Firefox source code. The same is true with Chromium.

Sure, but they would all cease to exist if Firefox or Chrome ceased to exist or even ceased to be worked on because they don't have the labour to keep their project going without the parent projects doing most of the work.

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

[^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.

They could try just focussing on the browser.

The petition should instead be asking Mozilla to allow people to directly donate to Firefox development.

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.

You can donate to MZLA Technologies Corporation for Thunderbird development however. If it works for Thunderbird, why can't it work for Firefox?

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.

It sounds like the goal is the same search contract just not with Google.

IMHO the EU should step in. Having a browser that is not controlled by big tech should be part of an effort to reduce the dependency on the US.

How about not involving governments in how Firefox is run. Especially not those keen on backdoors and "Chat control".

It could be a stand alone association ruled by its members or a classic free-for-all whatever goes code talks FOSS project.

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 seem united on censoring free speech and removing all privacy.

If they can invest some money with no strings attached – hey, why not.

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.

In the US, at least, all funding goes through Congress, so get in your rep's ear if you don't like this (or get in their ear if you do)

I wholeheartedly agree, though how to utilize the tax money isn’t the problematic part in the taxation IMO.

if its come with string attached then another agency (ehm ehm intelligence) would try to get their hands on them

Agencies seem to get involved even in private "independant" companies. It has nothing to do with the official string attachments.

The funding is the string simply because it can be taken away.

> funding is the string simply because it can be taken away

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

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.

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.

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.

It could but a national government is more likely to block sites at the ISP level.

Also ... private companies can block things they don't like, such as competitors...or alter their search rankings.

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.

There's already an independent Europe based browser...

Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is just a chromium wrapper as far as I understand.

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.

But unlike Brave and Edge, Vivaldi isn't open-source.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...

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.

> And let's be real, every browser (even Firefox) has closed source server side code.

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

But it depends on the Blink engine.

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.

Blink is a Google project, primarily maintained by Google employees.

or to invest in Servo

Not sure if you're aware but servo is currently funded by the linux foundation Europe. Not quite tax money, but European capital.

The EU invests in Servo already, for example through NLNet grants.

A dysfunctional company is not going to benefit from the addition of a dysfunctional political layer

[flagged]

Attaching the bottle cap is a great idea that prevents unnecessary plastic pollution.

It is an example of the EU doing something reasonable that a private company would never be motivated to do.

What?

It's a reference to an effort of the EU to reduce plastic waste in the environment by tethering the plastic bottle caps to their bottles.

Instead of rethinking their consumption habits, people are making fun it, suggesting the EU can't do anything productive.

..and yet this sort of thing works because it doesn't rely on people to show much responsibility.

What does it have to do with browsers?

You think attached bottle caps are a bad thing?

Ah yes, the same EU that forced Apple to disable encryption. Perfect

That's UK.

What happened to HN that people are arguing for more government regulations?

As if centralization with one big company weren't enough, now we're not even satisfied with one country, but a block of them. Yikes.

Nope, run in the opposite direction. Unsuck from any teat.

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.

Is that the same as a republic of independent states?

As long as the EU doesn't have the equivalent of the Commerce Clause then, sure.

"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 reason they're cozying up to ad-tech is because they're trying to ditch Google.

If they're turning to ads to replace Google, then maybe Mozilla deserves to die as an organization.

Modern adtech goes entirely against their core values.

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?

Because most people in this discussion don't know or care about the tech, just "ads bad" and "Google bad".

If it's already essentially paying for them then .... what is the difference if they get it via Google or directly?

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.

sorry, very random, but the effect on your personal website looks great!

Thank you so much! Just don’t leave it running for too long – it’s not the most optimized piece of code I’ve ever written :-)

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.

Maybe they will find out you don’t need $555M a year to make a web browser. First good step would be to fire that useless CEO.

Can you explain how? Or is your argument "One guy in a basement in Bulgaria could build Firefox for 50 Stotinki."?

What about the ladybird browser developers. They are mostly volunteers with some paid via donations and sponsors.

And they are nowhere close to have a shippable browser.

Let's do some back-of-a-napkin maths here and see if we could... Just for fun of course :D

=== 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 :)

> 20 developers at $150k each = $3M

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.

Anyway, this was all just a bit of fun :)

> $250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.

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.

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.

Vivaldi have 29 developers.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork. They couldn't commit to keeping uBlock Origin working.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/

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.

Not sure where the Chromium part comes in but I'm talking about Firefox here.

Anyway, all the heavy-lifting is done: The JS engine, the CSS engine and so on.

>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

All the way out the door, please.

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.

Mozilla is much larger than the browser.

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.

Firefox lost market share because of factors outside their control. They'd have to have owned a popular OS or conglomerate of dominant web services.

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.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-nex...

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.

[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

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.

True, but they only have like maybe three products that most people care about: Firefox, Thunderbird (maybe), and the MDN.

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.

Keeping up with all the scope creep is expensive.

I'm not sure how sync for firefox isn't part of focusing on firefox?

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).

Rust, formerly.

Isn't most of the money goes to the browser anyway?

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.

And I don’t care about anything but the browser. They should stop wasting money on things that I don’t care about.

The government should stop wasting money on things that I don't care about.

(Especially the regulatory things that apply to me personally.)

In 2023, it was 75% of their revenue that came from Google.

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

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…

I don't want my browser to be dependent on Marc Andreessen. And he doesn't want to do things useful to humanity anyway.

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.

Haha, I can see the strings you're attaching if you had his money.

Of course we all believe "But what I think is best for them is a good thing!".

10-20 dedicated web engineers doesn’t sound like – but Mozilla Foundation already has money for about 350–700 full-time developers.

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.

They’ve made $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] (That’s where I’m getting the 350 engineers figure from: $37.5M / $100k = 375.)

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...

So it was doable. They could have done it themselves. But in reality they don’t care about the browser

It was doable, and it is doable, and they are doing it.

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.

He couldn't control the foundation, but he could say "integrate a crypto wallet or I'm not donating any more".

As long as expenses are less than the interest growth of the endowment then it won’t matter.

I'm afraid it's too late for Mozilla. It's not in their mission anymore.

Nah, Firefox devs: It's time to ditch Mozilla and fork it.

Maybe a new browser will rise from Firefox's ashes. Perhaps we should call the fork Phoenix?

Spelled Fenix, of course, or the current cohort of people won't be able to find it.

Wait, they already did that.

For those too young to remember:

https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/05/13/milestone-phoe...

Zen Browser is pretty cool and it's not just a fork

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.

Who is going to pay the devs?

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.

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Too late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on...

Of course, it's never actually too late to add another fork.

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.

How would the fork be funded? You can't expect a complex program like a browser to be developed exclusively by volunteers in their free time.

How would the fork be funded?

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.

That’s also a possible scenario!

Not just possible but likely the *only* scenario that can have any real impact at this point.

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.

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.

If they ditch Google, they lose their income. Seems like a bad idea...

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).

Firefox isn’t even going to usable around in 20 years and these people think they could drop their lifeline?

What’s a petition without a solution?

This idea is more detached than Mastodon.

I don't understand what is the point of a petition when almost all revenue for Mozilla comes from Google being scared of a anti-trust trial

Yeah, that's the joke, Firefox is Google's "antitrust insurance."

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.

Firefox is done with.

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

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.

Sorry, I was recalling from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

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.

Sometimes I also search domains I crawled.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

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.

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?

Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Startpage, etc. Plenty of privacy-respecting and non-profit search engines

Searx.be

Yahoo, Bing, DDG, Perplexity...

Bing is already the default, if you use Windows.

[citation needed]

Why would Google pay to be the default if the majority of users would have a different engine?

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/windows-11-h...

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.

I don't support this change. Most people want to be using Google. Mozilla needs money. There's not even a suggestion of how to replace the funds.

Mozilla will never do so willingly.

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.

Hypothetically speaking, can we estimate how long Firefox can survive once Google pulls the funding? A year? Two?

Mozilla has money. Not an awful lot, but they will survive – they just need to bite the bullet.

(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.)

> Tell Mozilla: it’s time to ditch Google

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!

I'd love to see them double down on privacy-first revenue models, but the question is: can they make it work before the money runs out?

Would you pay for Firefox? I would.

As a Firefox user since 1.0, my future expectatives are put on Ladybird

Can't sign the form as nocodeform.io seems to be having problems.

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)

Wishful thinking.

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/

It's more boycottfirefox.com that is needed.

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.

mozilla burnt my shake and fucked my wife

Chrome wouldn't be so big if edge wasn't so shit

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Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Mozilla

/s

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As a Russian, I share your enthusiasm in not supporting our regime. Could you share some more details about DuckDuckGo? IIRC they’ve ended their partnership with Yandex already.

Of course, there’s also search engines other than Google and DuckDuckGo, so we have options.

Guess who "collaborates" with criminal regimes, like saudi arabia.

Can you provide any details?

Even if you're right (I don't know or care) I don't know what your point is. That Mozilla should form a commercial agreement with Google instead of DuckDuckGo? Is the latter even an option?

Why specificallly throw stones at Mozilla?

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...

If possible, Mozilla should go back to making Servo their main engine.

But how fund all that is still a major question.

Pressure exposes true colors. Taking away the pressure from Mozilla will only hide the symptoms but not cure the desease.

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.

NPR needs to get rid of the ads. That half of the budget is influencing their news coverage and content.

I didn't say the "same as" NPR, I said "like". Aspects.

The new privacy terms of Mozilla Firefox are a big concern [0]

[0] https://medium.com/@mail_18109/mozillas-new-firefox-terms-sp...