Threads about the finances of Mozilla are always full of criticism and begrudging. Yeah, they take money from Google, and that keeps them alive. Yeah, they would love to not be so reliant on them. This is old news. But while they are alive, and while Firefox continues development, Google have slightly less of a grip on the internet. That is undeniably a good thing.
Mozilla getting paid by Google is a better scenario than Firefox being abandoned and Google controlling the browser engine space entirely.
I think I mostly agree. But let me play Satan’s Lawyer for a moment:
Google wants to avoid resembling a monopoly on browsers. But they also don’t want competition. Keeping Mozilla on palliative care may actually be worse than letting it collapse, the monopoly becoming obvious, and regulatory bodies forcing corrections of the situation.
(but who am I kidding, that won’t happen… maybe in Europe)
It’s actually in Google’s best interest to help keep Mozilla alive. Mozilla is an innovator and helps push the envelope with technologies like Rust and WASM. Friendly competition helps prevent stagnation and encourages innovation on both sides.
Mozilla may have been an innovator, but the servo team was fired, and so was a security team, while the CEO's salary roared and the market share dropped further[1].
To me it sounds like they reached a point where servo met their needs for R&D and to bolster Firefox. Having a team dedicated to that in the long term can certain run multi-millions—but after hitting that milestone it’s then up to the community to move it forward with some maintenance dollars on the Firefox side perhaps.
Can’t speak about the CEO salary but if they can generate more revenue than the servo team I suppose that’s a potential win?
Going back to main idea though: Google indirectly funded Servo and rust development by supporting a competitor.
Their reasoning, whether or not you care to accept it, was that the executive level salary was nowhere near competitive in the market to hire or retain someone talented in that role.
It was never intended to be a full replacement for the whole browser, that would be a bad decision - they incorporated the parts they planned on and that’s it.
>Mozilla restructured its security functions "to better ensure the security of Mozilla and its users," Mozilla said of the cut. "Some positions were eliminated as a result of this effort, but the teams responsible for the security of the Firefox browser and Firefox services were not been impacted."
Safari has a bigger influence when it comes to stopping Google from total dominance. Firefox is irrelevant market share-wise, however much I like its developer tools.
It's real odd to be the only alternative to Chrome yet be almost entirely funded by it. Google allows Firefox to exist, and Google can decide it's tired of sponsoring competition tomorrow morning. I don't like that Mozilla allows that to be their (and ours, and the web's) reality and isn't more adventurous in monetization. Also that they pay their CEO an outrageous amount of money, but I guess you're free to pick what your kneepads are going to be made of.
The last time that Mozilla parted ways with Google (in 2014), Yahoo snapped up that spot (if reports are to be believed, for actually more than Google was paying). Yahoo Search may be defunct, but as long as Bing exists, there's an out. Of course, it would be nicer if the existence of megacorp-funded search engines was not an existential prerequisite.
I don't like the situation either, but I find it hard to blame Mozilla for not pushing monetization hard enough. I can't think of anything more I'd like Mozilla to actually do.
I'm rather against being sold out, and suspect most Firefox users feel similarly.
Offering services essentially entirely separate from Firefox could work, but comes with substantial risk. Mozilla will be more trusted than some fly-by-night startup, at least among the techie crowd, but also can't just burn investor money and start over until something sticks. (Ironically, the only thing that comes to mind here for me would be a privacy-oriented email provider.)
The only maybe, theoretically, kind-of, plausible route I see working would be more of an open-core-esque model, where their paid offerings essentially implemented extension-like capabilities that would benefit substantially from deep integration with the browser. Think things that would otherwise be impossible with the extension API, or have substantial performance improvements if only Firefox internals could be messed with.
But. So many buts.
I'm not even sure their organization is setup to allow this kind of thing. I'm sure their codebase isn't, especially if it might require special considerations to comply with their charter.
Mozilla would also gain a bunch of perverse incentives to restrict or cripple base Firefox, which would bite them every time they added a new paid offering. For example, just how much more flack would they have caught for the new extension API if their own offerings wouldn't have to abide by any of those new limitations?
And it seems inevitable that they'll have to spend some serious effort to minimize the amount of browser fragmentation issues that would now occur within Firefox itself.
After all of that, the extensions most likely to get me to buy in - literally and otherwise - to the whole concept, would be ones that would seriously strain Mozilla's relationship with Google and many other companies. Things like deeply integrated ad-blocking and other privacy-focused features would be most likely to get me to not only accept the practice but even spend my money. But step one of weening themselves off Google's money probably shouldn't be "Burn bridges with Google."
So... yeah.
What else is Mozilla supposed to do? I'm not overly enamored with Mozilla these days. Increasingly I feel I'm sticking with them less because of anything they've done, and more because of what Google's done. But still, I find it hard to blame them too much for treading water.
I agree with you - however one must remember that it was mostly Firefox (called Phoenix back then) who disrupted the web with tabbed browsing. It's that type of disruptive ideas that Mozilla must foster, not cheap transparent monetization techniques that its users are way too savvy to fall for. Not a VPN, not a bookmarking services or any of that crap it tries to peddle today.
The VPN is a funny one. Aside from appearances and legal realities, it's a great fit for them. It doesn't require a bunch of risky investment, and the whole VPN thing relies on trust anyway. I can't think of an organization offhand that would be well situated to run a VPN service and that I'd trust more as a VPN provider.
Of course they're not such a great fit if you're hoping for a slightly shady company in a country with favorable laws to conveniently 'lose' various legal requests. But other than that, if you had to guess if $slightly-shady-company or Mozilla was actually upholding their promises...
They have a billion dollars in assets and are making $600 million/annum if I'm reading their financial statement correctly. That is well into the 'corrupt until proven otherwise' range of wealth. Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that, the browser's market share collapsed and it is notable that Eich [0] of all people went on to develop a browser based on Chrome after thinking about what would be the best base for a company. And Brave is at least trying things - it probably won't work but there is a vision there of reshaping the internet and toppling Google's advertising model. That could be Mozilla. It isn't.
There is a lot of room here to criticise this project. It seems to be off the rails, and it is likely to go further off the rails.
$600 million in revenue (across all subsidiaries), $200 million on software development, $100 million on management, are you upset at Mozilla for running a healthy balance sheet? I'm confused about your complaint. Should Mozilla be packing itself to the gills with software developers for Firefox? It seems like they are trying to broaden their holdings and assets to build wealth for the company and Foundation so that they can become less reliant on Google.
Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015. I'm not seeing how this is can be made to an indictment of Mozilla corruption.
> ...are you upset at Mozilla for running a healthy balance sheet...
Charitable foundations aren't supposed to be corporations. If we've got an entity like Mozilla running a healthy balance sheet it should be a public corporation that we can all be shareholders in. So yes, I am upset by that too although that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
They've set up a situation where they are going to be corrupted. A billion dollars in assets attracts charlatans and they won't have sufficient defences to stop the money being siphoned off into pet projects and general shenanigans. There will probably turn out to be fraud involved sooner or later.
> ... Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015...
As far as I care, their purpose is to make a good web browser. This is absolutely an indictment of Mozilla.
>Charitable foundations aren't supposed to be corporations. If we've got an entity like Mozilla running a healthy balance sheet it should be a public corporation that we can all be shareholders in. So yes, I am upset by that too although that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
>They've set up a situation where they are going to be corrupted. A billion dollars in assets attracts charlatans and they won't have sufficient defences to stop the money being siphoned off into pet projects and general shenanigans. There will probably turn out to be fraud involved sooner or later.
It is very confusing what you want - you want Mozilla to be publicly traded so that you can share in its success (and open itself up to being corrupted), yet have an issue with it not being publicly traded?
I don't want anything in particular, I walked away from Firefox a while ago so the failures of the Mozilla corporation don't affect me. Most former Firefox users are in the same boat if the stats are accurate. They could wind the whole foundation up and almost nobody would need to notice.
But I don't think you can dispute the basic point here - there is a huge honeypot here to attract people with bad intentions, and they have failed to use it to promote any useful aims given the magnitude of the amount involved.
> Do you just want to be upset?
You've got me, I was bluffing. I'm not really upset. I just think it is bad form, philosophically. The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit. If they want to make money they should start a normal company and have shareholders.
> But I don't think you can dispute the basic point here - there is a huge honeypot here to attract people with bad intentions, and they have failed to use it to promote any useful aims given the magnitude of the amount involved.
They may attract people with good intentions as well - or do you have to be starving to be pure of heart?
PS: I don't see how they haven't promoted "any useful aims" - Firefox continues to exist, Rust exists, Let's Encrypt exists, and they are healthy. Those seem like promotions of useful aims.
>The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit.
Profit is just what is left over after what needs to be paid for is spent. Would you rather they have no money left at the end of every day? How do you imagine that that works?
> They may attract people with good intentions as well - or do you have to be starving to be pure of heart?
In the open source world? If they needed a billion dollars to get people doing good work the whole thing would have collapsed in the 90s. That is the theme I'm going with - order of magnitude 3 OSS projects for a billion dollars is such a bad project/$ ratio that there is no way the Mozilla Foundation will turn out to be competent and honest. If you go to the wiki page [0] you can see a somewhat limp list of second rate projects that nobody uses. They are lousy stewards. They started with an impressive product.
Firefox with 30% market share and enough money was much more effective at getting useful results than the Mozilla Foundation with a billion dollars. People with good intentions will be trying to copy that old project that worked, not the modern Foundation that is floundering. It is unlikely they are attracting competent well-intentioned people or we'd be seeing better results. Their management is no good.
That's exactly what the government wants a charity to do not create reserves. It would make sense to spend that money on increasing market share through advertising.
You'll notice that that document has a concept of reserves that are 'too high' - see for example section 4.2 the heading "Where a charity’s reserves appear to be too high
".
I looked up Let's Encrypt on Wikipedia by the way because I didn't remember that being a Mozilla thing - they don't appear to come under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation financially and their budget is $3.6 million according to the sidebar, and a literal rounding error if we stick to integer percentage points of Mozilla's revenue.
Compare it to operating finances of other open source projects, run by foundations, within a similar complexity (possibly lower, but within order of magnitude):
Blender: ~1 million (2020)
Libreoffice: ~1.3 million (2021)
Apache: ~900k (2017)
Debian: ~340k (2019)
One can argue that browsers are exceptionally complex (even linux distros like Gentoo that build everything - including the kernel - make exceptions for firefox due to its complexity) but even considering that, the figures are staggering by comparison.
To be absolutely clear on this we have a situation where:
- most Mozilla advocates & supporters are so because of Firefox
- most of Mozilla's income comes from Firefox
- most of Mozilla's income does not go towards Firefox development
- Mozilla continue to provide financial supporters with no means to donate directly to the Firefox project
- Mozilla's income is 2 orders of magnitude higher than any comparable charitable foundation
Add to that the decline in Firefox's userbase & the stewardship of the project becomes really difficult to justify/defend
Firstly noone has mentioned anything about wastage within the Firefox project - this thread is about Mozilla as a whole, not just Firefox. Not sure what point you're "coming back to" specifically.
Secondly, I don't work for Mozilla, so unless you know of some source more granular than their very high-level annual reports, the specific & data you're talking about would need to be sourced internally. Mozilla don't publish any breakdowns on a per-project basis: for all I know the Firefox team may well be operating at peak financial efficiency.
If we're to speculate, the closest thing Mozilla publish to a per-project breakdown is under activities in their expense report where they have a "software development" category costing ~250 million (not Firefox software development, all general software development). That's still very high compared to other similar open source projects, but it's just over a third of the gp's quoted income figure. So you've got 2/3rds of that figure to look at before you even get near the idea of Firefox dev wastage.
>Firstly noone has mentioned anything about wastage within the Firefox project - this thread is about Mozilla as a whole, not just Firefox. Not sure what point you're "coming back to" specifically.
I was responding to this line - "> Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that,". It's in my earlier comment. Its fine to criticize, but at some point you have to "provide the goods", so to speak.
If the line were "Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than it's current budget" your reply would make sense, but it didn't. It's merely stating Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than Mozilla's budget (which is explicitly not equivalent to Firefox's budget - that budget isn't public knowledge)
> Yeah, they would love to not be so reliant on them.
If they had put a substantial chuck of this money in income producing investments for the last ten or twenty years (instead of executive perks), they could have a nice annuity right now. Could be called an "endowment."
>Look Mr. Government, we're not a monopoly. We have a competitor! *
*Who were funding and have neutered to the point where they've lost 90% of their market share in the last 10 years. Have fired all their developers and are spending the money on spending that looks a lot like what GFX did.
Mozilla is a dead weight around the neck of the internet. The best thing that can happen is that it dies and something new, run by people who actually make things, is created again.
When was the last time anyone was excited about a firefox update?
The people you are imagining that can make things exist wether it not Mozilla exists. And no one is successfully making a browser project to rival Firefox. So no, I think that isn't the best thing
They spend far more than that on Firefox. You're suggesting a dozen companies could split the amount Mozilla makes in donations and develop better projects, which is silly as each one would have roughly 1/500th the budget of Mozilla.
To be fair, you are correct in the mobile space, and that is now the lion share of devices, but Firefox does have a healthy 7.5% usage in the desktop space if the metrics on this page are to be believed.
It affects usage rates of other browsers other than Safari on that platform, because other "browsers" are just limited chrome on top of Safari. The quality of Chrome, Firefox, etc on iOS will be behind the quality of the same browsers on platforms that they're allowed to improve and innovate upon.
I use Firefox across all my devices. It's fantastic. The people who actually care about browsers (and, perhaps, "anonymity", or "doing the right thing") have all largely moved on from Chrome.
Okay, that's good. Hopefully they will continue. Goal is to not have single-browser monopoly, so everyone develop according to the standards not optimize against single engine.
What's the point in arguing who is better balance keeper?
I'm in the same boat as you. 6 months into a job, don't have much to do. When I raise this, I'm often given some busy-work to do. Something meaningless to keep me quiet for a day or two. Frustrating.
Sounds like you're suggesting to him that he gets himself put on the "managed out" list. I get your point completely, and agree with it to an extent. But if I put myself in that position, what would I do? I'd like to think I'd take the honorable approach you suggested, but I've also got bills to pay, kids to support, plans I want to achieve. Getting myself "managed out" at the expense of all of those things would be hugely problematic.
Getting myself "managed out" at the expense of all of those things would be hugely problematic.
Agreed - and corporate life often gets that way.
But another way of looking at the payoff matrix might be: "I've got kids to support - and that means having parents they can trust, and look up to in this chaotic and morally ambivalent world. Even if it means we might have to work a year or two more before being able to retire more comfortably, or we might not get to take that vacation to Tulum this year."
>I've got kids to support - and that means having parents they can trust, and look up to in this chaotic and morally ambivalent world.
that's a high level of Maslow's hierarchy there, especially in the U.S with few support nets heading into what will probably be a really bad recession.
If you're a manager at Amazon (which is already known for being barely a level above sweat shops in terms of employee treatment), and even more if you're part of their tech (which, if you're posting on HN, you most likely are), you're making so much money that if you can't afford to spend 6 months without a job, you're frankly irresponsible with your cash.
This looks great. As someone who started learning Nix in the last few weeks this is definitely needed and will prove invaluable to future learners. I'm still completely lost on a lot of things but if I work something out that isn't covered on your site I'll try and put together a PR for it.
