Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

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

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).

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.

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.

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

More like a lapdog I'm right

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.

> 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.

this is hilarious

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

[flagged]

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/

you know keyboard warriors? keyboards CEOs also exist apprently

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

Does the default Brave ad blocker block Youtube ads?

> "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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

They seem united on censoring free speech and removing all privacy.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :-)

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.