Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

    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.

G&A = General and Administrative (expenses)

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

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?

> 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-...

> 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

> 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.

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...

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.

$260M isn't a few million.

[flagged]

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.

> 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).

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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'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.

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).

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.

> How does Brave survive financially?

Crypto [1].

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

>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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

But it depends on the Blink engine.

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.

You think attached bottle caps are a bad thing?

What?

That's UK.

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.

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).

For those too young to remember:

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

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

Wait, they already did that.

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.

[dead]

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.

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