21 ms·

Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More

495 points by bmelton 11y ago

hardwaresofton 11y ago
Not sure I like the adversarial title, but it's great that the changes are going over well. Firefox does a lot to better the entire ecosystem that is the Web, and I'm super glad they're around. Also generally my first move when I install FF on a new machine is to switch out the default search provider so... This doesn't affect me too much
- RodericDay 11y ago
  Just to counterbalance- I really like the adversarial title. I'm not the biggest fan of Google the company, and Firefox distancing themselves from them makes me happy.
  - nogbit 11y ago
    And to add to that, it's just a freakin title, adversarial or not. The title simply states fact that one company no longer needs another companies revenue, why can't it be left at that? I like all titles, regardless (link bait, trolls, flames, truth, false bias....whatever, it's all good and the best stand on their own merit)!
  - 392c91e8165b 11y ago
    Just to add even more counterbalance, I consider both Google and Mozilla enemies of public discourse on the internet. What I'm referring to is the fact that turning the web into a platform on which a wide variety of applications can run makes it more complicated and consequently more failure-prone and more tedious to use the web to publish and to read text, images and links to other pages of text and images. I don't in isolation mind the creation of a new application-delivery platform (and I appreciate the fact that the new application-delivery platform is not the intellectual property of a single corporation). I just wish there were some way to tell publishers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images to switch from the new application-delivery platform to something else, something whose design is not a compromise between the needs of the application-delivery platform and the needs of publishers and readers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images. Documents work better when they are mere data as opposed to programs requiring or assuming a complicated execution environment. HTML documents were better than PostScript and MS-Word documents for this reason -- until JavaScript was added to HTML, and web pages became programs assuming an execution environment, and then that execution environment got more and more complicated.
  - aniket_ray 11y ago
    Unfortunately this posturing is not because of any independence in Mozilla or any new revenue generating ability. Instead, they've just to switched to Yahoo/Bing's side now.
bobajeff 11y ago
I wonder what they'd do if Yahoo decides not to renew their deal with them. Would they go back to Google or go to Bing? What if no search provider thinks they are worth the amount they are getting with their current deals?
- zobzu 11y ago
  then they get no money. as long as they have market share people will pay no matter what. when they dont, they're dead.
AC__ 11y ago
I love Firefox, their addon api is pretty fucking sweet. I've made 2 super simple addons, one to kill a paywall on my local guardian site and a second just last night to easily set lightblue background with black text using a context-menu button, literally took 10 minutes. Can't beat Mozilla documentation.
- sundarurfriend 11y ago
  That's encouraging news, this is something I've wanted to tinker with. The only time I tried to get into extension making (which, to be fair to them, was 6 or 7 years ago), it seemed a complicated thing with rather poor documentation. How would one go about getting started in this now? I hear there's "old style addons", jetpack-based ones, and something about making it Electrolysis-compatible... and then there's WebExtensions looming in the horizon. Could you give me one definite starting point that's reasonably modern and future-proof?
  - AC__ 11y ago
    I don't know much about Jetpack or Elrolysis, next to nothing in fact. Best place to begin would be with the "Getting Started" tutorial https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Getting_Started_%28jpm%29 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Ge... Installation instructions here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm#Installation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm#In.... Caveat I haven't used the updated SDK using their jpm tool but my FF 41 is happily running addon packaged with out-of-date SDK. Good news for you is the new work-flow sounds even easier as you no longer need to call bin/activate to use cfx tools. I will eventually update SDK but I was perfectly happy with my old solution: alias ffsdk='cd /home/$USER/addon-sdk-1.17 && source bin/activate && PS1="ffsdk:\W$ "'
- Redoubts 11y ago
  Then why are there 20 chrome extensions for HackerNews, but none for FF?
  - AC__ 11y ago
DiabloD3 11y ago
Hopefully this means they can achieve market share parity now. I'm seriously considering switching from Chrome to Firefox due to how badly it behaves on my Ivy Bridge era MBPr.
- bjwbell 11y ago
  Firefox, or maybe Gecko, has been on a downhill slide with end users for a long time. I've been hoping it'll get better for at least a couple years and it hasn't. A good browser is hard, like really hard. It's in the same order of magnitude as writing an OS. To improve the user experience they need to hire guys like https://randomascii.wordpress.com https://randomascii.wordpress.com (Bruce Dawson).
  - TwoBit 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure some OS people would take issue with that statement. Firefox has indeed been losing share gradually, but not due to their browser implementation. That's been improving such that I think the slide would be worse otherwise.
  - TwoBit 11y ago
    No offense to Bruce, as he's a great guy, but wtf does he have to do with the answer to improving browser user experience?
    - bjwbell 11y ago
      Performance, I don't mean benchmark performance but the sucky stuff. Today on Linux I have to restart Firefox every ~20min because it slows to crawl. I don't know why and don't really care, because it'll take an unknown amount of time to root cause and 6 months from now an OS or browser update is likely to cause something similar. I'm not dissing the Firefox devs. Google seems to have more people to throw at this problem.
- PebblesHD 11y ago
  On a MacBook I've found its almost impossible to beat Safari, it works amazingly well and doesn't annihilate my battery life. Personal choice though, I'm not committed to any specific browser and all do certain things better than the rest.
krick 11y ago
So, let's make DuckDuckGo default in Europe then?
- dotch 11y ago
  Mozilla cares about good user experience more than money and sometimes even more than self interest and principles. Unfortunately the quality of DuckDuckGo's search results for non-english-speaking countries are nowhere close to google's, which is why google is still the default there.
  - balladeer 11y ago
    I fully agree with the second part of your comment regarding DDG search results; I am from Asia. But Mozilla caring about user experience is something maybe from the bygone era. All it cares about now is market share and revenue. The Pocket episode was the last nail in coffin for me along with the continuous bloat it has been putting into once my only browser options which was for years for me.
    - ionised 11y ago
      They don't make any money from Pocket and they are a non-profit organisation. Your comment and concerns don't make any sense.
  - krick 11y ago
    Actually, I kinda am from non-english speaking country myself and use a couple more languages that are not English. Funny enough, Google localization is one thing that made me switch to DuckDuckGo. Somehow, Google thinks if my IP is from Latvia — it has to speak Latvian to me (which I'm admittedly a bit less comfortable with than English), if it's from Netherlands — it has to speak Dutch (which I don't speak at all). And (aside from manually adding bizzare GET-arguments into url) it doesn't even allow me to chose language myself. One evening it asked me to confirm some user-agreement in Latvian before I'm allowed to continue using search, I got annoyed and said "That's enough". Yes, in some languages Google search is sometimes superior, but the difference isn't huge and I always can type "!g something" into DuckDuckGo if I need to (and I don't have to confirm any user agreements in that case). In fact, what still makes me use Google search sometimes isn't localization or some clever heuristic features like flight search, but "search by image" feature. I don't know any other engine that would do that nearly as good as Google. TinEye is left far behind, unfortunately.
ddingus 11y ago
Good, I hope. Long time Firefox fan here.
balladeer 11y ago
I see some comments treating this news as if it is a win for something like privacy advocacy. Here's what it is and that too in the very first lines: > The organization once banked on the millions that Google paid for search traffic from the Firefox browser. Then, there is this: > Now it relies on Yahoo, Baidu and others, and it expects revenue to grow. and this: > is confident new search-engine deals will bring in even more money
dimdimdim 11y ago
Firefox created the revolution of "better browsers"! Google was smart enough to have market their own browser by having themselves be the default search on it. Once you land on Google, the "install Chrome for a better experience" slowly had people move to it.
- afsina 11y ago
  >the "install Chrome for a better experience" slowly had people move to it. No, people moved to Chrome because it was a much better product.
  - iopq 11y ago
    Only before Firefox optimized its JS engine to bring it to par.
    - Niten 11y ago
      Firefox's security is still nowhere near up to par, unfortunately.
      - robin_reala 11y ago
        156 CVEs in Firefox this year compared to 133 in Chrome. Worse, but not ‘nowhere near up to par’.
        Excavator 11y ago
        Some relevant, interesting, material on counting CVEs: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/CNEgtJWYTb5 https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/CNEgtJWYTb5 http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-and-pie-charts.html http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-...
        robin_reala 11y ago
tmalsburg2 11y ago
Looking at Firefox' dwindling market share and Chrome's spectacular success, Google is probably thinking: "We don't need Mozilla's browser any more."
- fpgeek 11y ago
  That would be foolish. Firefox is the only major browser not controlled by one of Google's major competitors. Even without a deal for the search engine default, there are all sorts of reasons that is valuable to Google (collaboration on web standards, an insurance policy for browser design mistakes, not all Firefox users would switch to Chrome and so on).
  - PeCaN 11y ago
    Also keeping Firefox around is basically insurance against (some) antitrust lawsuits (not just for Google, for whatever browser maker sponsors them).
- jinst8gmi 11y ago
  There's more likely thinking: "why sponsor a competing browser when we have Chrome nagging everyone to sign into Google"
  - kibwen 11y ago
    Last I checked (which was years ago, mind), Mozilla's search partnership with Google was bringing in $4 billion in annual revenue for Google, with $300 million of that being kicked back to Mozilla. Google wasn't sponsoring Firefox for kicks, there was a definite financial incentive.
firebones 11y ago
I don't know nothin' about nothin', but Mozilla's involvement in Rust is a huge plus that someone is focused on the right things. Don't have to be the biggest thing in the world to do good for the world, or industry.
- ionised 11y ago
  I'm thinking of picking up a new language in my spare time and Rust is the main candidate I'm considering.
- epoch1970 11y ago
  I get a sense that the hype surrounding Rust has fallen away rather quickly since its 1.0 release around half a year ago. I won't speculate on why that is, but for a language that was poised to become very popular very quickly, we've seen remarkably little use of it so far. The only major Rust projects at this point are Rust and Servo, and both of them are quite closely tied to each other. There are a handful of libraries, and lots of small-scale demos or sample code, but that's about it. We aren't seeing companies across the board rushing to use it. We aren't seeing more than a handful of significant open source projects using it. We aren't seeing freelancers use it for their projects. We aren't seeing researchers use it. We aren't seeing academics adopt it for teaching purposes. Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did. While Rust will likely have some future, its impact may be much smaller than many of us anticipated even just a year ago.
  - Gankro 11y ago
    Rust is trying to improve the quality of core infrastructure, not random CRUD apps. It takes time for large companies to rewrite and migrate these systems, but it is indeed happening behind closed doors (source: private conversations with said companies). It's been less than a year since Rust 1.0.
    - gsnedders 11y ago
      This is entirely it—it's trying to displace C and C++, which are far more entrenched than Java, Go, or Ruby.
forrestthewoods 11y ago
They're still completely dependent on money from someone for default search status.
auvrw 11y ago
> On smartphones, its share of browser usage is virtually nonexistent that's surprising b/c i've had a good experience with firefox on android: i particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature, and although i'm still using adb for debug, newer versions apparently do debugging direct with desktop browser instances, no adb needed. for all i know, chrome has similar features as well, so i'll just say that i haven't found firefox mobile lacking. i was totally unaware that mozilla was making that much money (or any significant amount of money) from corporate deals, but that's probably b/c i'm naieve. proprotionally larger donations will go to wikipedia instead of mozilla in the future.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  I use Firefox on Android as well, primarily because of Firefox Sync and its client-side encryption.
- fpgeek 11y ago
  Yes, Firefox on Android is awesome. My favorite features: 1. The best options for delegating from websites to installed apps I've seen (via the long-press menu or by touching the Android when it appears in the URL bar). 2. Extensions. For me, browsing is practically uncivilized without Self-Destructing Cookies and there are lots of other useful ones. 3. The new "Open later" feature, where Firefox collects the URLs you click on, but doesn't load them until you switch to it. Among other things, it is a great way to collect links to look at from the Google Search app. My only real annoyance with it are the occasional sites that make broken mobile browser assumptions so I end up spoofing Android Chrome or Mobile Safari. At least there's Phony, so the spoofing is pretty easy.
  - rogeryu 11y ago
    You forget one: privacy! If you use Chrome, do you know what data will be shared with Google?
    - xiaoma 11y ago
      Every single keystroke?
Sven7 11y ago
Kudos to Mozilla! Mozilla can be more ambitious. Or atleast as bold as they once were, when they took on Microsoft. If they can convince Baidu, Yahoo et al to keep them open, independent and competitive against the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft, then there is no reason they can't pull the same thing off to fund an open social network or a open search engine that can shake things up a little at Google and Facebook. I am really quite sick of the Google and Facebook ivory towers deciding where and how things should work. Most of these decisions are based on empire defense rather than the common good. They speak the language of the common good, but constantly do things that benefit them disproportionately. So what is their purpose at the end of the day, other than "... we are the rich; we own america. God knows how. but we intend to keep it". They need saving from themselves. And I am glad Mozilla exists like a Ralph Nader does to keep things honest.
- iSnow 11y ago
  >an open social network or a open search engine Please don't! This has been both tried before and it ended in a waste of resources, money (Diaspora, anyone?) and goodwill. You can't beat the network effect of a social network with "we are open source", people don't care that much. You either have a usecase no one else has thought about, a technical killer feature or you don't try. With a search engine, the network effect is not as big, but you better deliver something consistently better than Google right from the start. Both are not fields ripe for disruption as the web browser game was in the mid-2000's.
  - 001sky 11y ago
    Do you have any sense of proportion? FB is worth hundreds of BILLIONs and somebody wasted $500K or whatever on diaspora...thats not a waste of resources its a single FTE for at one of these companies today....Or do you have something else in mind?
    - iSnow 11y ago
      I doubt the average FTE at FB costs 500 grant, but whatever. The point is, Diaspora didn't get that money from google or one of the giants who could care less. And it is now gone without making a lot of a splash. But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla enters the competitions they can win.
frik 11y ago
A bad article. Mozilla relies on Yahoo's Search-Engine (Bing) cooperation (instead of Google) and probably with partnerships like Pocket (will be removed). Mozilla's work on Firefox, Rust and Servo is great. Thunderbird and a real multi-process browser could get a bit more love. The later probably can only be achieved with a Servo based engine (probably not not with Gecko and its XCOM, XUL legacy code - the current multi process work uses just two processes (sandbox plugins) and doesn't scale - opening hundreds tabs won't spawn dozens of processes as we know from IE and Chrome (with all its downsides but even more upsides (stability, usability, UI latency)). Firefox with Firebug and all its plugins is the best web development browser, Chrome with its ever changing DevTools (UI changes) comes second (for me). Mozilla's browser is very important for the open Web.
- tweakz 11y ago
  "Pocket (will be removed)" Not according to Mozilla: http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/12/mozilla-has-no-plans-to-offer-firefox-without-pocket/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/12/mozilla-has-no-plans-to-of...
  - frik 11y ago
    Wrong: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631387 pocket is moving out of the main tree back to being an add-on
    - throwaway2048 11y ago
      that doesn't mean its not being bundled by default
- kibwen 11y ago
  > probably with partnerships like Pocket Mozilla has repeatedly stated that they're not receiving any money from bundling Pocket, and I see no reason why they would lie about this considering that they're actively seeking to diversify revenue sources. And even if you think Mozilla is lying, there's no way that Pocket is putting up the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to make their hypothethical contribution to Mozilla's coffers anything more than a rounding error.
incepted 11y ago
The article is not saying "Firefox doesn't need any corporate money". Corporate deals are really the only reason why they're still alive at all since they are virtually nonexistent in mind share. Instead, the article is simply saying that Google wised up and realized they had no need to give Mozilla that much money so instead, Mozilla convinced other gullible corporations to give them money. Once that stream dries up (and it will), Mozilla will meet the fate that it deserves and die.
- ionised 11y ago
  That's not at all what the article is saying.
  - e15ctr0n 11y ago
    Too bad, because that pretty much sums up the situation.
    - 001sky 11y ago
      "The article is not saying "Firefox doesn't need any corporate money". Corporate deals are really the only reason why they're still alive at all since they are virtually nonexistent in mind share. Instead, the article is simply saying that Google wised up and realized they had no need to give Mozilla that much money so instead, Mozilla convinced other gullible corporations to give them money. Once that stream dries up (and it will), Mozilla will meet the fate that it deserves and die." == I don't see why this text was offensive or the comment was killed by flags... The article clearly says that 2014 revenues was something like $300 million and most if not all was from a single-point corporate contract. Somehow, undisclosed in the article, all of this revenue has been replaced by non-google corporate contracts. Such that 2015/2016 will presumably not see much decline. Or, in other words, Mozilla was able to fully replace one Corporate sponsor with another (or another set). The key question for everyone here is what, if anything, does that matter? By not explaining of discussing the changes in the terms of the contracts/business model, not much at all transparency has been added to Mozilla's motivations or long-term outlook. Maybe this info is out there somewhere else, but decent reporting should have highlighted those links somewhere in tha artcicle. I'm surprised as well HN comments don't seem to cover this topic anywhere either, but maybe I;ve missed the discussion somewhere...
justinator 11y ago
Is it just me, or is CNET breaking the back button?
Grue3 11y ago
But then they remove great features like Tab Groups because it's "too expensive to maintain them". I would actually pay them to maintain this feature indefinitely, I'm sure others will as well.
- kuschku 11y ago
  It’s not "removed", it’s "moved into an extension".
- joonoro 11y ago
  This is the first I've heard about Tab Groups being removed and that makes me sad. However the comments in the bug tracker [0] make it sound like it isn't about the money. They also have a migration plan for existing users to back up their data and move on to an extension [1]. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550 [1] https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > I would actually pay them to maintain this feature indefinitely, I'm sure others will as well If you are not paying for it, you are the prod... oops, wrong browser vendor! /s Seriously though, I know there are trade-offs to consider, but some of the technical decisions being made for Firefox make me wonder what they were thinking (case in point: Pocket). Too bad most Firefox forks tend to wither over time.
1024core 11y ago
> In 2014, that deal accounted for most of the nonprofit organization's $330 million in revenue, according to financial results just now released for that year Wow, that's a lot of cash. What are the top expenditures of Mozilla?
- eps 11y ago
  Enforcement of fun and tolerant atmosphere at the office, obviously.
- bzbarsky 11y ago
  https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... page 6 says that the $318 million in expenses in 2014 broke down like so: $40 million "branding and marketing" $38 million "general and administrative" $10 million depreciation $13 million "program services" (whatever that is) $213 million "software development" Note that this is not counting income taxes (another $2.5 million) as an expense, because this is basically the "how much taxable profit is there?" calculation. Nate that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation claims Mozilla has "1000+" employees; if that claim is true I would expect $200+ million just for salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, office space, etc (obviously depending on where the employees are located).
- jldugger 11y ago
  The fuckloads of money it takes to promote Firefox and keep (more) people from using Chrome instead.
iSnow 11y ago
It pains me to say, but I'd rather Mozilla used all their man-power to fix the god-awful performance of desktop Firefox. Granted, I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. But I fail to understand why that leads to such a dramatic slow-down after having the browser open for a day or two. If I type text, it will appear with a delay of up to 20s - on a 16GB computer where a lot of RAM is free. And with only uBlock. Something in the core of Firefox is completely rotten.
- polymatter 11y ago
  perhaps its flash? I keep having the same problem and I suspect flash
  - realusername 11y ago
    Definitely flash, especially on Linux, just moving it to 'click to play' is making the browser much much faster.
    - FreeFull 11y ago
      I think it's 'click to play' by default now.
  - iSnow 11y ago
    No, I have Flash disabled, both on Windows and on MacOS. Developer tools are a resource drain, but bearable - the browser simply gets slower after a couple of hours of use. And then much slower, like unbearably slow, even the developer edition where I don't have uBlock or any script/flash/adblocker installed.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  > I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. 20 tabs is shockingly low for causing performance problems, especially that severe and _especially_ on a computer with freaking 16 GB of RAM. I abuse tabs pretty badly on Chrome: on my 16 GB workstation I'd have a few hundred open, many of them for weeks at a time, and on my 8 GB laptop, I usually have up to 100, and I rarely get performance problems, certainly never to that degree. I was one of the late-switchers to Chrome because there were some Firefox features I enjoyed, but the garbage performance finally forced my hand back in 2009/10 or whatever. I periodically check back with Firefox out of a healthy sense of wanting to be aware of alternatives, but it consistently fails at what's perhaps the most important to me: performance.
atmosx 11y ago
<OT> I like how the article references twitter quotes: "We're going where the users are going," </OT>
zmmmmm 11y ago
I feel like Mozilla ought to be banking / investing a large slice of their revenue and aiming to live off the profits. They need to turn themselves into a self funded foundation that truly needs money from no one. They definitely shouldn't get used to rivers of gold flowing in, especially as their market share keeps falling.
richardboegli 11y ago
Well if Firefox doesn't want it, I might go and ask for some :P
Patronus_Charm 11y ago
Firefox is my second favorite browser behind Safari. I am actually glad they got that albatross off their back.
joeblau 11y ago
While this might be true, I don't think this needed to be said out loud. Statements like this always have a way of turning into "famous last words" sometime down the line.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
>Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More So you're just reliant on Yahoo/Bing money now.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Sure, they're reliant on money. But since they have multiple options, then they're no longer reliant on Google money. It's a big step forward for them.
z3t4 11y ago
So who types in URL's or use bookmarks!?

495 points by bmelton 11y ago

Not sure I like the adversarial title, but it's great that the changes are going over well. Firefox does a lot to better the entire ecosystem that is the Web, and I'm super glad they're around. Also generally my first move when I install FF on a new machine is to switch out the default search provider so... This doesn't affect me too much

RodericDay 11y ago
Just to counterbalance- I really like the adversarial title. I'm not the biggest fan of Google the company, and Firefox distancing themselves from them makes me happy.
- nogbit 11y ago
  And to add to that, it's just a freakin title, adversarial or not. The title simply states fact that one company no longer needs another companies revenue, why can't it be left at that? I like all titles, regardless (link bait, trolls, flames, truth, false bias....whatever, it's all good and the best stand on their own merit)!
- 392c91e8165b 11y ago
  Just to add even more counterbalance, I consider both Google and Mozilla enemies of public discourse on the internet. What I'm referring to is the fact that turning the web into a platform on which a wide variety of applications can run makes it more complicated and consequently more failure-prone and more tedious to use the web to publish and to read text, images and links to other pages of text and images. I don't in isolation mind the creation of a new application-delivery platform (and I appreciate the fact that the new application-delivery platform is not the intellectual property of a single corporation). I just wish there were some way to tell publishers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images to switch from the new application-delivery platform to something else, something whose design is not a compromise between the needs of the application-delivery platform and the needs of publishers and readers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images. Documents work better when they are mere data as opposed to programs requiring or assuming a complicated execution environment. HTML documents were better than PostScript and MS-Word documents for this reason -- until JavaScript was added to HTML, and web pages became programs assuming an execution environment, and then that execution environment got more and more complicated.
- aniket_ray 11y ago
  Unfortunately this posturing is not because of any independence in Mozilla or any new revenue generating ability. Instead, they've just to switched to Yahoo/Bing's side now.

bobajeff 11y ago

I wonder what they'd do if Yahoo decides not to renew their deal with them. Would they go back to Google or go to Bing? What if no search provider thinks they are worth the amount they are getting with their current deals?

zobzu 11y ago
then they get no money. as long as they have market share people will pay no matter what. when they dont, they're dead.

AC__ 11y ago

I love Firefox, their addon api is pretty fucking sweet. I've made 2 super simple addons, one to kill a paywall on my local guardian site and a second just last night to easily set lightblue background with black text using a context-menu button, literally took 10 minutes. Can't beat Mozilla documentation.

sundarurfriend 11y ago
That's encouraging news, this is something I've wanted to tinker with. The only time I tried to get into extension making (which, to be fair to them, was 6 or 7 years ago), it seemed a complicated thing with rather poor documentation. How would one go about getting started in this now? I hear there's "old style addons", jetpack-based ones, and something about making it Electrolysis-compatible... and then there's WebExtensions looming in the horizon. Could you give me one definite starting point that's reasonably modern and future-proof?
- AC__ 11y ago
  I don't know much about Jetpack or Elrolysis, next to nothing in fact. Best place to begin would be with the "Getting Started" tutorial https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Getting_Started_%28jpm%29 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Ge... Installation instructions here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm#Installation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm#In.... Caveat I haven't used the updated SDK using their jpm tool but my FF 41 is happily running addon packaged with out-of-date SDK. Good news for you is the new work-flow sounds even easier as you no longer need to call bin/activate to use cfx tools. I will eventually update SDK but I was perfectly happy with my old solution: alias ffsdk='cd /home/$USER/addon-sdk-1.17 && source bin/activate && PS1="ffsdk:\W$ "'
Redoubts 11y ago
Then why are there 20 chrome extensions for HackerNews, but none for FF?
- AC__ 11y ago

DiabloD3 11y ago

Hopefully this means they can achieve market share parity now. I'm seriously considering switching from Chrome to Firefox due to how badly it behaves on my Ivy Bridge era MBPr.

bjwbell 11y ago
Firefox, or maybe Gecko, has been on a downhill slide with end users for a long time. I've been hoping it'll get better for at least a couple years and it hasn't. A good browser is hard, like really hard. It's in the same order of magnitude as writing an OS. To improve the user experience they need to hire guys like https://randomascii.wordpress.com https://randomascii.wordpress.com (Bruce Dawson).
- TwoBit 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure some OS people would take issue with that statement. Firefox has indeed been losing share gradually, but not due to their browser implementation. That's been improving such that I think the slide would be worse otherwise.
- TwoBit 11y ago
  No offense to Bruce, as he's a great guy, but wtf does he have to do with the answer to improving browser user experience?
  - bjwbell 11y ago
    Performance, I don't mean benchmark performance but the sucky stuff. Today on Linux I have to restart Firefox every ~20min because it slows to crawl. I don't know why and don't really care, because it'll take an unknown amount of time to root cause and 6 months from now an OS or browser update is likely to cause something similar. I'm not dissing the Firefox devs. Google seems to have more people to throw at this problem.
PebblesHD 11y ago
On a MacBook I've found its almost impossible to beat Safari, it works amazingly well and doesn't annihilate my battery life. Personal choice though, I'm not committed to any specific browser and all do certain things better than the rest.

krick 11y ago

So, let's make DuckDuckGo default in Europe then?

dotch 11y ago
Mozilla cares about good user experience more than money and sometimes even more than self interest and principles. Unfortunately the quality of DuckDuckGo's search results for non-english-speaking countries are nowhere close to google's, which is why google is still the default there.
- balladeer 11y ago
  I fully agree with the second part of your comment regarding DDG search results; I am from Asia. But Mozilla caring about user experience is something maybe from the bygone era. All it cares about now is market share and revenue. The Pocket episode was the last nail in coffin for me along with the continuous bloat it has been putting into once my only browser options which was for years for me.
  - ionised 11y ago
    They don't make any money from Pocket and they are a non-profit organisation. Your comment and concerns don't make any sense.
- krick 11y ago
  Actually, I kinda am from non-english speaking country myself and use a couple more languages that are not English. Funny enough, Google localization is one thing that made me switch to DuckDuckGo. Somehow, Google thinks if my IP is from Latvia — it has to speak Latvian to me (which I'm admittedly a bit less comfortable with than English), if it's from Netherlands — it has to speak Dutch (which I don't speak at all). And (aside from manually adding bizzare GET-arguments into url) it doesn't even allow me to chose language myself. One evening it asked me to confirm some user-agreement in Latvian before I'm allowed to continue using search, I got annoyed and said "That's enough". Yes, in some languages Google search is sometimes superior, but the difference isn't huge and I always can type "!g something" into DuckDuckGo if I need to (and I don't have to confirm any user agreements in that case). In fact, what still makes me use Google search sometimes isn't localization or some clever heuristic features like flight search, but "search by image" feature. I don't know any other engine that would do that nearly as good as Google. TinEye is left far behind, unfortunately.

ddingus 11y ago

Good, I hope. Long time Firefox fan here.

balladeer 11y ago

I see some comments treating this news as if it is a win for something like privacy advocacy. Here's what it is and that too in the very first lines: > The organization once banked on the millions that Google paid for search traffic from the Firefox browser. Then, there is this: > Now it relies on Yahoo, Baidu and others, and it expects revenue to grow. and this: > is confident new search-engine deals will bring in even more money

dimdimdim 11y ago

Firefox created the revolution of "better browsers"! Google was smart enough to have market their own browser by having themselves be the default search on it. Once you land on Google, the "install Chrome for a better experience" slowly had people move to it.

afsina 11y ago
>the "install Chrome for a better experience" slowly had people move to it. No, people moved to Chrome because it was a much better product.
- iopq 11y ago
  Only before Firefox optimized its JS engine to bring it to par.
  - Niten 11y ago
    Firefox's security is still nowhere near up to par, unfortunately.
    - robin_reala 11y ago
      156 CVEs in Firefox this year compared to 133 in Chrome. Worse, but not ‘nowhere near up to par’.
      - Excavator 11y ago
        Some relevant, interesting, material on counting CVEs: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/CNEgtJWYTb5 https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/CNEgtJWYTb5 http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-and-pie-charts.html http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-...
        robin_reala 11y ago

tmalsburg2 11y ago

Looking at Firefox' dwindling market share and Chrome's spectacular success, Google is probably thinking: "We don't need Mozilla's browser any more."

fpgeek 11y ago
That would be foolish. Firefox is the only major browser not controlled by one of Google's major competitors. Even without a deal for the search engine default, there are all sorts of reasons that is valuable to Google (collaboration on web standards, an insurance policy for browser design mistakes, not all Firefox users would switch to Chrome and so on).
- PeCaN 11y ago
  Also keeping Firefox around is basically insurance against (some) antitrust lawsuits (not just for Google, for whatever browser maker sponsors them).
jinst8gmi 11y ago
There's more likely thinking: "why sponsor a competing browser when we have Chrome nagging everyone to sign into Google"
- kibwen 11y ago
  Last I checked (which was years ago, mind), Mozilla's search partnership with Google was bringing in $4 billion in annual revenue for Google, with $300 million of that being kicked back to Mozilla. Google wasn't sponsoring Firefox for kicks, there was a definite financial incentive.

firebones 11y ago

I don't know nothin' about nothin', but Mozilla's involvement in Rust is a huge plus that someone is focused on the right things. Don't have to be the biggest thing in the world to do good for the world, or industry.

ionised 11y ago
I'm thinking of picking up a new language in my spare time and Rust is the main candidate I'm considering.
epoch1970 11y ago
I get a sense that the hype surrounding Rust has fallen away rather quickly since its 1.0 release around half a year ago. I won't speculate on why that is, but for a language that was poised to become very popular very quickly, we've seen remarkably little use of it so far. The only major Rust projects at this point are Rust and Servo, and both of them are quite closely tied to each other. There are a handful of libraries, and lots of small-scale demos or sample code, but that's about it. We aren't seeing companies across the board rushing to use it. We aren't seeing more than a handful of significant open source projects using it. We aren't seeing freelancers use it for their projects. We aren't seeing researchers use it. We aren't seeing academics adopt it for teaching purposes. Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did. While Rust will likely have some future, its impact may be much smaller than many of us anticipated even just a year ago.
- Gankro 11y ago
  Rust is trying to improve the quality of core infrastructure, not random CRUD apps. It takes time for large companies to rewrite and migrate these systems, but it is indeed happening behind closed doors (source: private conversations with said companies). It's been less than a year since Rust 1.0.
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    This is entirely it—it's trying to displace C and C++, which are far more entrenched than Java, Go, or Ruby.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

They're still completely dependent on money from someone for default search status.

auvrw 11y ago

> On smartphones, its share of browser usage is virtually nonexistent that's surprising b/c i've had a good experience with firefox on android: i particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature, and although i'm still using adb for debug, newer versions apparently do debugging direct with desktop browser instances, no adb needed. for all i know, chrome has similar features as well, so i'll just say that i haven't found firefox mobile lacking. i was totally unaware that mozilla was making that much money (or any significant amount of money) from corporate deals, but that's probably b/c i'm naieve. proprotionally larger donations will go to wikipedia instead of mozilla in the future.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
I use Firefox on Android as well, primarily because of Firefox Sync and its client-side encryption.
fpgeek 11y ago
Yes, Firefox on Android is awesome. My favorite features: 1. The best options for delegating from websites to installed apps I've seen (via the long-press menu or by touching the Android when it appears in the URL bar). 2. Extensions. For me, browsing is practically uncivilized without Self-Destructing Cookies and there are lots of other useful ones. 3. The new "Open later" feature, where Firefox collects the URLs you click on, but doesn't load them until you switch to it. Among other things, it is a great way to collect links to look at from the Google Search app. My only real annoyance with it are the occasional sites that make broken mobile browser assumptions so I end up spoofing Android Chrome or Mobile Safari. At least there's Phony, so the spoofing is pretty easy.
- rogeryu 11y ago
  You forget one: privacy! If you use Chrome, do you know what data will be shared with Google?
  - xiaoma 11y ago
    Every single keystroke?

Sven7 11y ago

Kudos to Mozilla! Mozilla can be more ambitious. Or atleast as bold as they once were, when they took on Microsoft. If they can convince Baidu, Yahoo et al to keep them open, independent and competitive against the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft, then there is no reason they can't pull the same thing off to fund an open social network or a open search engine that can shake things up a little at Google and Facebook. I am really quite sick of the Google and Facebook ivory towers deciding where and how things should work. Most of these decisions are based on empire defense rather than the common good. They speak the language of the common good, but constantly do things that benefit them disproportionately. So what is their purpose at the end of the day, other than "... we are the rich; we own america. God knows how. but we intend to keep it". They need saving from themselves. And I am glad Mozilla exists like a Ralph Nader does to keep things honest.

iSnow 11y ago
>an open social network or a open search engine Please don't! This has been both tried before and it ended in a waste of resources, money (Diaspora, anyone?) and goodwill. You can't beat the network effect of a social network with "we are open source", people don't care that much. You either have a usecase no one else has thought about, a technical killer feature or you don't try. With a search engine, the network effect is not as big, but you better deliver something consistently better than Google right from the start. Both are not fields ripe for disruption as the web browser game was in the mid-2000's.
- 001sky 11y ago
  Do you have any sense of proportion? FB is worth hundreds of BILLIONs and somebody wasted $500K or whatever on diaspora...thats not a waste of resources its a single FTE for at one of these companies today....Or do you have something else in mind?
  - iSnow 11y ago
    I doubt the average FTE at FB costs 500 grant, but whatever. The point is, Diaspora didn't get that money from google or one of the giants who could care less. And it is now gone without making a lot of a splash. But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla enters the competitions they can win.

frik 11y ago

A bad article. Mozilla relies on Yahoo's Search-Engine (Bing) cooperation (instead of Google) and probably with partnerships like Pocket (will be removed). Mozilla's work on Firefox, Rust and Servo is great. Thunderbird and a real multi-process browser could get a bit more love. The later probably can only be achieved with a Servo based engine (probably not not with Gecko and its XCOM, XUL legacy code - the current multi process work uses just two processes (sandbox plugins) and doesn't scale - opening hundreds tabs won't spawn dozens of processes as we know from IE and Chrome (with all its downsides but even more upsides (stability, usability, UI latency)). Firefox with Firebug and all its plugins is the best web development browser, Chrome with its ever changing DevTools (UI changes) comes second (for me). Mozilla's browser is very important for the open Web.

tweakz 11y ago
"Pocket (will be removed)" Not according to Mozilla: http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/12/mozilla-has-no-plans-to-offer-firefox-without-pocket/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/12/mozilla-has-no-plans-to-of...
- frik 11y ago
  Wrong: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631387 pocket is moving out of the main tree back to being an add-on
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    that doesn't mean its not being bundled by default
kibwen 11y ago
> probably with partnerships like Pocket Mozilla has repeatedly stated that they're not receiving any money from bundling Pocket, and I see no reason why they would lie about this considering that they're actively seeking to diversify revenue sources. And even if you think Mozilla is lying, there's no way that Pocket is putting up the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to make their hypothethical contribution to Mozilla's coffers anything more than a rounding error.

incepted 11y ago

The article is not saying "Firefox doesn't need any corporate money". Corporate deals are really the only reason why they're still alive at all since they are virtually nonexistent in mind share. Instead, the article is simply saying that Google wised up and realized they had no need to give Mozilla that much money so instead, Mozilla convinced other gullible corporations to give them money. Once that stream dries up (and it will), Mozilla will meet the fate that it deserves and die.

ionised 11y ago
That's not at all what the article is saying.
- e15ctr0n 11y ago
  Too bad, because that pretty much sums up the situation.
  - 001sky 11y ago
    "The article is not saying "Firefox doesn't need any corporate money". Corporate deals are really the only reason why they're still alive at all since they are virtually nonexistent in mind share. Instead, the article is simply saying that Google wised up and realized they had no need to give Mozilla that much money so instead, Mozilla convinced other gullible corporations to give them money. Once that stream dries up (and it will), Mozilla will meet the fate that it deserves and die." == I don't see why this text was offensive or the comment was killed by flags... The article clearly says that 2014 revenues was something like $300 million and most if not all was from a single-point corporate contract. Somehow, undisclosed in the article, all of this revenue has been replaced by non-google corporate contracts. Such that 2015/2016 will presumably not see much decline. Or, in other words, Mozilla was able to fully replace one Corporate sponsor with another (or another set). The key question for everyone here is what, if anything, does that matter? By not explaining of discussing the changes in the terms of the contracts/business model, not much at all transparency has been added to Mozilla's motivations or long-term outlook. Maybe this info is out there somewhere else, but decent reporting should have highlighted those links somewhere in tha artcicle. I'm surprised as well HN comments don't seem to cover this topic anywhere either, but maybe I;ve missed the discussion somewhere...

justinator 11y ago

Is it just me, or is CNET breaking the back button?

Grue3 11y ago

But then they remove great features like Tab Groups because it's "too expensive to maintain them". I would actually pay them to maintain this feature indefinitely, I'm sure others will as well.

kuschku 11y ago
It’s not "removed", it’s "moved into an extension".
joonoro 11y ago
This is the first I've heard about Tab Groups being removed and that makes me sad. However the comments in the bug tracker [0] make it sound like it isn't about the money. They also have a migration plan for existing users to back up their data and move on to an extension [1]. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550 [1] https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
sangnoir 11y ago
> I would actually pay them to maintain this feature indefinitely, I'm sure others will as well If you are not paying for it, you are the prod... oops, wrong browser vendor! /s Seriously though, I know there are trade-offs to consider, but some of the technical decisions being made for Firefox make me wonder what they were thinking (case in point: Pocket). Too bad most Firefox forks tend to wither over time.

1024core 11y ago

> In 2014, that deal accounted for most of the nonprofit organization's $330 million in revenue, according to financial results just now released for that year Wow, that's a lot of cash. What are the top expenditures of Mozilla?

eps 11y ago
Enforcement of fun and tolerant atmosphere at the office, obviously.
bzbarsky 11y ago
https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... page 6 says that the $318 million in expenses in 2014 broke down like so: $40 million "branding and marketing" $38 million "general and administrative" $10 million depreciation $13 million "program services" (whatever that is) $213 million "software development" Note that this is not counting income taxes (another $2.5 million) as an expense, because this is basically the "how much taxable profit is there?" calculation. Nate that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation claims Mozilla has "1000+" employees; if that claim is true I would expect $200+ million just for salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, office space, etc (obviously depending on where the employees are located).
jldugger 11y ago
The fuckloads of money it takes to promote Firefox and keep (more) people from using Chrome instead.

iSnow 11y ago

It pains me to say, but I'd rather Mozilla used all their man-power to fix the god-awful performance of desktop Firefox. Granted, I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. But I fail to understand why that leads to such a dramatic slow-down after having the browser open for a day or two. If I type text, it will appear with a delay of up to 20s - on a 16GB computer where a lot of RAM is free. And with only uBlock. Something in the core of Firefox is completely rotten.

polymatter 11y ago
perhaps its flash? I keep having the same problem and I suspect flash
- realusername 11y ago
  Definitely flash, especially on Linux, just moving it to 'click to play' is making the browser much much faster.
  - FreeFull 11y ago
    I think it's 'click to play' by default now.
- iSnow 11y ago
  No, I have Flash disabled, both on Windows and on MacOS. Developer tools are a resource drain, but bearable - the browser simply gets slower after a couple of hours of use. And then much slower, like unbearably slow, even the developer edition where I don't have uBlock or any script/flash/adblocker installed.
wutbrodo 11y ago
> I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. 20 tabs is shockingly low for causing performance problems, especially that severe and _especially_ on a computer with freaking 16 GB of RAM. I abuse tabs pretty badly on Chrome: on my 16 GB workstation I'd have a few hundred open, many of them for weeks at a time, and on my 8 GB laptop, I usually have up to 100, and I rarely get performance problems, certainly never to that degree. I was one of the late-switchers to Chrome because there were some Firefox features I enjoyed, but the garbage performance finally forced my hand back in 2009/10 or whatever. I periodically check back with Firefox out of a healthy sense of wanting to be aware of alternatives, but it consistently fails at what's perhaps the most important to me: performance.

atmosx 11y ago

<OT> I like how the article references twitter quotes: "We're going where the users are going," </OT>

zmmmmm 11y ago

I feel like Mozilla ought to be banking / investing a large slice of their revenue and aiming to live off the profits. They need to turn themselves into a self funded foundation that truly needs money from no one. They definitely shouldn't get used to rivers of gold flowing in, especially as their market share keeps falling.

richardboegli 11y ago

Well if Firefox doesn't want it, I might go and ask for some :P

Patronus_Charm 11y ago

Firefox is my second favorite browser behind Safari. I am actually glad they got that albatross off their back.

joeblau 11y ago

While this might be true, I don't think this needed to be said out loud. Statements like this always have a way of turning into "famous last words" sometime down the line.

bitmapbrother 11y ago

>Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More So you're just reliant on Yahoo/Bing money now.

wpietri 11y ago
Sure, they're reliant on money. But since they have multiple options, then they're no longer reliant on Google money. It's a big step forward for them.

z3t4 11y ago

So who types in URL's or use bookmarks!?