5 ms·

> I think it’s a good idea to donate money to Mozilla to reduce the dependence on Yahoo This is a fool's errand. Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million: ht

by tshtf 11y ago

> I think it’s a good idea to donate money to Mozilla to reduce the dependence on Yahoo This is a fool's errand. Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... The sum total of the proposed public donations to Mozilla will be off by an order of magnitude or two. And there's no reason to believe that public donations will change Mozilla's bizarre course of actions such as forced Pocket integration, or lack of any U2F support.

brandon272 11y ago
Thanks for the link. It would have never occurred to me than Mozilla spends $320M a year.
- jms703 11y ago
  Salaries.
  - riffraff 11y ago
    That appears to account for 210k of the 320k[0]. I wonder how it compares with similarly sized enterprises (~1000 employees). [0] I'm interpreting "software development" as "salaries".
    - bzbarsky 11y ago
      Note that "salaries" would include some of the marketing budget too, right? On the other hand, "software development" probably includes non-salary costs like offices, hardware, payroll taxes, and whatnot. Anyway, in terms of comparisons to other companies the usual estimates I've seen put the cost of an employee to the employer at somewhere around 2x salary. So employing 500 good software developers will probably run you at least $100 million. If they're mostly in the Bay Area, probably a good bit more; even starting salaries there are over $100k for strong just-out-of-college hires last I checked.
- Animats 11y ago
  Have you seen their new San Francisco headquarters, on the waterfront at the Bay Bridge?[1] Wow. What a location. Who gets the corner office? [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895755,-122.3886589,3a,75y,261.43h,86.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1suHVOyXTibJ5hBZ-Hlw66ww!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895755,-122.3886589,3a,75y,...
  - LargeCompanies 11y ago
    WoW right on the Embarcadero, that can't be cheap! On a different note .. devoted Mozilla web browser user here since 2003. I forget what it was called prior to Firefox.
    - mst 11y ago
      Phoenix, then Firebird. (user since Phoenix 0.1 here :)
      - 0x4a42 11y ago
        Netscape Communicator / Navigator. ;)
        mst 11y ago
        No, user of firefox since. I was using Netscape in '89 or so but that doesn't count.
byuu 11y ago
> Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million It's amazing that there's such a massive amount of money even for having ~10% market share and declining. Given how many people are clamoring for something like what Firefox used to be, you'd really think someone would step in to make a really first-rate browser. One could even be forgiven for using existing engines (Webkit, Blink, V8, etc), so long as the UI were exceptional. Instead, all of the Webkit frontends are barely usable at all (Midori, Vivaldi, etc.) The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.
- Svip 11y ago
  If people want something conservative, why don't they try SeaMonkey? That's still run by Mozilla and under active development. I've just noticed a tendency for these Firefox discussions to completely ignore SeaMonkey.
  - byuu 11y ago
    I like SeaMonkey a lot, but I'm quite worried about its long-term health. They've had a lot of trouble building new releases lately. It also takes a lot of work (not just userchrome.css hacks, but outright extracting omni.ja(r) [and its intentionally corrupt header that prevents most tools from being able to extract it], hacking at the XUL layout, etc) to make it look even remotely like it belongs in 2015 (the default is right out of 1995.) And then there's quite a few serious limitations. The cookie manager is all but impossible to use, there is no web inspector (required to use Adblock well these days), no network debugger tools (great for writing/debugging web servers), fullscreen controls don't work at all, etc. That said, SeaMonkey's probably my best shot going forward. I keep trying to switch to Chrome, but it's just so darned inflexible.
    - vsync 11y ago
      I have no idea what you're on about with what decade it looks like it belongs in. Cookie manager works fine for me. For the development stuff, I use Firebug.
- 11y ago
cadecairos 11y ago
Donations to Mozilla don't fund Firefox development, they go to the non-profit foundation, which uses the money for things like open news, open science, policy work, etc.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  If you have enough steady donation you can close Mozilla Corp which was created initially to handle business contracts with Google and a few other early business partners. Although Mozilla has many contributors, most of the bulk works are still completed by full time employees. I believe Wikipedia runs entirely off as a Foundation, but I think they have attracted enough fund to support development and operation.
  - cardamomo 11y ago
    Perhaps it's easier for the general public to see the value in Wikipedia. The convenience, breadth, and availability of this resource as a repository of knowledge have never been rivaled. That's simply not the case with browsers. In recent memory, there have always been options, albeit meager at times, so the perceived cost of losing one browser may be significantly less. EDIT: Typo
chimeracoder 11y ago
> Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million In other words, if every Firefox user paid $1/year, donations would more than surpass the amount that Mozilla makes from Yahoo. I don't think every user is going to pay $1, no, but just to put that into perspective, it's not a prohibitive sum of money. EDIT $1, not $5: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/
- tshtf 11y ago
  It is. As a comparison, the EFF received only $13 million in annual donations according to their last annual report: https://www.eff.org/document/fiscal-year-2013-14-audited-financial-statement https://www.eff.org/document/fiscal-year-2013-14-audited-fin...
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > As a comparison, the EFF received only $13 million in annual donations The EFF is hardly a relevant comparison. Most Firefox users have no idea what the EFF is, but most Firefox users do know what Firefox is. (And even if they don't, and just know Firefox as "the Internet", as some users don't understand what a browser is, it's still a lot easier to tell them what Firefox is and why it's important than to explain to them the work the EFF does and why that's important. I am not speculating here; I am speaking as someone who donates to both Mozilla and the EFF and reminds his non-tech friends and family each December to do the same. The challenge with getting a critical mass of Firefox users to donate is not in convincing users that their web browser is worth ~10¢/month, but in the friction required to get them to make a payment the first time[1]. [1] (This is the exact challenge that basically every non-profit ever has faced with recurring donations. Some are better at solving it than others.)
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    Normal people do not care about the EFF and have no idea what it is. What EFF products does your grandma use? How much does Wikipedia (something normal people actually care about) raise?

by tshtf 11y ago

brandon272 11y ago

Thanks for the link. It would have never occurred to me than Mozilla spends $320M a year.

jms703 11y ago
Salaries.
- riffraff 11y ago
  That appears to account for 210k of the 320k[0]. I wonder how it compares with similarly sized enterprises (~1000 employees). [0] I'm interpreting "software development" as "salaries".
  - bzbarsky 11y ago
    Note that "salaries" would include some of the marketing budget too, right? On the other hand, "software development" probably includes non-salary costs like offices, hardware, payroll taxes, and whatnot. Anyway, in terms of comparisons to other companies the usual estimates I've seen put the cost of an employee to the employer at somewhere around 2x salary. So employing 500 good software developers will probably run you at least $100 million. If they're mostly in the Bay Area, probably a good bit more; even starting salaries there are over $100k for strong just-out-of-college hires last I checked.
Animats 11y ago
Have you seen their new San Francisco headquarters, on the waterfront at the Bay Bridge?[1] Wow. What a location. Who gets the corner office? [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895755,-122.3886589,3a,75y,261.43h,86.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1suHVOyXTibJ5hBZ-Hlw66ww!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895755,-122.3886589,3a,75y,...
- LargeCompanies 11y ago
  WoW right on the Embarcadero, that can't be cheap! On a different note .. devoted Mozilla web browser user here since 2003. I forget what it was called prior to Firefox.
  - mst 11y ago
    Phoenix, then Firebird. (user since Phoenix 0.1 here :)
    - 0x4a42 11y ago
      Netscape Communicator / Navigator. ;)
      - mst 11y ago
        No, user of firefox since. I was using Netscape in '89 or so but that doesn't count.

byuu 11y ago

> Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million It's amazing that there's such a massive amount of money even for having ~10% market share and declining. Given how many people are clamoring for something like what Firefox used to be, you'd really think someone would step in to make a really first-rate browser. One could even be forgiven for using existing engines (Webkit, Blink, V8, etc), so long as the UI were exceptional. Instead, all of the Webkit frontends are barely usable at all (Midori, Vivaldi, etc.) The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.

Svip 11y ago
If people want something conservative, why don't they try SeaMonkey? That's still run by Mozilla and under active development. I've just noticed a tendency for these Firefox discussions to completely ignore SeaMonkey.
- byuu 11y ago
  I like SeaMonkey a lot, but I'm quite worried about its long-term health. They've had a lot of trouble building new releases lately. It also takes a lot of work (not just userchrome.css hacks, but outright extracting omni.ja(r) [and its intentionally corrupt header that prevents most tools from being able to extract it], hacking at the XUL layout, etc) to make it look even remotely like it belongs in 2015 (the default is right out of 1995.) And then there's quite a few serious limitations. The cookie manager is all but impossible to use, there is no web inspector (required to use Adblock well these days), no network debugger tools (great for writing/debugging web servers), fullscreen controls don't work at all, etc. That said, SeaMonkey's probably my best shot going forward. I keep trying to switch to Chrome, but it's just so darned inflexible.
  - vsync 11y ago
    I have no idea what you're on about with what decade it looks like it belongs in. Cookie manager works fine for me. For the development stuff, I use Firebug.
11y ago

cadecairos 11y ago

Donations to Mozilla don't fund Firefox development, they go to the non-profit foundation, which uses the money for things like open news, open science, policy work, etc.

yeukhon 11y ago
If you have enough steady donation you can close Mozilla Corp which was created initially to handle business contracts with Google and a few other early business partners. Although Mozilla has many contributors, most of the bulk works are still completed by full time employees. I believe Wikipedia runs entirely off as a Foundation, but I think they have attracted enough fund to support development and operation.
- cardamomo 11y ago
  Perhaps it's easier for the general public to see the value in Wikipedia. The convenience, breadth, and availability of this resource as a repository of knowledge have never been rivaled. That's simply not the case with browsers. In recent memory, there have always been options, albeit meager at times, so the perceived cost of losing one browser may be significantly less. EDIT: Typo

chimeracoder 11y ago

> Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million In other words, if every Firefox user paid $1/year, donations would more than surpass the amount that Mozilla makes from Yahoo. I don't think every user is going to pay $1, no, but just to put that into perspective, it's not a prohibitive sum of money. EDIT $1, not $5: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/

tshtf 11y ago
It is. As a comparison, the EFF received only $13 million in annual donations according to their last annual report: https://www.eff.org/document/fiscal-year-2013-14-audited-financial-statement https://www.eff.org/document/fiscal-year-2013-14-audited-fin...
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > As a comparison, the EFF received only $13 million in annual donations The EFF is hardly a relevant comparison. Most Firefox users have no idea what the EFF is, but most Firefox users do know what Firefox is. (And even if they don't, and just know Firefox as "the Internet", as some users don't understand what a browser is, it's still a lot easier to tell them what Firefox is and why it's important than to explain to them the work the EFF does and why that's important. I am not speculating here; I am speaking as someone who donates to both Mozilla and the EFF and reminds his non-tech friends and family each December to do the same. The challenge with getting a critical mass of Firefox users to donate is not in convincing users that their web browser is worth ~10¢/month, but in the friction required to get them to make a payment the first time[1]. [1] (This is the exact challenge that basically every non-profit ever has faced with recurring donations. Some are better at solving it than others.)
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  Normal people do not care about the EFF and have no idea what it is. What EFF products does your grandma use? How much does Wikipedia (something normal people actually care about) raise?