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"...market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. [...] Meanwhile, Mozilla has flourished financially. The most recent "State of Mozilla" repo

"...market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. [...] Meanwhile, Mozilla has flourished financially. The most recent "State of Mozilla" report says that in 2016 various deals with search engines brought in an astonishing $520 million." Just a reminder that Mozilla was able to pull of an unbelievably good deal with Yahoo thanks to Marissa Mayer in November 2014, which made Mozilla winning the lottery in case Yahoo was sold afterwards before 2019. Yahoo was sold to Verizon shortly after the deal which made it possible for Mozilla to pull out of the deal unilaterally, and still getting a yearly payment until 2019 ($375 Million fixed annually, to be exact). Please tell me: Who makes a 4 year fixed deal with a browser maker that is losing 10-15% of its users annually? It does not make any sense for Mayer to do this, except if she was completely on the side of Mozilla. My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management. It is hard to overstate the deal with Yahoo. It makes Mozilla basically immune to drops in market share until 2020. The deal with switching to the Yahoo search engine (starting in 2016) was already too good to be true, as Yahoo gave Mozilla way more money than Google had done before, and Google was already paying well. The result is that for around 3 or more years now Mozilla is living inside a bubble, where basically nothing what they do has financial consequences. Not only that, they are building up enourmous amounts of financial reserves, so I think we will actually never again see Firefox innovating. When the finances finally will reflect the state of Firefox, that is when they have used up their reserves somewhere in 2021 or 2022, Firefox won't play an active role anymore. Most of the 1000+ employees will have to leave during the next 5 years. Mozilla switched back to Google with the aim of getting both the Yahoo money and additional Google money. - vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/the-ghost-of-marissa-mayer-is-still-haunting-yahoo - techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/oath-and-mozilla-are-suing-each-other-after-firefox-switches-back-to-google-search/

ianbicking 8y ago
"My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management." What would Mozilla do that it's not doing? I don't see an obvious answer to the marketshare issue (except maybe marketing). It's not that there's nothing that could be done, but what that thing is is unclear. I suppose it's true that in the face of financial insolvency management might go into a "do anything" mindset, but that's just a death spiral, it can lead to action but I don't think it helps guide correct action.
- user812 8y ago
  Google is a good example what can happen with lots of money productively. But Google, in contrast to Mozilla, has to work hard to innovate and their income is always a reflection of how good they are and they have a management with a long-term vision. Due to the fixed contract Mozilla will not feel the consequences of their actions for a very long time. You see this kind of laziness everywhere when money doesn't matter anymore. It is more or less human nature. To answer your question: It is not about marketshare. Mozilla has always said it is about values and open source, and so on. They could do something great even with 1% marketshare. Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. I think there is a slight possibility that the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 will be when you see some subtle changes to how Firefox works. Maybe they get their humility back.
  - pythonaut_16 8y ago
    You still didn't really answer what you think Mozilla should be doing with that money. (Besides vaguely hinting that they don't target power users anymore which suggests you're bitter about the switch to web extensions)
    - user812 8y ago
      Actually I am not bitter. I don't really use extensions with Firefox. I only try to give an account of general user sentiment. Of course it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of this sentiment, but I see lots of negative comments online, and lots of valid arguments. Only Mozilla can come up with ways to spend that money. I think I made it quite clear that it is first and foremost about innovation, and money is only a tool. But usually what you can do in such situation is hiring top people from the industry as leaders.
  - jamesgeck0 8y ago
    > Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. There are a number of things Mozilla is doing that are appealing to me as a power user. 1. Rust and Firefox Quantum. Mozilla has invested a herculean amount of effort into making Firefox's internals cutting edge, and we've only just started seeing it pay off. The updated CSS rendering component alone made Firefox one of the snappiest browsers, and it's going to get even faster as additional components are rewritten. 2. Firefox is going to start blocking a lot more trackers by default in the coming months; some of this is in beta, more is in nightly. Power users can already do this with extensions, but it's easier for me to recommend a browser that does it by default. 3. Mozilla is reviewing add-ons. There were a lot of complaints about this initially, but I feel safer installing things from Firefox Add-ons than I do from the Chrome Web Store. The review process isn't perfect, but it feels like it's much harder for a Firefox addon to scoop my entire browsing history and get away with it. Allowing me to disable automatic updates for individual extensions is also good; it's a second layer of protection against situations like that Sylish fiasco where an extension suddenly, silently becomes malicious. 4. Add-on APIs. The add-on situation was dire when Mozilla killed XUL extensions and switched to a Chrome-compatible format. But now they're extending it and adding all sorts of functionality for add-ons that Chrome doesn't have, again.
mjw1007 8y ago
Does anyone know what happened with the lawsuit where Yahoo/Oath were trying to get out of paying? Is it still going? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Court_Case https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Cou... ends at 2018-01-05. [edit: seems to be still going. The latest thing I can find is Mozilla on the losing end of a discovery dispute in August: http://lawzilla.com/blog/yahoo-holdings-inc-v-mozilla-corporation/ http://lawzilla.com/blog/yahoo-holdings-inc-v-mozilla-corpor... ]
- user812 8y ago
  I've read somehwere that it is about two questions: - Is Yahoo obliged to pay anything at all? If Yahoo is succesfull, Mozilla will not get anything. - Is Yahoo obliged to pay the full $375 million per year or only the difference between the new Google contract and the old Yahoo contract? In the latter case Yahoo would only have to pay Mozilla $375 million minus the Google money if they won. Unfortunately I don't know more.
Vinnl 8y ago
And yet in that same time they managed to introduce successful innovations such as Rust, and made Firefox enormously faster.

ianbicking 8y ago

"My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management." What would Mozilla do that it's not doing? I don't see an obvious answer to the marketshare issue (except maybe marketing). It's not that there's nothing that could be done, but what that thing is is unclear. I suppose it's true that in the face of financial insolvency management might go into a "do anything" mindset, but that's just a death spiral, it can lead to action but I don't think it helps guide correct action.

user812 8y ago
Google is a good example what can happen with lots of money productively. But Google, in contrast to Mozilla, has to work hard to innovate and their income is always a reflection of how good they are and they have a management with a long-term vision. Due to the fixed contract Mozilla will not feel the consequences of their actions for a very long time. You see this kind of laziness everywhere when money doesn't matter anymore. It is more or less human nature. To answer your question: It is not about marketshare. Mozilla has always said it is about values and open source, and so on. They could do something great even with 1% marketshare. Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. I think there is a slight possibility that the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 will be when you see some subtle changes to how Firefox works. Maybe they get their humility back.
- pythonaut_16 8y ago
  You still didn't really answer what you think Mozilla should be doing with that money. (Besides vaguely hinting that they don't target power users anymore which suggests you're bitter about the switch to web extensions)
  - user812 8y ago
    Actually I am not bitter. I don't really use extensions with Firefox. I only try to give an account of general user sentiment. Of course it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of this sentiment, but I see lots of negative comments online, and lots of valid arguments. Only Mozilla can come up with ways to spend that money. I think I made it quite clear that it is first and foremost about innovation, and money is only a tool. But usually what you can do in such situation is hiring top people from the industry as leaders.
- jamesgeck0 8y ago
  > Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. There are a number of things Mozilla is doing that are appealing to me as a power user. 1. Rust and Firefox Quantum. Mozilla has invested a herculean amount of effort into making Firefox's internals cutting edge, and we've only just started seeing it pay off. The updated CSS rendering component alone made Firefox one of the snappiest browsers, and it's going to get even faster as additional components are rewritten. 2. Firefox is going to start blocking a lot more trackers by default in the coming months; some of this is in beta, more is in nightly. Power users can already do this with extensions, but it's easier for me to recommend a browser that does it by default. 3. Mozilla is reviewing add-ons. There were a lot of complaints about this initially, but I feel safer installing things from Firefox Add-ons than I do from the Chrome Web Store. The review process isn't perfect, but it feels like it's much harder for a Firefox addon to scoop my entire browsing history and get away with it. Allowing me to disable automatic updates for individual extensions is also good; it's a second layer of protection against situations like that Sylish fiasco where an extension suddenly, silently becomes malicious. 4. Add-on APIs. The add-on situation was dire when Mozilla killed XUL extensions and switched to a Chrome-compatible format. But now they're extending it and adding all sorts of functionality for add-ons that Chrome doesn't have, again.

mjw1007 8y ago

Does anyone know what happened with the lawsuit where Yahoo/Oath were trying to get out of paying? Is it still going? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Court_Case https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Cou... ends at 2018-01-05. [edit: seems to be still going. The latest thing I can find is Mozilla on the losing end of a discovery dispute in August: http://lawzilla.com/blog/yahoo-holdings-inc-v-mozilla-corporation/ http://lawzilla.com/blog/yahoo-holdings-inc-v-mozilla-corpor... ]

user812 8y ago
I've read somehwere that it is about two questions: - Is Yahoo obliged to pay anything at all? If Yahoo is succesfull, Mozilla will not get anything. - Is Yahoo obliged to pay the full $375 million per year or only the difference between the new Google contract and the old Yahoo contract? In the latter case Yahoo would only have to pay Mozilla $375 million minus the Google money if they won. Unfortunately I don't know more.

Vinnl 8y ago

And yet in that same time they managed to introduce successful innovations such as Rust, and made Firefox enormously faster.