5 ms·

> Hundreds of millions in revenue and probably < 0.5% of it due to its linux userbase?

by leeoniya 7y ago

vetinari 7y ago
It's not that they have huge userbase lately, so they could afford to lose it any further.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  What would you consider a huge userbase? Firefox has 230 million monthly users, using FF for an average of over 5 hours per day. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
  - vetinari 7y ago
    Given that Linux has 2% desktop market share (let's be generous) and Firefox has 10% (let's be generous the same way), that would mean that Linux has potential to be 20% of Firefox users. Is that something you are going to ignore? Many executives would sell their families for less opportunity.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      The big difference is that those executives would be getting money out of those 20% customer base. I seriously doubt that those 20% Firefox users even consider doing a $1 donation.
      - zaphirplane 7y ago
        Firefox makes money from the install base via the search engine default setting. Fairly sure more so than donations
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Might be, is there any official numbers? After all plenty also switch to other search engines.
        michaelmrose 7y ago
        Are you sure? I bet 99% just leave it configured to use google.
michaelmrose 7y ago
Linux distros tend to ship with firefox and linux users are more concerned with open source. It would be strange if the percentage of mozillas userbase using linux was smaller than the general percentage of pc users running linux. Its probably more fair to go on profit not revenue. 100 million in revenue * 2.18% is 2.2 million. A decrease of 10% of that is 220k. If engineers at mozilla are 150k then 3 months of work is aprox 38k. This would put the break even point at losing 2% of its linux users by not spending the money.
- leeoniya 7y ago
  there are a lot of assumptions in your reply. > 3 months of work according to whom? this will almost certainly need more than a single engineer's eyes on it. and even if it is 3 months, that's 3 months they don't spend working on features for 98% of their userbase. i want this to happen as much as anyone, but i just don't see the compelling math here. it's a chicken-egg problem (if FF could use VA API [1], then more might switch to linux). personally, i'm happy that Panfrost recently got mainlined. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API

> Hundreds of millions in revenue and probably < 0.5% of it due to its linux userbase?

vetinari 7y ago

It's not that they have huge userbase lately, so they could afford to lose it any further.

JohnBooty 7y ago
What would you consider a huge userbase? Firefox has 230 million monthly users, using FF for an average of over 5 hours per day. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
- vetinari 7y ago
  Given that Linux has 2% desktop market share (let's be generous) and Firefox has 10% (let's be generous the same way), that would mean that Linux has potential to be 20% of Firefox users. Is that something you are going to ignore? Many executives would sell their families for less opportunity.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    The big difference is that those executives would be getting money out of those 20% customer base. I seriously doubt that those 20% Firefox users even consider doing a $1 donation.
    - zaphirplane 7y ago
      Firefox makes money from the install base via the search engine default setting. Fairly sure more so than donations
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Might be, is there any official numbers? After all plenty also switch to other search engines.
        michaelmrose 7y ago
        Are you sure? I bet 99% just leave it configured to use google.

michaelmrose 7y ago

Linux distros tend to ship with firefox and linux users are more concerned with open source. It would be strange if the percentage of mozillas userbase using linux was smaller than the general percentage of pc users running linux. Its probably more fair to go on profit not revenue. 100 million in revenue * 2.18% is 2.2 million. A decrease of 10% of that is 220k. If engineers at mozilla are 150k then 3 months of work is aprox 38k. This would put the break even point at losing 2% of its linux users by not spending the money.

leeoniya 7y ago
there are a lot of assumptions in your reply. > 3 months of work according to whom? this will almost certainly need more than a single engineer's eyes on it. and even if it is 3 months, that's 3 months they don't spend working on features for 98% of their userbase. i want this to happen as much as anyone, but i just don't see the compelling math here. it's a chicken-egg problem (if FF could use VA API [1], then more might switch to linux). personally, i'm happy that Panfrost recently got mainlined. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API