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> None of the "alternative" browser companies today built upon Gecko or forked Firefox itself, because _it's really hard to maintain a browser engine_. What we

by zrm 5y ago

> None of the "alternative" browser companies today built upon Gecko or forked Firefox itself, because _it's really hard to maintain a browser engine_. What we really need isn't a fork. It's for someone to do the same deal of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder, but then commit to using all of the money for promoting and improving the browser instead of all the non-Firefox things Mozilla does with it. Then the extent of the fork is to change the browser name and the search engine link and all the improvements go back to upstream Firefox instead of having to maintain an independent one. But when it gets out that someone is doing this, who isn't going to want the one which is actually funding the browser and is otherwise identical? In time the "fork" could become the dominant contributor to Firefox and just take over. Or convince Mozilla to commit to doing the same thing to make them go away.

Yoric 5y ago
> It's for someone to do the same deal of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder, but then commit to using all of the money for promoting and improving the browser instead of all the non-Firefox things Mozilla does with it. That's a really, really minor part of the costs of Mozilla. Most of the money, by far, is spent paying engineering, design and marketing.
- zrm 5y ago
  It would be nice if there was some way to know that, but the browser is developed by Mozilla Corporation, which is a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation and not a public company so as far as I can tell it has no published budget. Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation that does have published financial statements spends millions on all kinds of not-Firefox things. Including the money it gets as donations from people who think they're donating to fund Firefox and the money it gets from the for-profit Mozilla Corporation that actually does develop Firefox and should be using the money for that instead.
  - Yoric 5y ago
    Well, last time I checked (which was before the recent layoffs) Mozilla Corp had around 1,000 employees, most of whom were working either on technology or around technology (i.e. I'm including designers, support, end-user research, managers) and a revenue of ~800 M$. I'd be really surprised if the budget per employee (including salary and employer taxes) was below 300 k$ per annum. That's already close to half of the revenue. I won't try to guesstimate operating costs, but Mozilla needs to rent plenty of cloud computing power for both CI (heck, Mozilla pretty much invented Continuous Integration), Telemetry, Sync, Accounts, MDN, ... Offices in Silicon Valley and around the world (several of which have closed in recent years) can't be cheap, either. I also seem to remember that Mozilla had marketing campaigns that cost dozens of millions of dollars. Pretty cheap in comparison to what e.g. Google can afford, but less so for a smaller company. I realize that there's lots of guesses here, but I believe that my earlier claim makes definite sense.

by zrm 5y ago

Yoric 5y ago

> It's for someone to do the same deal of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder, but then commit to using all of the money for promoting and improving the browser instead of all the non-Firefox things Mozilla does with it. That's a really, really minor part of the costs of Mozilla. Most of the money, by far, is spent paying engineering, design and marketing.

zrm 5y ago
It would be nice if there was some way to know that, but the browser is developed by Mozilla Corporation, which is a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation and not a public company so as far as I can tell it has no published budget. Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation that does have published financial statements spends millions on all kinds of not-Firefox things. Including the money it gets as donations from people who think they're donating to fund Firefox and the money it gets from the for-profit Mozilla Corporation that actually does develop Firefox and should be using the money for that instead.
- Yoric 5y ago
  Well, last time I checked (which was before the recent layoffs) Mozilla Corp had around 1,000 employees, most of whom were working either on technology or around technology (i.e. I'm including designers, support, end-user research, managers) and a revenue of ~800 M$. I'd be really surprised if the budget per employee (including salary and employer taxes) was below 300 k$ per annum. That's already close to half of the revenue. I won't try to guesstimate operating costs, but Mozilla needs to rent plenty of cloud computing power for both CI (heck, Mozilla pretty much invented Continuous Integration), Telemetry, Sync, Accounts, MDN, ... Offices in Silicon Valley and around the world (several of which have closed in recent years) can't be cheap, either. I also seem to remember that Mozilla had marketing campaigns that cost dozens of millions of dollars. Pretty cheap in comparison to what e.g. Google can afford, but less so for a smaller company. I realize that there's lots of guesses here, but I believe that my earlier claim makes definite sense.