4 ms·

The eternal HN cycle. "I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google" (Mozilla tries to branch out so that they're less dependent on Go

The eternal HN cycle. "I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google" (Mozilla tries to branch out so that they're less dependent on Google) "I wish Mozilla would just stick to Firefox" (Mozilla tries to find a non-Google revenue source for Firefox) "How dare they try to monetize Firefox, the one and only product I want them to produce."

soderfoo 3y ago
Was just thinking the same thing! It would be nice if those critical of Mozilla offered solutions. I agree with alot of the points raised, but I also empathize with the tough position Mozilla is in. I know squat about product management and would love to hear some knowledgeable input.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  I've never made the exact criticisms above but I've got the solution. Taking the money from Google is fine. Stop spending it all. The CEO doesn't need an inflated salary, Mozilla is not a tech giant. Mozilla doesn't need pristine expensive offices in HCOL areas. Mozilla could pay a core group of engineers good salaries, work on Firefox and adjacent tech like servo. If they had done that and banked/invested the rest of the cash they'd have a big runway for the future. How many is core? I don't know. Not 750 though. To change course now would mean layoffs which nobody likes. But I argue they never should have hired that many folks, and to continue with that headcount is throwing good money after bad. If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100%
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    Rust was a spinoff from Mozilla. It doesn't sound very "core" to me. Mozilla have a DNA of inventing their own wheel -- XPCOM was one of them
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      Sure, maybe in my alternative universe Mozilla didn't invent rust. Or they did but it spun out faster. Or... see doesn't really matter, we don't know. And it doesn't mean they couldn't still change course and become a slimmer, Firefox focused organisation with savings in the bank.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    > If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100% The mission statement of the Mozilla Foundation is not about Firefox: > Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      So about as vague as you can get? I guess they can do whatever that like.
thayne 3y ago
I wish they had kept lockwise, and built an enterprise grade, client side encrypted password manager with it that they sold to businesses. Not only would that provide a revenue stream, it would also provide an incentive for businesses to encourage employees to use Firefox, since it has better integration with the password manager.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
I mean sure, do other stuff, just keep stuff separate. It started with pocket integration, now the sync account will be linked to other products, and soon you'll need an AI chat account to be able to save passwords in firefox. Apache can do it... want a web server? Apache webserver. Want java? Get tomcat. Data streaming? Kafka. All apache, but separate. Look at microsoft.. you need their email account just to be able to install the OS (in many cases). Look at google... get banned on youtube, lose gmail, google analytics, etc.
jchw 3y ago
I have a deep love-hate relationship with Mozilla. I want Firefox marketshare to grow, but it seems like many of the ventures that Mozilla has (like with Pocket) would just alienate the generally more technical audience that is still on Firefox. They've seemingly killed a lot of their R&D with the winding down of Servo, which is not a good sign given that they are struggling to keep up with Google technology-wise. The mess with MDN didn't send a great message either, though I don't know where that ended up. Some of Mozilla's ventures seem cool. Like Mozilla VPN seems like a win/win; it supports Mullvad, you get a reasonable service, no complaints from me. But the thing that sucks is, Mozilla clearly needs to expand and build a large business to properly support Firefox, but their avenues for doing so in an ethically reasonable way that connects with the general mission seem pretty limited. Like it would be better if they could operate leaner and more directly focused on just building a good browser, but a lot of their options for monetizing Firefox itself are absolutely terrible. Ever since the whole debacle with using Firefox Studies to advertise, I don't even use upstream Firefox anymore. I do use Thunderbird and even donate sometimes, but I'm terrified that despite being donation-driven Thunderbird will somehow start to be enshittified too as part of their strategy to try to grow at any cost. All of this signals, to me, a more general issue: it seems that maintaining a feasible mainstream web browser has become generally unsustainable.
- abnercoimbre 3y ago
  > The mess with MDN didn't send a great message either, though I don't know where that ended up. Where can I read about this? If it’s hard to link to a blog post, maybe expand on it for the curious!
  - jchw 3y ago
    Mozilla apparently had laid off the entire team that handled MDN[1]. They seem to have tried to make MDN itself a business unit, too, now with premium subscriptions and an integrated AI chat I guess. Though, I didn't really follow what happened after that, so I'm not sure what really happened and what effects it has had in the longer term. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have_laid_off_the_entire_mdn_writers_team/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have...
Aeolun 3y ago
> "I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google" God forbid they’d just make us pay for it… Give me a $10/month Firefox subscription and I’d pay it in a heartbeat. But I don’t want it to be a $10/month ‘other bizarre Mozilla projects’ subscription. Right now it’s hard to trust that any money I give them would go to a better browser.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Seconded. I'd absolutely sponsor Firefox specifically if there were a guarantee that my money were going entirely to Firefox, especially if doing so opened up access to official "low noise" builds that had all monetization, A/B testing, etc disabled.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  You know you can donate to it, right? And Mozilla gets 2% of their revenue from donation. People just don't pay for software when free alternative is available. Also if other mozilla products are profitable, then that money will go to firefox as mozilla is non profit company. Edit: Leared that you could only donate to mozilla foundation which is not the same.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    You can donate to the Mozilla Foundation, but not to Mozilla Corporation. The foundation owns the corp 100%. Gecko/Firefox developers on payroll are employed by Mozilla Corporation, which pays taxes etc. like any company.
  - infogulch 3y ago
    Actually you can't. You can donate to the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. But Firefox is owned by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation (which itself is wholly owned by the foundation). The Foundation does "other stuff" in addition to directing the Corporation to develop firefox (what exactly? it's not clear to me). It's managed like a single entity, but the org is broken up like this for some #bigcorp reason (taxes, control how profits are allocated, or some such). Not to drag on it, do business however you want, but my point is that you can't directly donate to firefox development because you have no say on how the Foundation allocates its funds. It's a bit complicated so I drew up a little diagram: 1. Mozilla Foundation (not for profit) <- Donations accepted here ├── 2. Mozilla Corporation (for profit, wholly owned by the foundation so all profit goes to the foundation) X- No donations │ └── 3. Firefox X- No donations └── 4. Other social causes (??? it's not clear) At least, that's how I understand it. Honestly I'm super curious about what the benefits of this kind of org structure are, and what objectives they optimize for. This org structure is clearly not an accident...
nfriedly 3y ago
Mozilla has gotten billions of dollars from Google - if they had stayed small and put a significant portion of that income into an endowment fund, they'd be in a much better position for the long term.
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  and people would complain that they are not funding the development of Firefox. Please realize that maintaining a competitive web runtime can't be done with a "small" team.
  - kyleee 3y ago
    How about a “lean” team instead of quibbling about “small”?
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      Sure. How many people do you think it takes? (devs, qa, 1 manager for 10 non-managers).
roenxi 3y ago
Hacker News has detected a management team that led their product from 20% of the global market to watching-the-race status. If that doesn't elicit general criticism what will? I think they're being outcompeted by Opera. The issue here is that things like socialising, search and what have you to diversify revenue would have been really interesting back in Firefox 2.0 when they had a thriving extension ecosystem. There were things like ChatZilla where there were full fledged apps being built in browser to provide social options. Mozilla killed that off when they removed the old XUL layers. They went with Google's strategy of everything being a HTML/Javascript web app. Cool I suppose but they've obsoleted themselves and there isn't an obvious way back into the game for them. They aren't competent at anything, thy're stewarding a 3rd rate product and they're wasting a lot of money. They'll struggle to do anything right under current conditions.
- Gud 3y ago
  I agree with most of what you say, except Firefox is not a third rate browser. Despite everything , Firefox is still an amazing product. I just hope the Mozilla leadership gets thrown out before they finally kill Firefox through incompetence and neglect.
- JohnTHaller 3y ago
  The old extension ecosystem is one of the reasons their performance was suffering and their market share was declining. It had declined significantly long before the decision was made to end support for XUL. Ending that support is one of the reasons Firefox's performance is competitive with Chrome again. Your take also ignores the very real anti-competitive factors Firefox is up against. Google relentlessly promoting Chrome across their web presence and paying third parties to trick end users into installing it and setting it as their default for instance: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
  - roenxi 3y ago
    It's a fair point, but what is the pitch meant to be now? "We're reskinned Chrome"? If I wanted reskinned Chrome I'd use Brave. Which in fact I do want and do use. Firefox isn't owed a market. Google have proved themselves, so far, to be better stewards of the world's browser engine than the people at Mozilla. It might have a new era in the sun one day, but right now there really isn't much of a niche for Firefox. And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. Chrome was (likely: still is) just technically better.
makeitdouble 3y ago
Are you genuinely wondering why people want their main access to the whole web to be either non commercial, or shielded from commercial interests ? The whole input behind linux was to have the central piece of computing managed by the community for the community. I'd wish something similar for the central piece of the internet.
rvba 3y ago
The problem with Mozilla is that they dont care about their core product, which lost its unique proposition for customers (add-ons and customization) and is losing market share. If any other product lost so much market share, the CEO would be removed. Also those "fun" projects are career boosters for people involved, not something that makes firefox better. It even makes it worse, since fewer resources go for firefox.

soderfoo 3y ago

Was just thinking the same thing! It would be nice if those critical of Mozilla offered solutions. I agree with alot of the points raised, but I also empathize with the tough position Mozilla is in. I know squat about product management and would love to hear some knowledgeable input.

jemmyw 3y ago
I've never made the exact criticisms above but I've got the solution. Taking the money from Google is fine. Stop spending it all. The CEO doesn't need an inflated salary, Mozilla is not a tech giant. Mozilla doesn't need pristine expensive offices in HCOL areas. Mozilla could pay a core group of engineers good salaries, work on Firefox and adjacent tech like servo. If they had done that and banked/invested the rest of the cash they'd have a big runway for the future. How many is core? I don't know. Not 750 though. To change course now would mean layoffs which nobody likes. But I argue they never should have hired that many folks, and to continue with that headcount is throwing good money after bad. If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100%
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  Rust was a spinoff from Mozilla. It doesn't sound very "core" to me. Mozilla have a DNA of inventing their own wheel -- XPCOM was one of them
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    Sure, maybe in my alternative universe Mozilla didn't invent rust. Or they did but it spun out faster. Or... see doesn't really matter, we don't know. And it doesn't mean they couldn't still change course and become a slimmer, Firefox focused organisation with savings in the bank.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  > If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100% The mission statement of the Mozilla Foundation is not about Firefox: > Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    So about as vague as you can get? I guess they can do whatever that like.

thayne 3y ago

I wish they had kept lockwise, and built an enterprise grade, client side encrypted password manager with it that they sold to businesses. Not only would that provide a revenue stream, it would also provide an incentive for businesses to encourage employees to use Firefox, since it has better integration with the password manager.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

I mean sure, do other stuff, just keep stuff separate. It started with pocket integration, now the sync account will be linked to other products, and soon you'll need an AI chat account to be able to save passwords in firefox. Apache can do it... want a web server? Apache webserver. Want java? Get tomcat. Data streaming? Kafka. All apache, but separate. Look at microsoft.. you need their email account just to be able to install the OS (in many cases). Look at google... get banned on youtube, lose gmail, google analytics, etc.

jchw 3y ago

I have a deep love-hate relationship with Mozilla. I want Firefox marketshare to grow, but it seems like many of the ventures that Mozilla has (like with Pocket) would just alienate the generally more technical audience that is still on Firefox. They've seemingly killed a lot of their R&D with the winding down of Servo, which is not a good sign given that they are struggling to keep up with Google technology-wise. The mess with MDN didn't send a great message either, though I don't know where that ended up. Some of Mozilla's ventures seem cool. Like Mozilla VPN seems like a win/win; it supports Mullvad, you get a reasonable service, no complaints from me. But the thing that sucks is, Mozilla clearly needs to expand and build a large business to properly support Firefox, but their avenues for doing so in an ethically reasonable way that connects with the general mission seem pretty limited. Like it would be better if they could operate leaner and more directly focused on just building a good browser, but a lot of their options for monetizing Firefox itself are absolutely terrible. Ever since the whole debacle with using Firefox Studies to advertise, I don't even use upstream Firefox anymore. I do use Thunderbird and even donate sometimes, but I'm terrified that despite being donation-driven Thunderbird will somehow start to be enshittified too as part of their strategy to try to grow at any cost. All of this signals, to me, a more general issue: it seems that maintaining a feasible mainstream web browser has become generally unsustainable.

abnercoimbre 3y ago
> The mess with MDN didn't send a great message either, though I don't know where that ended up. Where can I read about this? If it’s hard to link to a blog post, maybe expand on it for the curious!
- jchw 3y ago
  Mozilla apparently had laid off the entire team that handled MDN[1]. They seem to have tried to make MDN itself a business unit, too, now with premium subscriptions and an integrated AI chat I guess. Though, I didn't really follow what happened after that, so I'm not sure what really happened and what effects it has had in the longer term. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have_laid_off_the_entire_mdn_writers_team/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have...

Aeolun 3y ago

> "I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google" God forbid they’d just make us pay for it… Give me a $10/month Firefox subscription and I’d pay it in a heartbeat. But I don’t want it to be a $10/month ‘other bizarre Mozilla projects’ subscription. Right now it’s hard to trust that any money I give them would go to a better browser.

jwells89 3y ago
Seconded. I'd absolutely sponsor Firefox specifically if there were a guarantee that my money were going entirely to Firefox, especially if doing so opened up access to official "low noise" builds that had all monetization, A/B testing, etc disabled.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
You know you can donate to it, right? And Mozilla gets 2% of their revenue from donation. People just don't pay for software when free alternative is available. Also if other mozilla products are profitable, then that money will go to firefox as mozilla is non profit company. Edit: Leared that you could only donate to mozilla foundation which is not the same.
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  You can donate to the Mozilla Foundation, but not to Mozilla Corporation. The foundation owns the corp 100%. Gecko/Firefox developers on payroll are employed by Mozilla Corporation, which pays taxes etc. like any company.
- infogulch 3y ago
  Actually you can't. You can donate to the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. But Firefox is owned by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation (which itself is wholly owned by the foundation). The Foundation does "other stuff" in addition to directing the Corporation to develop firefox (what exactly? it's not clear to me). It's managed like a single entity, but the org is broken up like this for some #bigcorp reason (taxes, control how profits are allocated, or some such). Not to drag on it, do business however you want, but my point is that you can't directly donate to firefox development because you have no say on how the Foundation allocates its funds. It's a bit complicated so I drew up a little diagram: 1. Mozilla Foundation (not for profit) <- Donations accepted here ├── 2. Mozilla Corporation (for profit, wholly owned by the foundation so all profit goes to the foundation) X- No donations │ └── 3. Firefox X- No donations └── 4. Other social causes (??? it's not clear) At least, that's how I understand it. Honestly I'm super curious about what the benefits of this kind of org structure are, and what objectives they optimize for. This org structure is clearly not an accident...

nfriedly 3y ago

Mozilla has gotten billions of dollars from Google - if they had stayed small and put a significant portion of that income into an endowment fund, they'd be in a much better position for the long term.

fabrice_d 3y ago
and people would complain that they are not funding the development of Firefox. Please realize that maintaining a competitive web runtime can't be done with a "small" team.
- kyleee 3y ago
  How about a “lean” team instead of quibbling about “small”?
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Sure. How many people do you think it takes? (devs, qa, 1 manager for 10 non-managers).

roenxi 3y ago

Hacker News has detected a management team that led their product from 20% of the global market to watching-the-race status. If that doesn't elicit general criticism what will? I think they're being outcompeted by Opera. The issue here is that things like socialising, search and what have you to diversify revenue would have been really interesting back in Firefox 2.0 when they had a thriving extension ecosystem. There were things like ChatZilla where there were full fledged apps being built in browser to provide social options. Mozilla killed that off when they removed the old XUL layers. They went with Google's strategy of everything being a HTML/Javascript web app. Cool I suppose but they've obsoleted themselves and there isn't an obvious way back into the game for them. They aren't competent at anything, thy're stewarding a 3rd rate product and they're wasting a lot of money. They'll struggle to do anything right under current conditions.

Gud 3y ago
I agree with most of what you say, except Firefox is not a third rate browser. Despite everything , Firefox is still an amazing product. I just hope the Mozilla leadership gets thrown out before they finally kill Firefox through incompetence and neglect.
JohnTHaller 3y ago
The old extension ecosystem is one of the reasons their performance was suffering and their market share was declining. It had declined significantly long before the decision was made to end support for XUL. Ending that support is one of the reasons Firefox's performance is competitive with Chrome again. Your take also ignores the very real anti-competitive factors Firefox is up against. Google relentlessly promoting Chrome across their web presence and paying third parties to trick end users into installing it and setting it as their default for instance: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
- roenxi 3y ago
  It's a fair point, but what is the pitch meant to be now? "We're reskinned Chrome"? If I wanted reskinned Chrome I'd use Brave. Which in fact I do want and do use. Firefox isn't owed a market. Google have proved themselves, so far, to be better stewards of the world's browser engine than the people at Mozilla. It might have a new era in the sun one day, but right now there really isn't much of a niche for Firefox. And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. Chrome was (likely: still is) just technically better.

makeitdouble 3y ago

Are you genuinely wondering why people want their main access to the whole web to be either non commercial, or shielded from commercial interests ? The whole input behind linux was to have the central piece of computing managed by the community for the community. I'd wish something similar for the central piece of the internet.

rvba 3y ago

The problem with Mozilla is that they dont care about their core product, which lost its unique proposition for customers (add-ons and customization) and is losing market share. If any other product lost so much market share, the CEO would be removed. Also those "fun" projects are career boosters for people involved, not something that makes firefox better. It even makes it worse, since fewer resources go for firefox.