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The inability to fund Firefox development is completely baffling to me. The finances seem pretty obvious: Open up a fund for Firefox donations. Hire contractors

The inability to fund Firefox development is completely baffling to me. The finances seem pretty obvious: Open up a fund for Firefox donations. Hire contractors under the non-profit to work on Firefox. When you have enough to pay a full time developer, hire one under the non-profit. Rinse and repeat. If, as some claim, there isn't ever enough money to really fund development, fine, they've now proven that. But not even allowing it as a possibility is completely insane! I'm left in a position where I'm assured repeatedly that the best way to fund Firefox development is to pay for a side project I have no use for like Pocket or their VPN and then hope that that payment doesn't get consumed paying for said side project or future side projects. OP's thoughts were mine the day that the LBI was announced: finally there's a non-profit that is actually committed to maintaining browser diversity. It's just a pity that it's one that's starting from behind and not the existing non-profit whose browser at one point enjoyed a majority market share.

pipeline_peak 2y ago
They may be starting from behind, but a clean slate might be to their advantage. It takes a distinguished dev to jump into an old, large scale project. Firefox and Chrome definitely meets both of those factors.
llm_trw 2y ago
But how will the CEO get millions in compensation for running the browser into the ground while funding her side projects? Oh sorry, she's chairwoman of the board now, completely different.
- skissane 2y ago
  I can’t help but wonder where Firefox would be today if Brendan Eich had not been pushed out as CEO
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Mozilla was in terminal decline in 2014 so pretty much in the same place as today. You'd have to go back to 2009.
    - skissane 2y ago
      Brendan Eich might not be the perfect CEO. But still I think he would have done better than Mitchell Baker did. He's interested in technology in a way in which she isn't.
      - lern_too_spel 2y ago
        Eich wasted effort on FirefoxOS because he doesn't understand business. Now he's a cryptogrifter.
        timschmidt 2y ago
        FirefoxOS had potential to pick up the pieces from the outstanding WebOS. We could have seen continued funding for Servo as well.
        lern_too_spel 2y ago
        The business model for FirefoxOS didn't make sense, just like the business model for WebOS didn't make sense. Android was cheaper than free to put on phones because Google was willing to share search revenue with carriers. They would not have done that on a FirefoxOS phone before it reached scale, nor would Microsoft, which was pushing its own phones.
        rasz 2y ago
        Offering privacy first OS would make perfect sense.
        timschmidt 2y ago
        I don't buy it. Apple owners pay premium prices for a perception of increased safety and convenience. I feel that way about what WebOS was. There is always market space available for a device people want.
  - teg4n_ 2y ago
    is there any reason to think it wouldn’t look like Brave just with firefox instead of chromium?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Is there any reason that would be a problem? My main beef with Brave is that it's not really contributing to browser diversity.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        Yes. Brave's crypto scam is a problem, and they've done some very controversial things in that regard. Like taking "money" on behalf of sites that didn't even participate.
  - edflsafoiewq 2y ago
    I don't think the CEO matters. Their entire trajectory was probably fixed the instant Google decided to release a browser.
    - jordanb 2y ago
      Yes. The purpose of Mozilla Org, from the perspective of the people paying for it (Google), was to kill Firefox. Mitchell Baker got rewarded because she did her job.
      - gary_0 2y ago
        It's hard not to imagine Google giving a little wink as they hand over that check.
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    I don't think he would've done things differently really. He was also part of the same old guard and wasn't exactly aiming for some radical changes inside Mozilla. Imo one of the only things that could've made Firefox more relevant would've been to focus on an electron alternative, especially early on in 2013-14 as it would've been an entirely new "product segment", which could've made Firefox the standard engine for a lot of apps. But there's no indication that anyone high up at Firefox wanted to do something like that. It's a non-profit and non profits are rather conservative, for better or for worse.
    - Moomoomoo309 2y ago
      You mean positron? https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron They did try to build that, and gave up.
      - kasabali 2y ago
        They had XULRunner long before that, then of course they ditched it to pursue whatever crap they were pursuing that year. What a great vision.
      - mardifoufs 2y ago
        Yeah I heard about it, but I don't know why they gave up. There's a lot of stuff that could be done to improve on electron (especially back then), and Mozilla was in a nice position where they controlled their web engine (as opposed to electron), so they could've made a very solid product... anyways that's not happening now... Edit: okay from what I understand in the blog, one of the reasons for abandoning it was that it was hard to keep up with the electron API changes and keep it compatible. That just goes to show that they were completely outplayed early on, otherwise they wouldn't have had to play catch up by merely being an electron shell around Spider monkey... >But Tofino is dead (long live the Browser Futures Group!), and Electron compatibility isn’t essential for a viable Gecko runtime. It’s also hard, since Electron has a large API surface area, is a moving target, requires Node.js integration (itself a moving target), and is designed for Chromium’s process architecture, which is substantially different from Firefox’s.
    - 2y ago
dtx1 2y ago
Money is not the Problem with firefox https://preview.redd.it/r9q69xop8n6d1.png?auto=webp&s=59a1d3c98d0f3f8e7cb457a6b374dea58d889048 https://preview.redd.it/r9q69xop8n6d1.png?auto=webp&s=59a1d3...
- heinrich5991 2y ago
  This diagram should be zero-aligned at the very least.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  This is misleading. Firefox does not have a CEO, Mozilla does. The Mozilla CEO/chairperson is responsible for many more projects than just increasing the market share of Firefox — whether nerds on Hacker News think that’s what Mozilla should be doing or not is another conversation.
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    Sure, but their main project still is Firefox, by far. That's the project that has the most impact too. How successful are they with their side projects, anyways?
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      > That's the project that has the most impact too. How do you measure impact? If it's income created for Mozilla Corp then I agree it's impactful too, and the CEO's pay does seem justified. > How successful are they with their side projects, anyways? Honestly I don't know, I haven't looked at their latest annual report. I do pay for Mozilla VPN, although I'm not a Firefox user.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        $75 million per year from subscriptions and ads, according to their latest report (2022 for some reason). Another commenter did some quick math to try to prove that donations were fruitless and found that Firefox could reasonably expect to replace that revenue with a donation box: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901664 So in other words: the side projects aren't successful enough to justify not accepting donations.
shusaku 2y ago
Donations are a way to buy influence. Just wait until they receive a generous donation from M. Soft.
- lolinder 2y ago
  And that situation would be worse than the current one, where 80% of their revenue comes from their only serious competitor?
- mozman 2y ago
  Their primary “donation” is Google. They’re focused on virtue signaling values instead of real work. It’s a fantasy land. I was there for awhile.
PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago
I would imagine that there is caution about becoming beholden to user donations to continue operations. Such a situation would give users a measure of effective voting power in the development of the browser.
- lolinder 2y ago
  If you were starting a project from scratch I could see that as a valid concern, but the current world is one where 80% of the funds to pay for Firefox comes from Google. No one can seriously argue that becoming beholden to your users is a worse situation than becoming beholden to your primary competitor.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >No one can seriously argue that becoming beholden to your users is a worse situation than becoming beholden to your primary competitor. The C-level execs getting their salaries off that Google money can!
    - immibis 2y ago
      Hypothesis: They are paid (by Google) to keep Firefox unpopular.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        I don't think so, but close. I think they're indirectly paid by Google to keep Firefox around as a token competitor for antitrust purposes. I'm sure that's what the "search deal" is really about. Because Google already owns the search market, they don't have to pay for it. However with falling marketshare there comes a point that when that won't fool regulators anymore. And then there's no point for Google to keep paying.
  - PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago
    I would present that situation as evidence that the "competition" isn't really a serious one. But perhaps I am ignorant.
kazinator 2y ago
> The inability to fund Firefox development is completely baffling to me. It's hard to imagine that it's for a reason other than "Google wants it that way".
fabrice_d 2y ago
You can fund Firefox by pooling money and pay a developer or a company like Igalia to implement a feature you want. It's not trivial, but given the number of people on HN that claim they would pitch in, someone should really try that.
- sdk- 2y ago
  Folks on HN are good to talk the talk but not really to walk the walk. Not only they could give to developers or company like Igalia but they could also get a Firefox Relay/VPN subscription. They don't even need to use it and their money is going to be 100% profit for MoCo. Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser. It's way more complicated than creating yet another chrome skin.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > their money is going to be 100% profit for MoCo If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it. > Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser. People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for?
    - sdk- 2y ago
      > If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it. Fair enough. They publish their annual financial report but it isn't splitted per project so it's hard to know for a fact with the public information we have access to. However, it isn't unreasonable to think that at the very least a percentage of the smaller products revenues are reinjected elsewhere in the organization (e.g Firefox) since the goal seems to be to diversify their income sources. > People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for? It's been tried over and over in the FOSS community. Few projects are able to get decent money with donations (e.g. Thunderbird). However, it's nowhere near the complexity of a web browser. For example, Thunderbird made almost $7M (USD) in 2023 for an average of $20 per donation which is 350k users out of 20M monthly active users [1]. Firefox has 10 times that number of users so we could estimate that they'd make $70M/year. That's far from $500M/year they're doing right now. [1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
wakawaka28 2y ago
Mozilla isn't incapable of funding Firefox. It's just that they get most of their funding from Google, and thus they will never be allowed to break free or dominate the browser market again. That is, unless Google gets out of the browser business, which will probably never happen.
philistine 2y ago
There must be some sort of cultural virus attached to Firefox that it has to make money as a commercial entity. Firefox was born from Netscape, a for-profit closed-source project, and while they lost the closed-source aspect of it, the executive class at Mozilla don't want to give up the for-profit segment.
udev4096 2y ago
Yeah, only if the Mozilla foundation was run by the engineers

pipeline_peak 2y ago

They may be starting from behind, but a clean slate might be to their advantage. It takes a distinguished dev to jump into an old, large scale project. Firefox and Chrome definitely meets both of those factors.

llm_trw 2y ago

But how will the CEO get millions in compensation for running the browser into the ground while funding her side projects? Oh sorry, she's chairwoman of the board now, completely different.

skissane 2y ago
I can’t help but wonder where Firefox would be today if Brendan Eich had not been pushed out as CEO
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Mozilla was in terminal decline in 2014 so pretty much in the same place as today. You'd have to go back to 2009.
  - skissane 2y ago
    Brendan Eich might not be the perfect CEO. But still I think he would have done better than Mitchell Baker did. He's interested in technology in a way in which she isn't.
    - lern_too_spel 2y ago
      Eich wasted effort on FirefoxOS because he doesn't understand business. Now he's a cryptogrifter.
      - timschmidt 2y ago
        FirefoxOS had potential to pick up the pieces from the outstanding WebOS. We could have seen continued funding for Servo as well.
        lern_too_spel 2y ago
        The business model for FirefoxOS didn't make sense, just like the business model for WebOS didn't make sense. Android was cheaper than free to put on phones because Google was willing to share search revenue with carriers. They would not have done that on a FirefoxOS phone before it reached scale, nor would Microsoft, which was pushing its own phones.
        rasz 2y ago
        Offering privacy first OS would make perfect sense.
        timschmidt 2y ago
        I don't buy it. Apple owners pay premium prices for a perception of increased safety and convenience. I feel that way about what WebOS was. There is always market space available for a device people want.
- teg4n_ 2y ago
  is there any reason to think it wouldn’t look like Brave just with firefox instead of chromium?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Is there any reason that would be a problem? My main beef with Brave is that it's not really contributing to browser diversity.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Yes. Brave's crypto scam is a problem, and they've done some very controversial things in that regard. Like taking "money" on behalf of sites that didn't even participate.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  I don't think the CEO matters. Their entire trajectory was probably fixed the instant Google decided to release a browser.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    Yes. The purpose of Mozilla Org, from the perspective of the people paying for it (Google), was to kill Firefox. Mitchell Baker got rewarded because she did her job.
    - gary_0 2y ago
      It's hard not to imagine Google giving a little wink as they hand over that check.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  I don't think he would've done things differently really. He was also part of the same old guard and wasn't exactly aiming for some radical changes inside Mozilla. Imo one of the only things that could've made Firefox more relevant would've been to focus on an electron alternative, especially early on in 2013-14 as it would've been an entirely new "product segment", which could've made Firefox the standard engine for a lot of apps. But there's no indication that anyone high up at Firefox wanted to do something like that. It's a non-profit and non profits are rather conservative, for better or for worse.
  - Moomoomoo309 2y ago
    You mean positron? https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron They did try to build that, and gave up.
    - kasabali 2y ago
      They had XULRunner long before that, then of course they ditched it to pursue whatever crap they were pursuing that year. What a great vision.
    - mardifoufs 2y ago
      Yeah I heard about it, but I don't know why they gave up. There's a lot of stuff that could be done to improve on electron (especially back then), and Mozilla was in a nice position where they controlled their web engine (as opposed to electron), so they could've made a very solid product... anyways that's not happening now... Edit: okay from what I understand in the blog, one of the reasons for abandoning it was that it was hard to keep up with the electron API changes and keep it compatible. That just goes to show that they were completely outplayed early on, otherwise they wouldn't have had to play catch up by merely being an electron shell around Spider monkey... >But Tofino is dead (long live the Browser Futures Group!), and Electron compatibility isn’t essential for a viable Gecko runtime. It’s also hard, since Electron has a large API surface area, is a moving target, requires Node.js integration (itself a moving target), and is designed for Chromium’s process architecture, which is substantially different from Firefox’s.
  - 2y ago

dtx1 2y ago

Money is not the Problem with firefox https://preview.redd.it/r9q69xop8n6d1.png?auto=webp&s=59a1d3c98d0f3f8e7cb457a6b374dea58d889048 https://preview.redd.it/r9q69xop8n6d1.png?auto=webp&s=59a1d3...

heinrich5991 2y ago
This diagram should be zero-aligned at the very least.
nozzlegear 2y ago
This is misleading. Firefox does not have a CEO, Mozilla does. The Mozilla CEO/chairperson is responsible for many more projects than just increasing the market share of Firefox — whether nerds on Hacker News think that’s what Mozilla should be doing or not is another conversation.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Sure, but their main project still is Firefox, by far. That's the project that has the most impact too. How successful are they with their side projects, anyways?
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    > That's the project that has the most impact too. How do you measure impact? If it's income created for Mozilla Corp then I agree it's impactful too, and the CEO's pay does seem justified. > How successful are they with their side projects, anyways? Honestly I don't know, I haven't looked at their latest annual report. I do pay for Mozilla VPN, although I'm not a Firefox user.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      $75 million per year from subscriptions and ads, according to their latest report (2022 for some reason). Another commenter did some quick math to try to prove that donations were fruitless and found that Firefox could reasonably expect to replace that revenue with a donation box: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901664 So in other words: the side projects aren't successful enough to justify not accepting donations.

shusaku 2y ago

Donations are a way to buy influence. Just wait until they receive a generous donation from M. Soft.

lolinder 2y ago
And that situation would be worse than the current one, where 80% of their revenue comes from their only serious competitor?
mozman 2y ago
Their primary “donation” is Google. They’re focused on virtue signaling values instead of real work. It’s a fantasy land. I was there for awhile.

PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago

I would imagine that there is caution about becoming beholden to user donations to continue operations. Such a situation would give users a measure of effective voting power in the development of the browser.

lolinder 2y ago
If you were starting a project from scratch I could see that as a valid concern, but the current world is one where 80% of the funds to pay for Firefox comes from Google. No one can seriously argue that becoming beholden to your users is a worse situation than becoming beholden to your primary competitor.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >No one can seriously argue that becoming beholden to your users is a worse situation than becoming beholden to your primary competitor. The C-level execs getting their salaries off that Google money can!
  - immibis 2y ago
    Hypothesis: They are paid (by Google) to keep Firefox unpopular.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      I don't think so, but close. I think they're indirectly paid by Google to keep Firefox around as a token competitor for antitrust purposes. I'm sure that's what the "search deal" is really about. Because Google already owns the search market, they don't have to pay for it. However with falling marketshare there comes a point that when that won't fool regulators anymore. And then there's no point for Google to keep paying.
- PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago
  I would present that situation as evidence that the "competition" isn't really a serious one. But perhaps I am ignorant.

kazinator 2y ago

> The inability to fund Firefox development is completely baffling to me. It's hard to imagine that it's for a reason other than "Google wants it that way".

fabrice_d 2y ago

You can fund Firefox by pooling money and pay a developer or a company like Igalia to implement a feature you want. It's not trivial, but given the number of people on HN that claim they would pitch in, someone should really try that.

sdk- 2y ago
Folks on HN are good to talk the talk but not really to walk the walk. Not only they could give to developers or company like Igalia but they could also get a Firefox Relay/VPN subscription. They don't even need to use it and their money is going to be 100% profit for MoCo. Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser. It's way more complicated than creating yet another chrome skin.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > their money is going to be 100% profit for MoCo If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it. > Also, if we are realistic, the total money in donation that Mozilla could get would probably represent a drop in the ocean compared to their annual budget and the amount of money you need to develop a (complete) browser. People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for?
  - sdk- 2y ago
    > If you can provide a citation for this claim I'd get a subscription today. I don't pay for their side projects because I don't want them to take it as a signal of demand for VPNs, but if it's truly 100% profit I'd be willing to risk it. Fair enough. They publish their annual financial report but it isn't splitted per project so it's hard to know for a fact with the public information we have access to. However, it isn't unreasonable to think that at the very least a percentage of the smaller products revenues are reinjected elsewhere in the organization (e.g Firefox) since the goal seems to be to diversify their income sources. > People keep saying this, but given that it's never been tried you have no proof. And even if it were, what harm is there in opening up one more option for those of us who want to be really clear about what we're paying for? It's been tried over and over in the FOSS community. Few projects are able to get decent money with donations (e.g. Thunderbird). However, it's nowhere near the complexity of a web browser. For example, Thunderbird made almost $7M (USD) in 2023 for an average of $20 per donation which is 350k users out of 20M monthly active users [1]. Firefox has 10 times that number of users so we could estimate that they'd make $70M/year. That's far from $500M/year they're doing right now. [1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

wakawaka28 2y ago

Mozilla isn't incapable of funding Firefox. It's just that they get most of their funding from Google, and thus they will never be allowed to break free or dominate the browser market again. That is, unless Google gets out of the browser business, which will probably never happen.

philistine 2y ago

There must be some sort of cultural virus attached to Firefox that it has to make money as a commercial entity. Firefox was born from Netscape, a for-profit closed-source project, and while they lost the closed-source aspect of it, the executive class at Mozilla don't want to give up the for-profit segment.

udev4096 2y ago

Yeah, only if the Mozilla foundation was run by the engineers