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It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.
by jqpabc123 1y ago
It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future
Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.
- olalonde 1y agoWhat do you mean? Doesn't most of Mozilla's revenue come from Firefox?
- ObscureScience 1y agoHow do you think Firefox is making money, since it has no payed features? Hint: it has Google search as the default search engine.
- olalonde 1y agoThat's my point... The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. If you follow the money, it doesn't make sense for them to neglect Firefox.
- jqpabc123 1y agoThe fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. You obviously haven't been following the money. The statistical global marketshare of Firefox is very close to that of Internet Explorer --- within a single rounding digit. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoFirefox users just block trackers, that's why you don't see them.
- thoroughburro 1y agoNo. Check Mozilla’s own numbers if you don’t believe tracking stats. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
- drsnow 1y agoFirefox users also tend to disable telemetry and any kind of phoning home whatsoever.
- jqpabc123 1y agoPossible perhaps --- but definitely not easy and thus highly unlikely on a broad scale. And this is by design. The most *easy* and sustainable way to achieve this is by using a fork of Firefox --- aka LibreWolf. https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...
- konart 1y agoTops make goods money as is. All they need to do is to keep Fx the way it is. And Google won't be paying more if Firefox becomes something bigger than Chrome. Google has no interest in it. All they need is a spoiler effect.
- 0x000xca0xfe 1y ago> The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google This is not reflected in the numbers, at least from what I've found: 300m/year in 2011[1], 400+m/year in 2020[2], 485m/year in 2025[3]. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1543269/google-to-pay-mozilla-300m-yearly-in-new-search-deal-says-report.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1543269/google-to-pay-... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go... [3] https://nerdschalk.com/85-of-mozillas-revenue-at-risk-firefoxs-survival-threatened-by-potential-loss-of-google-search-deal/ https://nerdschalk.com/85-of-mozillas-revenue-at-risk-firefo...
- DoctorOetker 1y agoIs mozilla being rewarded if the user base provably falls?
- kaoD 1y agoGoogle does not need Mozilla to have a sizable market share. They just need it as a semblance of competition in the browser space.
- lioeters 1y agoI can't believe how this is common knowledge, this arrangement between Google and Mozilla as a weak and incompetent "competitor" propped up to avoid being accused of monopoly and anti-competitive practice. Why isn't it considered a form of fraud, not even with extra steps - a direct relationship. Maybe there's enough plausible deniability that it's hard to prove criminal intent. In the browser space, what Apple is doing is awfully manipulative of the market too. It's almost like this situation is being willfully ignored and effectively encouraged by regulators.
- thoroughburro 1y agoYou’re the one who didn’t follow the money: they’ve made more from Google as their market share has decreased. Neat incentive, huh?
- atoav 1y agoNope it comes from Google.
- sirwhinesalot 1y agoMozilla is basically paid by Google to have a multi-platform non-Blink browser around they can point to when accused of being a monopoly. Having a quality browser is not required, merely it existing. So why waste money on novel web engine experiments when you can have AI conferences in Zambia?
- jqpabc123 1y agoLiving large and loving life --- by selling out.
- nextaccountic 1y agoI think people are implying that Google told Mozilla to drop Servo, to make sure Firefox wouldn't leapfrog Chrome. And since Google funds Mozilla almost entirely, Mozilla had to comply. Almost no technical aspect of Firefox have anything to do with how much money Google pays them.
- camdroidw 1y agoIt's wrong to name names without prood but after a point you start doubting your understanding of the world and at this point I'm beginning to suspect Mitchell Baker is a plant
- bobajeff 1y agoI think without Mitchell Baker there would probably not have been a Mozilla. I'm fuzzy on the history but I believe she was the lawyer who originally set up the organization.
- badsectoracula 1y agoAFAIK she also wrote the MPL, but the thing is, people change and doing good stuff 30 years ago doesn't mean they'd keep doing good stuff decades later. In any case it doesn't really matter much anymore since apparently she left Mozilla around February.
- Gualdrapo 1y agoI still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.
- johnisgood 1y agoBecause Mozilla benefits from Google's donations (the majority comes from Google), and being a counterpoint to Google's Chrome is bad for Google, which means less or no donations to Mozilla. Google holds the key here. They have leverage over Mozilla.
- fhd2 1y agoThey don't get donations from Google, but get paid to include Google as the default search engine, right? No important difference though. Mozilla tried to switch to Yahoo a few years back and backpedaled. In terms of what users expect, they don't have a lot of options. Google OTOH could do without the users Firefox has left. And I've personally observed Google strong arm "partners". Not sure I see a conspiracy here, but I'm pretty sure that if Google asks for concessions, Mozilla will see what they can do.
- johnisgood 1y agoYou are right, it is not a "donation", more like a business arrangement or something. I am not sure it is limited to "be the default search engine" though.
- LtdJorge 1y agoIt is
- f311a 1y agoWebKit is a nice competitor, too. Look at Orion browser, it's a pretty decent competitor. Although they only target macOS, WebKit can be used on Windows and Linux, too.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoThe string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time. Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top. That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.
- xpe 1y agoA lot of things look like incompetence at a distance, but get really fascinating up close. Does anyone know care to share what they know about the particular personalities, drives, and visions?
- jqpabc123 1y agoThat would be pure incompetence from the top For which they are compensated very well. It just doesn't make sense does it?
- nicoburns 1y agoNo, but it's not mozilla-specific. It's true of almost every large corporation.
- bornfreddy 1y agoThe way this world is going, you shouldn't attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice.
- xpe 1y agoThe end of Pocket is just another sad example. As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.
- paulryanrogers 1y agoStrange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.
- Octoth0rpe 1y agoEven if you dislike Pocket, its purchase/deprecation is an example of Mozilla failing to effectively use its capital.
- windsurfer 1y agoThey integrated Pocket as a proprietary service in their open source product 2 years before Mozilla acquired it. Removing the integration required editing about:config. The complaints were mostly during that time.
- chimeracoder 1y ago> Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people. They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear that no data was sent to a third party unless you explicitly clicked it and went through the steps to set it up. Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party, so Mozilla decided to buy Firefox in an attempt to put those complaints to rest, since it would no longer be a third party. In the end, those purists didn't stop complaining - they just moved on to different complaints. If you're curious to see for yourself, you can look up the conversations on HN and cross-reference the usernames against other topics involving OSS purism and Firefox. In the end, everyone lost: longtime Pocket users lost a product that they had enjoyed because it got acquired by a company that never really had an active interest in the product itself, Firefox lost because of the negative PR which contributes to their declining market share, and Mozilla lost because of the massive waste of money this was.
- Certhas 1y agoI think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by 100M+ per year. They are not yet in striking distance to truly become independent, but they are making significant steps in that direction. The share of Google money in their revenue went from 90% in 2020 to 75% in 2023. I don't think following the money actually shows what you think it does. As a postscript: Damned if they do, damned if they don't. There were plenty of people at the time arguing that Firefox maintaining one independent browser engine was idiotic and they should just switch to Chromium like everyone else. People like to lambast Mozilla over relatively minor advocacy spending stuff and cry that it should just focus on Firefox, but insist it should have obviously continued with Servo. Even though Servo probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference to Firefox post Quantum for a very long time.
- skinkestek 1y agoThe majority of Mozilla’s revenue came through Firefox—their flagship product and by far their most recognized project. And yet, somehow, they still struggle to secure adequate funding for Firefox itself, while millions are allocated to executive salaries and various advocacy initiatives.
- lesuorac 1y agoAt what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income? Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).
- cropcirclbureau 1y agoEvery day I login into Hacker News. Every day, I see Mozilla FUD.