4 ms·

I've seen a lot of criticism of Mozilla in these parts, some more fair than others. (Adtech = bad, regardless of whether you call it privacy preserving. CEO pay

I've seen a lot of criticism of Mozilla in these parts, some more fair than others. (Adtech = bad, regardless of whether you call it privacy preserving. CEO pay, not as bad as people say but don't love it.) But the notion that a trillion dollar platform company dictating web standards and Firefox are two sides of the same coin is, by my lights, the singularly most spectacular failure of comprehension that's been wrought by this era of Mozilla skepticism. It's not exactly a big lie because the people saying it seem to sincerely believe it but it's comparably disastrous as a test of information literacy.

tracker1 1y ago
Mozilla was sitting on a chest of cash that could have funded engineering efforts for decades. Instead they decided to inflate managers and marketers in an effort to expand market/mindshare and follow that with needs for ever increasing funding drives to fund lavish parties and events on the marketing side, while shuttering engineering efforts and even laying off swaths of engineering talent. That doesn't even touch some of the more salient political movements or failure after failure to spin the brands off into something more/different for profit motives. Mozilla needs to restructure as an engineering focused organization where business operations, marketting and brand management are not steering the ship.
- roryirvine 1y ago
  Are non-profits in the US allowed to hoard cash long-term? In the UK, spending on furthering their charitable purpose is expected to roughly match income over the medium term. There are carve-outs for specific types of "permanent endowment" (and even there, spending is meant to match the investment income) but it wouldn't cover anything like Mozilla's commercial agreement with Google.
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    Mozilla has already hoarded well over a billion. A billion would pay a sizable development team of experts for quite a while. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
    - roryirvine 1y ago
      But the Mozilla Foundation's purpose is "protect and improve the Internet as a public resource, open and accessible to all". It's not clear to me why that requires a sizeable team of developers - surely they'd be better off working for MoCo (the commercial subsidiary who make the browser and who provide a large portion of the MoFo's income)? MoFo's activities are centred on philanthropy and advocacy. You'd expect most of their staff to be experts in things like community engagement, policy research and development, grant-making, campaign strategy, volunteer welfare, reporting & transparency, and management of investments. Sure, there'll be some engineering needed to support that, but it shouldn't be their core focus.
      - yencabulator 1y ago
        You're arguing the stated purpose of the current system, I'm arguing we'd actually benefit more from refocusing it into software (like it used to be). And that's the stated purpose. The observed current purpose of the system is to make a small handful of people more rich.
        roryirvine 1y ago
        The MoCo/MoFo split happened for a reason: a non-profit couldn't do the big commercial deals that became available to MoCo. If you went back to the pre-2005 situation, in which MoFo was all there was, it would have at most low single-digit millions in the bank rather than a billion. The AOL dowry was only intended to last a couple of years, and there's simply no way it could have sustained development of the browser beyond that. The Phoenix would have been consumed by the flames, and we'd be left with a stagnant IE/Chrome duopoly.
        yencabulator 1y ago
        Let's try this: 1. most of the money comes from Google Search placement in the browser 2. most of the money is NOT used on the browser
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    Worth noting that Mozilla Corporation (which I believe is the entity that has the contract with Google) is a for-profit organisation wholely owned by Mozilla Foundation which is the non-profit. In theory, it feels like that ought not to change anything regarding the legal situation, but I bet it does.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Are you sure that you have your numbers right? It seems pretty common in the hn comment section for people to come in and randomly claim that Mozilla either spent all of their money or are losing all of their money. But the last figure I saw for their cash and investments was around $1.2 billion from late 2022, and everything I can find on their data spanning from the 2010s through the 2020s through today is that it's been a steady trend line up. They had $91 million in 2009. 105 million and 2010, $193 million by the end of 2011, $372 million by the end of 2015, and I don't have every number for every year, but it all seems to indicate a steady upward trend. I'm not sure how to look at those data and interpret them as squandering of cash and those are pretty specific claims that I would hope could be articulated in a clear cause and effect way if they were true.
heavyset_go 1y ago
There's some serious Mozilla Derangement Syndrome in online spaces, I see it on Reddit, too. A lot of people seem to want to hold them to standards they hold no other company to, some discontents seem to be driven into a frothing rage by some of CEOs uh.. traits? too.
- glenstein 1y ago
  I feel like I just want to keep a running list of the most egregious criticisms, or alternatively write an article along the lines of "Mozilla Criticisms, Ranked by Sanity". Some are fair! But many aren't. But it may help temper MDS to put it all in one place.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    I'd do it myself, but I don't want to put a target on my back that will attract the internet's most tedious pedants.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  I think a lot of the people who remember Phoenix and were part of the push to install Firefox and unseat IE are very sour about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing. That and the whole Eich debacle.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    >about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing. I don't know if you ever saw the movie Dark City, but one aspect of the plot was that everyone thought they knew the way to Shell Beach, but could never actually tell you how to get there if you asked [0]: >Murdoch learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which everyone knows, though no one remembers how to get there and Murdoch's attempts to visit fail. And, look at this thread! 90% of the time it's young adults with no financial literacy misinterpreting non-profit filings. Which, again, it's not to say there's no issues. Adtech is bad. CEO pay is bad-ish. But most of the time the best anyone can manage is sweet nothings like "you know... all the... stuff they're doing!" It's filed away in the Shell Beach part of their brains. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)

tracker1 1y ago

Mozilla was sitting on a chest of cash that could have funded engineering efforts for decades. Instead they decided to inflate managers and marketers in an effort to expand market/mindshare and follow that with needs for ever increasing funding drives to fund lavish parties and events on the marketing side, while shuttering engineering efforts and even laying off swaths of engineering talent. That doesn't even touch some of the more salient political movements or failure after failure to spin the brands off into something more/different for profit motives. Mozilla needs to restructure as an engineering focused organization where business operations, marketting and brand management are not steering the ship.

roryirvine 1y ago
Are non-profits in the US allowed to hoard cash long-term? In the UK, spending on furthering their charitable purpose is expected to roughly match income over the medium term. There are carve-outs for specific types of "permanent endowment" (and even there, spending is meant to match the investment income) but it wouldn't cover anything like Mozilla's commercial agreement with Google.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Mozilla has already hoarded well over a billion. A billion would pay a sizable development team of experts for quite a while. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
  - roryirvine 1y ago
    But the Mozilla Foundation's purpose is "protect and improve the Internet as a public resource, open and accessible to all". It's not clear to me why that requires a sizeable team of developers - surely they'd be better off working for MoCo (the commercial subsidiary who make the browser and who provide a large portion of the MoFo's income)? MoFo's activities are centred on philanthropy and advocacy. You'd expect most of their staff to be experts in things like community engagement, policy research and development, grant-making, campaign strategy, volunteer welfare, reporting & transparency, and management of investments. Sure, there'll be some engineering needed to support that, but it shouldn't be their core focus.
    - yencabulator 1y ago
      You're arguing the stated purpose of the current system, I'm arguing we'd actually benefit more from refocusing it into software (like it used to be). And that's the stated purpose. The observed current purpose of the system is to make a small handful of people more rich.
      - roryirvine 1y ago
        The MoCo/MoFo split happened for a reason: a non-profit couldn't do the big commercial deals that became available to MoCo. If you went back to the pre-2005 situation, in which MoFo was all there was, it would have at most low single-digit millions in the bank rather than a billion. The AOL dowry was only intended to last a couple of years, and there's simply no way it could have sustained development of the browser beyond that. The Phoenix would have been consumed by the flames, and we'd be left with a stagnant IE/Chrome duopoly.
        yencabulator 1y ago
        Let's try this: 1. most of the money comes from Google Search placement in the browser 2. most of the money is NOT used on the browser
- nicoburns 1y ago
  Worth noting that Mozilla Corporation (which I believe is the entity that has the contract with Google) is a for-profit organisation wholely owned by Mozilla Foundation which is the non-profit. In theory, it feels like that ought not to change anything regarding the legal situation, but I bet it does.
glenstein 1y ago
Are you sure that you have your numbers right? It seems pretty common in the hn comment section for people to come in and randomly claim that Mozilla either spent all of their money or are losing all of their money. But the last figure I saw for their cash and investments was around $1.2 billion from late 2022, and everything I can find on their data spanning from the 2010s through the 2020s through today is that it's been a steady trend line up. They had $91 million in 2009. 105 million and 2010, $193 million by the end of 2011, $372 million by the end of 2015, and I don't have every number for every year, but it all seems to indicate a steady upward trend. I'm not sure how to look at those data and interpret them as squandering of cash and those are pretty specific claims that I would hope could be articulated in a clear cause and effect way if they were true.

heavyset_go 1y ago

There's some serious Mozilla Derangement Syndrome in online spaces, I see it on Reddit, too. A lot of people seem to want to hold them to standards they hold no other company to, some discontents seem to be driven into a frothing rage by some of CEOs uh.. traits? too.

glenstein 1y ago
I feel like I just want to keep a running list of the most egregious criticisms, or alternatively write an article along the lines of "Mozilla Criticisms, Ranked by Sanity". Some are fair! But many aren't. But it may help temper MDS to put it all in one place.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  I'd do it myself, but I don't want to put a target on my back that will attract the internet's most tedious pedants.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
I think a lot of the people who remember Phoenix and were part of the push to install Firefox and unseat IE are very sour about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing. That and the whole Eich debacle.
- glenstein 1y ago
  >about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing. I don't know if you ever saw the movie Dark City, but one aspect of the plot was that everyone thought they knew the way to Shell Beach, but could never actually tell you how to get there if you asked [0]: >Murdoch learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which everyone knows, though no one remembers how to get there and Murdoch's attempts to visit fail. And, look at this thread! 90% of the time it's young adults with no financial literacy misinterpreting non-profit filings. Which, again, it's not to say there's no issues. Adtech is bad. CEO pay is bad-ish. But most of the time the best anyone can manage is sweet nothings like "you know... all the... stuff they're doing!" It's filed away in the Shell Beach part of their brains. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)