7 ms·

Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem faci

by dom96 10mo ago

Genuinely can someone with knowledge of the business explain why they aren't simply doubling down on making Firefox better? Is there an existential problem facing them that they are trying to solve by adding AI into the browser?

K0nserv 10mo ago
No knowledge of the business. But I think it's because of the underlying question that plagues Mozilla: How will that make money?
- 4gotunameagain 10mo ago
  They don't really need money. Look at Mozilla's CEO compensation for example. It was 7 million USD in 2022. Seven. Million. For ruining a bastion of the open internet. The problem is the MBAs.
  - RobotToaster 10mo ago
    It still seems obscene to me that anyone at a non-profit, that begs for donations and volunteers, makes 7 figures. (Yes it's technically a company, but it's a company owned by a non profit.)
    - pas 10mo ago
      did people ask the supervisors of the foundation what do they think about this?
  - pas 10mo ago
    multiple things can be true at once. is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track. CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad. https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/documents/ceocompensation_0.pdf https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/d... framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services. it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant. but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
    - drawfloat 10mo ago
      It's too much money for a non-profit that is failing by all possible metrics and is saying it is struggling for revenue.
      - sakompella 10mo ago
        Parallelly, it is on par for similar positions.
        int_19h 10mo ago
        Just because something bad has been normalized doesn't make it appropriate, though. You can argue that they won't find another CEO for less money. To that I would posit that they won't find another CEO from the MBA crowd for less money, but that is a feature, not a bug.
  - on_the_train 10mo ago
    It's a git repo. They don't need employees besides a few programmers
- pas 10mo ago
  it's a completely obvious "problem" -- more users are easier to monetize, even if they "simply" go the Wikipedia donations model many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff) and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
- lopis 10mo ago
  I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.
- tessierashpool9 10mo ago
  Google pays Mozilla, Mozilla has more money, Mozilla spends more money (especially in compensations to a bloated C-level), Mozilla needs more money, Google threatens with paying less, Mozilla will lube up and bend over.
major505 10mo ago
[flagged]
- arresin 10mo ago
  Money laundering? Is there evidence for that? That’s a pretty big thing to throw out there.
colesantiago 10mo ago
What does "doubling down on making Firefox better?" mean? What can Mozilla Firefox do to make their 500 million without Google?
- philipallstar 10mo ago
  They could just make less money and deprioritise non-engineering/engineering-leadership personnel.
  - lukan 10mo ago
    In short, they could become a non profit again, with a single mission - build a open source browser with the interests of its users as first priority.
    - paulryanrogers 10mo ago
      Others are trying that approach, so I guess we'll see if that's enough
      - philipallstar 10mo ago
        It's definitely enough. The problem is that any money attracts people who glom onto it and suggest interesting side avenues of spending for a "good cause" that's nothing to do with the mission of the org.
- rvba 10mo ago
  They dont need to spend millions on other products and politics for start.
austhrow743 10mo ago
Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron. By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way. [0]These will be very expensive listings should this feature become popular: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/gallery/images/2025-09-12-14-03-11-b818dd.png https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
- Krasnol 10mo ago
  Is there any prove for Googles influence on their development you outline here?
  - bluehatbrit 10mo ago
    Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue. There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
    - Krasnol 10mo ago
      Soooo...there isn't.
      - pessimizer 10mo ago
        If the plaintiff pays 500 million to the judge and the defendant goes to jail, there's no proof that the judge wouldn't have made the same decision without the 500 million. If you're a fool, you'll sneer and ask "Where's the proof?" Why would there be any proof?
concinds 10mo ago
You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying. The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.
- RobotToaster 10mo ago
  They already do monetize it, every search engine included by default paid to be there. They forcefully remove those that don't pay from existing installations without the user's permission, as they did with yandex.
- oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
  > You can't monetize a browser. You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
- rvba 10mo ago
  They dont have to. They could be lean and focus on firefox only. Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted. If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
- NothingAboutAny 10mo ago
  I'd pay $10 a month for a browser, I pay that much for music and TV shows and I spend more time in a browser. I'm sure the market doesn't agree with me but I pay more for things that are less useful.
nikanj 10mo ago
Society doesn't get improved by doing incremental work on a browser, and Mozilla's mission is to improve society
- creata 10mo ago
  Yes it does. Having a browser that truly has the user's back, without always trying to compromise the user's interests in favor of advertisers - that would be a benefit to society. I wish Firefox would be that browser.
- danaris 10mo ago
  Possibly, but that's an absurdly overbroad mission. Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody. "Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.
csin 10mo ago
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days? - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them. - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them. - They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them. - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience. - The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup. How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas. Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss. Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them. The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
- OvervCW 10mo ago
  In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default. On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
- probably_wrong 10mo ago
  How would I make Firefox better? First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3]. Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should. Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before? And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-revamp-firefoxs-android-browser-adds-450-new-extensions/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109 [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though. [4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/article/a-rebrand-and-a-call-to-action-reclaim-the-internet/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...
ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!" I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
ivanjermakov 10mo ago
Making a better product does not make a fortune in a short run. Banning ad blockers and integrating adware/spyware does.

by dom96 10mo ago

K0nserv 10mo ago

No knowledge of the business. But I think it's because of the underlying question that plagues Mozilla: How will that make money?

4gotunameagain 10mo ago
They don't really need money. Look at Mozilla's CEO compensation for example. It was 7 million USD in 2022. Seven. Million. For ruining a bastion of the open internet. The problem is the MBAs.
- RobotToaster 10mo ago
  It still seems obscene to me that anyone at a non-profit, that begs for donations and volunteers, makes 7 figures. (Yes it's technically a company, but it's a company owned by a non profit.)
  - pas 10mo ago
    did people ask the supervisors of the foundation what do they think about this?
- pas 10mo ago
  multiple things can be true at once. is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track. CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad. https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/documents/ceocompensation_0.pdf https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/d... framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services. it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant. but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
  - drawfloat 10mo ago
    It's too much money for a non-profit that is failing by all possible metrics and is saying it is struggling for revenue.
    - sakompella 10mo ago
      Parallelly, it is on par for similar positions.
      - int_19h 10mo ago
        Just because something bad has been normalized doesn't make it appropriate, though. You can argue that they won't find another CEO for less money. To that I would posit that they won't find another CEO from the MBA crowd for less money, but that is a feature, not a bug.
- on_the_train 10mo ago
  It's a git repo. They don't need employees besides a few programmers
pas 10mo ago
it's a completely obvious "problem" -- more users are easier to monetize, even if they "simply" go the Wikipedia donations model many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff) and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
lopis 10mo ago
I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.
tessierashpool9 10mo ago
Google pays Mozilla, Mozilla has more money, Mozilla spends more money (especially in compensations to a bloated C-level), Mozilla needs more money, Google threatens with paying less, Mozilla will lube up and bend over.

major505 10mo ago

[flagged]

arresin 10mo ago
Money laundering? Is there evidence for that? That’s a pretty big thing to throw out there.

colesantiago 10mo ago

What does "doubling down on making Firefox better?" mean? What can Mozilla Firefox do to make their 500 million without Google?

philipallstar 10mo ago
They could just make less money and deprioritise non-engineering/engineering-leadership personnel.
- lukan 10mo ago
  In short, they could become a non profit again, with a single mission - build a open source browser with the interests of its users as first priority.
  - paulryanrogers 10mo ago
    Others are trying that approach, so I guess we'll see if that's enough
    - philipallstar 10mo ago
      It's definitely enough. The problem is that any money attracts people who glom onto it and suggest interesting side avenues of spending for a "good cause" that's nothing to do with the mission of the org.
rvba 10mo ago
They dont need to spend millions on other products and politics for start.

austhrow743 10mo ago

Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron. By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point where no individual company makes up a majority of their revenue, it allows them to focus on their mission in a much broader way. [0]These will be very expensive listings should this feature become popular: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/gallery/images/2025-09-12-14-03-11-b818dd.png https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...

Krasnol 10mo ago
Is there any prove for Googles influence on their development you outline here?
- bluehatbrit 10mo ago
  Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue. There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
  - Krasnol 10mo ago
    Soooo...there isn't.
    - pessimizer 10mo ago
      If the plaintiff pays 500 million to the judge and the defendant goes to jail, there's no proof that the judge wouldn't have made the same decision without the 500 million. If you're a fool, you'll sneer and ask "Where's the proof?" Why would there be any proof?

concinds 10mo ago

You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying. The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.

RobotToaster 10mo ago
They already do monetize it, every search engine included by default paid to be there. They forcefully remove those that don't pay from existing installations without the user's permission, as they did with yandex.
oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
> You can't monetize a browser. You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
rvba 10mo ago
They dont have to. They could be lean and focus on firefox only. Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted. If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
NothingAboutAny 10mo ago
I'd pay $10 a month for a browser, I pay that much for music and TV shows and I spend more time in a browser. I'm sure the market doesn't agree with me but I pay more for things that are less useful.

nikanj 10mo ago

Society doesn't get improved by doing incremental work on a browser, and Mozilla's mission is to improve society

creata 10mo ago
Yes it does. Having a browser that truly has the user's back, without always trying to compromise the user's interests in favor of advertisers - that would be a benefit to society. I wish Firefox would be that browser.
danaris 10mo ago
Possibly, but that's an absurdly overbroad mission. Organizations with clear, focused missions are much more likely to be able to achieve them than organizations that want to be everything to everybody. "Make and maintain Firefox as the best browser for people who care about internet freedom, privacy, and extensibility" would be a perfectly reasonable mission.

csin 10mo ago

Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days? - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them. - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them. - They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them. - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience. - The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup. How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas. Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss. Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them. The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.

OvervCW 10mo ago
In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default. On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
probably_wrong 10mo ago
How would I make Firefox better? First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3]. Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should. Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before? And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-revamp-firefoxs-android-browser-adds-450-new-extensions/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109 [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though. [4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/article/a-rebrand-and-a-call-to-action-reclaim-the-internet/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago

I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!" I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.

ivanjermakov 10mo ago

Making a better product does not make a fortune in a short run. Banning ad blockers and integrating adware/spyware does.