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Mozilla do a lot of work besides Firefox. They have Thunderbird, Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Bugzilla, etc etc. Brooks' estimates suggest that cost of development

by CHY872 11y ago

Mozilla do a lot of work besides Firefox. They have Thunderbird, Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Bugzilla, etc etc. Brooks' estimates suggest that cost of development increases with the square of the length of the code. Likewise, a single developer should expect to achieve around 10 lines of code per day on an established codebase. This is about $45 per line of code at SV rates. Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its various projects, and this income is necessary to keep them in work. You wouldn't get $1M out of that Kickstarter. You could literally just change the default search engine and compile Firefox yourself.

lmm 11y ago
Mozilla clearly likes having all those projects, and is willing to make compromises to achieve that. Maybe you think the non-firefox work they do is valuable enough that you're ok with them auctioning off the default search engine setting (for example) to fund it. Myself, I'll stick to Konqueror. You don't need a Mozilla-sized organization or Mozilla-scale funding to make a great (IMO better than firefox in many respects) open-source browser.
byuu 11y ago
I don't really mind the default search engine all that much, personally. Not gonna lie, I use Google anyway for web search because it's the best at what it does. I do think it creates a conflict of interest when you're a privacy organization and by far your biggest customer is a company that makes all its money in the advertising business, but like you said, it's easy to turn off. I'm a lot more creeped out by the newtab tiles. Again, I know you can turn it off, and I know it's not transmitting my search history off of my PC. I don't think that makes it okay, though. I don't want code on my PC that's designed to analyze my behavior to push products on me. I know I'm in the minority here, but I'd be willing to pay some money for a light, configurable, sensible browser like Firefox 4 but with modern HTML5/CSS3/etc support. It'd have to run on FreeBSD and be open source, of course.
sangnoir 11y ago
> Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its various projects, and this income is necessary to keep them in work. Here's a thought experiment - what it Mozilla spun-out a "Firefox foundation" that only worked on Firefox? How many employees & how much funding would that require? I suspect it could get by without the ads and could infact, be kick-started. Granted, this would not mesh with Mozilla's manifesto, and the other projects would die without the ad-powered money-printer that Firefox is.

by CHY872 11y ago

lmm 11y ago

Mozilla clearly likes having all those projects, and is willing to make compromises to achieve that. Maybe you think the non-firefox work they do is valuable enough that you're ok with them auctioning off the default search engine setting (for example) to fund it. Myself, I'll stick to Konqueror. You don't need a Mozilla-sized organization or Mozilla-scale funding to make a great (IMO better than firefox in many respects) open-source browser.

byuu 11y ago

I don't really mind the default search engine all that much, personally. Not gonna lie, I use Google anyway for web search because it's the best at what it does. I do think it creates a conflict of interest when you're a privacy organization and by far your biggest customer is a company that makes all its money in the advertising business, but like you said, it's easy to turn off. I'm a lot more creeped out by the newtab tiles. Again, I know you can turn it off, and I know it's not transmitting my search history off of my PC. I don't think that makes it okay, though. I don't want code on my PC that's designed to analyze my behavior to push products on me. I know I'm in the minority here, but I'd be willing to pay some money for a light, configurable, sensible browser like Firefox 4 but with modern HTML5/CSS3/etc support. It'd have to run on FreeBSD and be open source, of course.

sangnoir 11y ago

> Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its various projects, and this income is necessary to keep them in work. Here's a thought experiment - what it Mozilla spun-out a "Firefox foundation" that only worked on Firefox? How many employees & how much funding would that require? I suspect it could get by without the ads and could infact, be kick-started. Granted, this would not mesh with Mozilla's manifesto, and the other projects would die without the ad-powered money-printer that Firefox is.