It's amazing that there's such a massive amount of money even for having ~10% market share and declining.
Given how many people are clamoring for something like what Firefox used to be, you'd really think someone would step in to make a really first-rate browser. One could even be forgiven for using existing engines (Webkit, Blink, V8, etc), so long as the UI were exceptional. Instead, all of the Webkit frontends are barely usable at all (Midori, Vivaldi, etc.)
The lack of serious competition in the browser market is quite unsettling.
I've just noticed a tendency for these Firefox discussions to completely ignore SeaMonkey.
It also takes a lot of work (not just userchrome.css hacks, but outright extracting omni.ja(r) [and its intentionally corrupt header that prevents most tools from being able to extract it], hacking at the XUL layout, etc) to make it look even remotely like it belongs in 2015 (the default is right out of 1995.)
And then there's quite a few serious limitations. The cookie manager is all but impossible to use, there is no web inspector (required to use Adblock well these days), no network debugger tools (great for writing/debugging web servers), fullscreen controls don't work at all, etc.
That said, SeaMonkey's probably my best shot going forward. I keep trying to switch to Chrome, but it's just so darned inflexible.
Cookie manager works fine for me.
For the development stuff, I use Firebug.
15% of 3 billion is still 450 million, which is a lot of users.
In addition, a web browser is pretty easy to monetize because it's the entry point for the web. The default search engine has the lion share but there are other revenue streams (like non-default search engine, for ex. Amazon, the unfamous pocket button...)
From the number you said, they're monetizing less than $1 per user per year, and actually I think it's a bit low. It may be due to them not monetizing on European users where they have a strong market share (about 22%).
Is there any major corner of software with competition as healthy as the browser market?
A browser is just the most complicated piece of software that there is.
But I fail to see why we can't have a full-featured browser front-end that uses Webkit, V8, etc as libraries. We have a lot of these projects, but they are always very spartan on feature-set, portability, extensibility, etc. It's almost always a team of 1-5 hobbyists, instead of a serious team of full-time employees. At $30m per 1% of the market, there's a whole lot of money to be made.
Just make it look like a native app on each major OS (Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD), let me move all the toolbar buttons around, let me put my tabs where I want them, let me load my ad blocker and script injector, don't spy on me, don't pack it full of adware, and I'm a happy camper.
The reason, to my mind, is simple: unless your underlying technology is better, there's little reason why users should choose your fork over the engine's official skin, which is always going to have better integration, will be first to get new features, gets security updates first, etc.
1) There aren't more competitors 2) A subgroup of them hasn't agreed to a conformant subset of HTML/Javascript/CSS and stuck to it
I believe Wikipedia runs entirely off as a Foundation, but I think they have attracted enough fund to support development and operation.
EDIT: Typo
In other words, if every Firefox user paid $1/year, donations would more than surpass the amount that Mozilla makes from Yahoo.
I don't think every user is going to pay $1, no, but just to put that into perspective, it's not a prohibitive sum of money.
EDIT $1, not $5: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/
Assuming that every user would donate is wildly off-target. I'm sure Mozilla could raise respectable numbers too, but I'm not convinced this is what we should focus on to get things to change.
I'm not sure what point you're refuting, since the original post says:
> I don't think every user is going to pay $1
The comparison is an illustration of the average donation necessary per user, not a prediction that every user will donate the mean amount.
As noted below, Wikipedia raises that amount because that's what they need. They could easily raise more if they wanted or needed to.
Mozilla already does have a donation drive; the question we're discussing is whether it would be beneficial (and practical) for Firefox to shift its business model to rely more heavily on user donations.
Currently, Mozilla does not raise more because they don't need to - it's not their primary source of funding, and so they're not as aggressive with their donation campaign as they could be.
As a comparison, the EFF received only $13 million in annual donations according to their last annual report: https://www.eff.org/document/fiscal-year-2013-14-audited-fin...
The EFF is hardly a relevant comparison. Most Firefox users have no idea what the EFF is, but most Firefox users do know what Firefox is. (And even if they don't, and just know Firefox as "the Internet", as some users don't understand what a browser is, it's still a lot easier to tell them what Firefox is and why it's important than to explain to them the work the EFF does and why that's important.
I am not speculating here; I am speaking as someone who donates to both Mozilla and the EFF and reminds his non-tech friends and family each December to do the same.
The challenge with getting a critical mass of Firefox users to donate is not in convincing users that their web browser is worth ~10¢/month, but in the friction required to get them to make a payment the first time[1].
[1] (This is the exact challenge that basically every non-profit ever has faced with recurring donations. Some are better at solving it than others.)
How much does Wikipedia (something normal people actually care about) raise?
(That's the Wikimedia Foundation and does not include the local chapters such as Wikimédia France.)
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895755,-122.3886589,3a,75y,...
On a different note .. devoted Mozilla web browser user here since 2003. I forget what it was called prior to Firefox.
(user since Phoenix 0.1 here :)
[0] I'm interpreting "software development" as "salaries".
On the other hand, "software development" probably includes non-salary costs like offices, hardware, payroll taxes, and whatnot.
Anyway, in terms of comparisons to other companies the usual estimates I've seen put the cost of an employee to the employer at somewhere around 2x salary. So employing 500 good software developers will probably run you at least $100 million. If they're mostly in the Bay Area, probably a good bit more; even starting salaries there are over $100k for strong just-out-of-college hires last I checked.
This is a fool's errand. Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...
The sum total of the proposed public donations to Mozilla will be off by an order of magnitude or two. And there's no reason to believe that public donations will change Mozilla's bizarre course of actions such as forced Pocket integration, or lack of any U2F support.