If they cannot succeed in making Firefox better, the problem is bigger than I thought. So basically, they’ll try to gain income from other sources, because they have given up on increasing the Firefox market share, and anticipate losing the revenue that comes with it?

> If they cannot succeed in making Firefox better

They can make Firefox better, and have been doing that a lot. The problem is - it doesn't make the users to come. Google, Apple, Microsoft - all own platforms that people use, and they heavily push the users towards their own browsers.

I think that point is not as big as you think it is. Remember how big Firefox was back in the day? This was despite Microsoft pushing IE and bundling it with Windows.

Users nowadays have been conditioned that it’s perfectly normal to download Chrome after installing Windows / buying a new computer. If Google can do this, why not Mozilla?

> If Google can do this, why not Mozilla?

I think you are having a very selective memory. Since day one, Google put Chrome ads everywhere including on the Google home page when you are visiting from Firefox and there is no way to permanently disable them.

If you are aware of a similiar marketing outreach that Mozilla could do I'm sure they would love to hear about it!

What Google did - and does - should land them in some seriously hot anti-trust water. But they'll get away with it, just as Microsoft got away with it. "This is not the monopoly you are looking for...".

I still don't get the concept of antitrust suits with browsers. Unless the system literally prevents you from installing a competing browser, you can always just go and download the competing browser and use it. Theres nothing stopping you from doing that, where's the monopoly power here?

Microsoft bundling Windows with IE, and Google using their search dominance to promote Chrome. That’s anti-competitive behavior right there, abusing your monopoly in one area to extend it to another.

> Unless the system literally prevents you from installing a competing browser, you can always just go and download the competing browser and use it.

Not if the company providing the competing browser goes out of business and stops offering it.

That's really what antitrust regulation is for: to prevent one dominant company from killing all their competitors. Once that happens, the dominant company has no more pressure to succeed and their product stagnates, harming everyone.

Browsers are actually a great example of this; despite the government prosecution, Microsoft succeeded in killing off Netscape and then had the entire browser market to themselves. The result was IE6 and "made for Internet Explorer", a horrible mess that took years to clean up.

The idea is that to use soft power you got from x to push product y is not great for the users as y should compete on its own in a meritocracy.

But it’s not really how the world works though as bigger companies use this soft power for everything, which is why I have stocks in FANG and it just keeps going up and up.

It’s a bit like Atlassian, no one is happy with Jira by itself but they do have the whole package.

They didn’t start the ads on day one. Their first big push was the TV ad:

https://slate.com/technology/2009/05/google-s-first-ever-tv-...

The “try Chrome” ads for other browsers didn’t start for a while later after that IIRC.

Firefox was big because the alternative was dysfunctional.

Mozilla cannot really competitively compete with Chrome on features, not for long. Anything new they put out that can pull in a meaningful usershare increase will be replicated by Google. And all the niche features they want to push (privacy et al) aren't going to cause major market swings.

Firefox circa 2004 was dominating because IE was a steaming pile of garbage and Apple had no market share at the time. If you wanted a usable browser it was your only option and even then they were still a minority to the installed by default broken trash.

> They can make Firefox better, and have been doing that a lot. The problem is - it doesn't make the users to come. Google, Apple, Microsoft - all own platforms that people use, and they heavily push the users towards their own browsers.

So what? History has shown that users happily switch to a different browser if it is better. The Mozilla Corporation should know this, as they were the ones making people switch from IE to FF a decade ago. And they were competing against a preinstalled browser!

"Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed"

Aka the browser will no longer bring them any money to sustain themselves. It's sad but we're basically seeing a chromium near-monopoly coming.

Not renewed yet or will not be renewed?

Yet

I don't think they've given up on it - they're still making pretty big technical changes. But they would be daft to bet that they will somehow manage to win back significant market share from Chrome, given the resources Google can put into it.

But if they’re not betting on winning market share from Chrome, then what are they doing that’s worth betting on?

From my perspective, the Chrome monoculture is one of the largest threats of the Internet right now, and I don’t see how Mozilla could be relevant without challenging that.

But I guess this goes back to Mozilla the corporation, rather than Mozilla the non-profit org. They want to maintain some form of independence, at the cost of making bit bets.

To take one example, Mozilla's 'privacy not included' guides. They rate hardware and software products for privacy protections. This is a topic that people care about in the abstract but couldn't easily make concrete decisions on. You may disagree with how they do it, but it's definitely relevant.

I get the feeling from this thread that some people think the only conceivable purpose of Mozilla is to maintain an independent browser, and if they can't do that they may as well shut down. Mozilla sees itself in a larger role of supporting a healthy internet, and kind of has to think about what else that might mean besides an independent browser.

> I get the feeling from this thread that some people think the only conceivable purpose of Mozilla is to maintain an independent browser, and if they can't do that they may as well shut down

This is exactly how I feel about Mozilla indeed. Their only relevance to me is their browser, I don’t care much about the rest. If a “privacy not included guide” is the best example of other value they add, this strongly confirms it from my point of view.

Perhaps the disconnect is that Mozilla's goals are not just the bits you care about. If all you're saying is that they should double down on Firefox and ignore everything else because that's what you want, that's not a very interesting argument.

Even if you believe Firefox is the only goal, though... Mozilla needs money to develop it. Despite all the technical effort that's gone into it in recent years, Firefox is still losing marketshare. Maybe there's some killer feature that will turn it around. But so far tracking protection doesn't seem to have done it, and there's not that many other features that Google can't copy. So if you still want Firefox to be useful in 10 years, there's a real chance it will be need to be subsidised by something like Mozilla VPN.

> If all you're saying is that they should double down on Firefox and ignore everything else because that's what you want, that's not a very interesting argument.

I started this discussion with the point that I’m not donating to Mozilla, because I don’t want my donations to go to their other projects. Mozilla is of course free to do with their resources what they want, it’s just that they should not be expecting my support in that case.

I personally prefer to fund established projects and developers with donations, I just don’t consider Mozilla very good at starting new projects. I want to fund and support Firefox and that’s it, and there’s currently no way to do so. And with that, comes my criticism of how they are using their resources that I can fund.

Precisely. All they would have to do is to allow you to earmark your funds 'Just for FireFox' and to pinky swear they would not commingle that with their general pot for pet projects.

But it is set up exactly in the contrary manner, without much in terms of any guarantees about what the budgetary division will be leaving FireFox as the collector but not the recipient of the bulk of those funds. Imagine where FireFox would be if not for all those non-starter projects and products that drain resources make it to launch and then get axed quietly 3 months later.