Re:Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would y...
by account42 on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @06:20AM
(#30345126)
> The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.
Firefox is owned by the Mozilla foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it since having developers work directly for the foundation is apparently complicated. Non-profit foundations don't need to find ways to make money with their core product and they should not try to - instead they can seek funding elsewhere, for example from donations and government grants.
Re:Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would y...
by GekkePrutser on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @08:39PM
(#30355362)
No the corporation was founded because having a major corporation like Google pay so much to a foundation was difficult for tax reasons.
But it did push them over the edge IMO. They're behaving like a corporation now, with a CEO pulling as much money as they can, too much PR etc. Through the Google deal they have become what they were fighting. But they're not very good at it, hence the low marketshare.
I agree they probably didn't need to invent rust: that was an happy accident, the kind of things that happen when you have really smart people around. If they had a money making accident we would be talking about something else, but I guess they would need a different type of culture for that to happen.
This is not how you run a company and it shows. It's impressive Mozilla is still around if you ask me - but I suspect it has to do with Google, M$ needing someone easily controllable to keep the anti monopoly government people away from browsers.