For starters Mozilla could operate with a much smaller footprint, much less projects in parallel and less vanity projects. That would reduce the amount of money required by a lot, which is the big problem in the first place.

Developing a browser isn't easy and requires a few teams of developers, but in 2020 it spent 242 million dollars in software development costs, 137 million dollars in administrative costs and 37 million dollars in marketing and branding costs. I don't live in a lala land where I think you can develop a browser for free, but I think we can all agree that you don't need to spend this amount of money on it either. Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost? Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser?

In terms of funding, they got 440 million dollars from royalties (what they get from setting default search engines on their browser) and 25 million dollars in subscription revenue (Pocket and VPN subscriptions type things - products they actually sell).

Now, can you develop a browser on 25 million dollars per year? Maybe it's cutting it short, but for sure there could be a strategy to invest more on this side of the equation to phase out the need to be Google's bitch in a more intentional way.

Source: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...

> Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost?

100-200 developers probably roughly costs on the order of 25-50 million a year (assuming a made up number of 250k fully loaded cost with benefits and taxes, which might be lower or higher than their average, idk. This number seems almost too conservative to my gut). From this back of the envelope math, I don't think the royalties business is enough to support the development cost alone.

> Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser?

If you don't want them to leave to work on safari or chrome, probably? This experiment was more or less tried by opera, right?

Brave gets away with a lot lower overhead by bascially piggybacking off chrome. Opera similarly gave up selling their own browser engine and cut their development teams while switching to another wrapper on blink. Firefox could become yet another skinning of blink and chrome code, but it's not clear to me how that's helping them with being "Google's bitch in a more intentional way".

I think there are problems with Mozilla's side project expenditures, there is definitely some bloat, and they have had some expensive failures like Firefox phone. However I don't think Mozilla could have survived without Google's funding and people vastly underestimate how expensive quality software is.

>Brave gets away with a lot lower overhead by bascially piggybacking off chrome

Chromium get contributions from a few big companies, why couldn't Mozilla create a "contributor community group" something like Java has? Oracle keeps control over Java but there is a democratic process on what gets into Java/JDK. At some point Samsung was contributing to servo when it still was experimental.

> why couldn't Mozilla create a "contributor community group" something like Java has?

Mozilla regularly accepts code from unpaid community members and has since its inception.

>Mozilla regularly accepts code from unpaid community members and has since its inception.

Yes, so it Java and Google and Microsoft... you're still missing the point I made there. Make Servo a cross-company product serving more than just Firefox. More companies contribute to it, lower costs of development.

There's good developers living in regions where 50k is a really excellent salary. Even 100k. I agree with the parent poster that SF salaries are crazy for a product like this.

Even 100k salary is like 130k with benefits and taxes, so 200 developers takes out 26 million, above the subscription revenue without counting for any overhead like infrastructure, ops and administration. And below 100k, I think you will struggle to hire enough with the skills you need, browser dev is hairy and hard, and you are competing against an extremely well funded project in Chrome.

I don't doubt there are developers being paid peanuts with more talent than I will ever see, but I haven't seen them and I know a lot of people spending a lot of money looking, which suggests to me they are rare and hard to build a team out of.

And if they found them, and they fired all the senior bay area folks and rehired these 100k developers tomorrow, are those developers experienced writing fault tolerant c++ in a multi-decade codebase? And if so, how many will relocate or take remote jobs for way higher salaries after a couple years? Google, Amazon and Microsoft would be happy to have them and pay 300k+ TC for those skills, as well as countless banks and fintech firms.

I was considering 100k including everything :)

Here in Spain (which is a first-world country :) a good dev would make about 50k or so..

I think the Silicon Valley area has really skewed expectations of salary (and of course living expenses!). Familiarity with codebase is a problem indeed, but they could start setting up a hub somewhere in Europe.

I think part of the problem is that when they incorporated Mozilla they started thinking as a corporation. Multi-million-dollar-paid CEOs, top-heavy with marketing etc. They should have stayed nonprofit IMO.

> From this back of the envelope math, I don't think the royalties business is enough to support the development cost alone.

Did you mean subscription business? Like I mentioned, the royalties were 440 million which is way larger than 25-50. If you put 200 developers on this project, with fully loaded costs of 400k / year each, that's 80 million dollars per year. You add 20 million dollars for administrative and other expenses and we come to 100 million dollars per year burn rate.

In 2020 they made ~25M on subscriptions, if 50 of the 200 developers focus on improving the subscription business, at the current rate of growth they had from 2019-2020, in a few years they could totally phase out of needing royalties at all to cover their $100M / year expenses, with 200 developers earning competitive salaries.

Yes, sorry, I meant non-royalties business. I don't believe the kind of growth you mentioned is likely, but maybe I am missing things about their business. I think they bet big on diversifying with other initiatives like Firefox phone that just didn't hit, lots of browser things like you were talking about.

In 2013/2014 when Snowden started whiste-blowing we were hoping for Mozilla to monetize privacy, but they never did. They only recently made some very poor attempts at private email, VPN and integrated some DoH. They were very hesitant for any cryptocurrencies integration. I would be happy to pay for a serious VPN and email service (remember Mozilla owns Thuderbird) with promises like Tutanota or Proton have. They could have acquired them, but instead they acquired pocket. Mozilla had the perfect brand and enough userbase to do it. Mozilla started doing that work 5-7 years too late and did too little to be meaningful. I feel they are doomed now and their space is shrinking and there's no future for Firefox in the long term.

There's a lot that can be added here:

Mozilla promised to opensource pocket server and never did.

They promised to hire someone full-time for Thunderbird, but never did. afair there is a German company that has full-time developer working on Thuderbird.

They promised a VPN... yes, delivered something.

They promised anonymous email, I know they were giving access by invites, but nothing more about it.

They promised to unfork Tor browser and integrate Tor into Firefox, they were even running a few Tor nodes.

Remember how hyped everyone here was for Servo in Firefox and electron competitor?

MDN could have integration with GH or GL and educational content for web development, they literally had resources, brand and ability to join an online university and give degrees or at least serious bootcamps. Mozilla was a meaningful brand to do it.

They had a lot of opportunities to sell privacy, we literally demanded it from them, but they weren't interested in listening. Instead they delivered 6 rebrands each breaking my muscle memory.

Do you remember how they advised EU to regulate monopoly on the webbrowser market? There was time when they had all ability, but 0 will to keep it this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

on the other hand, colorways

wow this escalated so fucking fast i have no idea what happened

Not really, its just the epitome of blagging which is criminal!

By not spending the >$1 billion they've taken in over the last decade as fast as they got it. A billion+ is a ton of money in the open source world and had they been responsible stewards they would have been able to fund development for a very long time without short term funding concerns. The fact that they've pissed away every cent taken in is their problem.

> they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself

If we’re talking about the Mozilla foundation, they should seek donations and grants and focus on being the best user web tooling.

If we’re talking about the corp, they could’ve kept rust under the umbrella and pioneered the WASI runtime and built an alternative to k8s that runs webassemblies and built out a paid cloud infra.

It doesn’t make sense to have a foundation that is user aligned and a corp that is user hostile. There should be aligned incentives.

>how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself.

1. Stick to building a more private browser

2. Become a non-profit or Benefit Corp

3. Fund #1 through all of us donating and encouraging our less tech savvy connections to use it and donate

1. Why focus on privacy? The niche is already taken by brave 2. To do so, they'd have to drop their half-billion default search engine deals 3. Currently, the donation figure is about $20mil. They'd have to somehow additionally collect $1.5 from every single user annually to prevent layoffs.

> 2. To do so, they'd have to drop their half-billion default search engine deals

Yes, that is part of the reason why they should be a non-profit - sot that they can work for the public good and not for the good of their corporate sponsor.

> 3. Currently, the donation figure is about $20mil.

Donation figure for what? Currently you CANNOT donate towards Firefox development.

> Donation figure for what? Currently you CANNOT donate towards Firefox development.

To Mozilla foundation. Most people I heard donating to them don't realize their money aren't and couldn't be put into Firefox development.

It's not a small niche. It can be shared with Brave.

And Brave has things that not everyone likes like the bat token stuff. And chromium.

> 3. Fund #1 through all of us donating and encouraging our less tech savvy connections to use it and donate

They could also try to seek government funding. EU and other non-US countries should have an interest in there being a browser that is not beholden to a US for-profit corporation.

It'd be a nice start if they'd let me give them money for their product.

I say this every time it comes up. I would happily pay $5/month for a “platinum” branded Firefox browser if that $5 would go to support development costs. I’d love to have other people see it when I share my screen both inside and outside my organization.

Indeed.

And something like apple's iCloud relay. I would pay for that.

I won't pay for a Mullvad subscription that's less useful than actual Mullvad because it just works in the browser and it doesn't fix all the issues iCloud relay solves.

If they'd sell actual privacy features I'd pay for it totally. Sync too.

This has been done to death in other threads.. mozilla's raison d'etre today is as a lighting rod to prevent real competition to google. Follow the money, and why the mozilla ceo gets big bucks for performance that's against mozilla's public goals - they are instead meeting mozilla's private goals.

Your raising a discussion about mozilla in a brave thread plays right into mozilla's purpose of muddying the waters for actual competition against google. Please don't derail brave discussions with off topic stuff.

You can use the same reasoning for why Google is happy with "competition" from Chromium based browsers.

It would help if they didn't increase the board and leadership compensation and spend loads of money on social justice projects whilst at the same time cutting on development as their footprint on the browser market keeps shrinking.

Sure it's probably not going to make it but they're still not things they can sensibly afford to do.