As far as I know, Mozilla is funded primarily by Google. From their 2023 financial report[0]:

> Approximately 85% and 81% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.

Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.

[0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

>Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.

What should they do instead? Their "Program" (ie. non-management) salaries alone are $200M+ per year. That's not something you can replace with a Patreon.

Judging by the features they have been adding into Firefox lately, I would guess that actually just maintaining and updating the browser doesnt cost anywhere to $200m per year.

They have something like 700 employees working on Firefox. To be honest, I have no idea what they do — take a look at the commit history and you’ll see that the core group of engine contributors is quite small — but $280,000 per employee including benefits, HR, office rent, and other overhead actually isn’t bad at all.

For me, the best option would be to be able to donate to Firefox engineers directly, but not to Mozilla, they do too many things, I don't stand for those, just the Firefox browser...

You may just end up with the "tipped cashier" effect where wages are driven down on rationale that they will be tipped.

Now if you buy a self serve coffee in a paper cup the cashier whose sole job is to take your money, expects a tip because their wages are shite.

I wonder why they haven't tried that yet:

Firefox Support Edition, for $10 a month you get nothing (or maybe some Sync stuff) but all the funds go to Firefox exclusively, and your copy will show a pretty star on startup or something else.

Patron Edition: for $20 a month, same thing but you also get the VPN from Mullvad.

160M users. If 10% subscribe, you get $160M every month. I'm a marketing genius.

>160M users. If 10% subscribe, you get $160M every month. I'm a marketing genius.

Can't tell whether you're serious or being sarcastic. A 10% conversion rate for a free product would be the most successful marketing campaign in history. Typical rates are in the low single digits, and that includes goods/services that people have no choice but to pay money for (eg. drop shipped goods from china or SaaS products).

This. I’m starting to wonder if it could be possible to raise some funds and hire people to work on Firefox (and Firefox only). Maybe partner with the FF forks to help raise money? I don’t really know how that would work.

Money is fungible. Every dollar you donate earmarked to "Firefox engineers" can theoretically be offset by the Mozilla foundation/corporation moving one dollar to something else. This eventually breaks down if the sums are large enough, but at the scales that individual donations can muster, it'll probably hold.

Right. Governments have used the same tricks with lotteries and bonds allocated to specific programs. People vote for these revenue generating methods to fund the programs, and the governments can then divert the money that was previously funding the programs into less popular sinkholes.

Exactly, which is why buying a homeless drug addict a coffee and a sandwich means he can shift that money into drugs.

And why "humanitarian aid" to countries at war allows budgets to be shifted to weapons instead of food and medical supplies.

Sometimes you just can't do the seemingly obvious "right thing"

To be clear, it's likely funded by people using Google search as the default on Mozilla.

Someone needs to dismantle the system that clings onto a standard that requires $^6+/mo to implement. This is much more realistic than playing chase me game with someone who makes the rules.

They managed to convince everyone that a browser is naturally a hypercomplex app which requires so much maintenance, support and whatever. But in fact, a browser is an app mostly for rendering text, images and videos, and an embedded scripting language, which all wastes lots of memory and crawls on moderate loads. You can make an app like this in a month, solo, you just can’t fit it to the standard. Before web was a thing, people regularly made much more complex software that “web” heavily sucked compared to. This has to be done. No $200M/mo org can exist without naturally destructive interests in it. The lesson should be recognized, learned and never “feature update”d again. We learned everything we needed in these 30+ years, time to rip it out of corp hands, revisit, settle and put it into maintenance.

Add: to be clear, this is not a tech problem. It must be recognized and done at the antimonopoly level, crushed by the law.

A very tiny percentage of people will switch.

No body wants to pay say 20$ a month for what they can have for free. I suspect you'd need a few hundred million in annual revenue to actually fund a full browser that doesn't rely on existing engines.

I think the question here is around how much money is actually needed to develop the browser features that people want without everything else that Mozilla does. At minimum, people would presumably want security fixes, new browser features that get standardized that websites will expect to be able to be used, and probably some amount of support/bugfixes for issues that people run into that aren't vulnerabilities but still might be annoying. It seems like a substantial amount of work, but I don't have a good sense of exactly how much would be needed for that. My understanding is that Mozilla makes its money primarily from deals to make certain search engines enabled by default, and secondarily from donations (with "selling user data" being somewhat of an unknown right now given that they seem to be claiming that they _don't_ make money from it because they're not "selling" it under what most people would consider to be selling, but it's not clear whether that's because they're claiming that "anonymized user data" isn't actually "user data" or whether they're not "selling" it).

The key factor to me is whether that poorly specified extra stuff is actually necessary as part of funding the development or not. As far as I can tell, getting a search engine deal is actually not out of the question for one of these forks; Waterfox's documentation[0] indicates that it has a deal like this (with Bing, from what I can tell from trying it out yesterday), and presumably a large migration of users to a fork could lead to an increase in the funding in the future, in addition to any individual donations. I don't know whether this would result in enough money in the long run to be able to continue developing a browser indefinitely, but Mozilla also is doing other things than just developing Firefox and has costs associated with that, and I don't think there's any other obvious revenue source, so the two most likely scenarios are that they're either making money off of selling user data (or something derived from it that they're claiming isn't user data but aren't willing to bet on the law agreeing with them) or they're actually incurring costs from those other things that could otherwise be spent on Firefox. If it's the former, I think that being vague and quibbling over semantics has lost them the presumption of good faith, and I'd reluctantly conclude that having browser focused on user privacy is no longer tenable and we might as well just all switch to Chrom{e,ium}. If it's the latter, then focusing solely on the browser would _reduce_ the incentive to sell user data for funding, and the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem able or willing to do this means that we're all better of moving to an alternative.

[0]: https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-...

True, but I'd accept less "features" per year considering very often Mozilla features were not bringing me a lot. A more open, stable, secure browser is all I need.

For sure, I'm guessing that's where most of us would happily choose to cut scope if it were up to us. Like the sibling comment mentions though, sometimes the pressure for more features comes from elsewhere in the web ecosystem, and as much as I don't feel like there's a strong need for the web to add a bunch of new features, I'd also rather have the features if websites are going to go forward with them regardless because the other browsers aren't slowing down. It's a balance, and it just makes the case more to clear to me that even doing the minimum to keep the browser working with whatever the web currently looks like is is more than enough along with stability and security to keep an organization busy without needing any additional projects.

I agree with your observations, but your comment gives the perfect context to understand why in my opinion, by rapidly expanding web standards, Google makes it harder for independent browsers to sustain themselves (deliberately or not - I don't know).

Web API surface is large, and if we see new features like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113790 and developers start using it, then websites start to "look worse" in Firefox (or work slower if polyfills are used).. then in order to keep up, Mozilla might feel pressured to expand their engineering team to implement things, and this is expensive..

> If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival.

So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions.

For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.

Your statements do not align with the reality of Firefox’s own words. They are trading/selling your data and they updated their ToS to reflect that.

“ In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar”

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

This has been discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

But that has nothing to do with the new language that was added to the ToS, which states:

> You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

This new license to the data that you enter into the browser is only for local operation of the browser itself, not for ads or sponsored suggestions. In addition to that license, they also use the words that you type into the urlbar or search box to customize the ads and search suggestions that you see. It is important to keep these two things separate, because only one of them is new. The other has been there for years.

Nothing in the ToU says this is local only or not for ads.

Of course it does. It explicitly says that the license is for “operating Firefox” and “for the purpose of doing as you request”. Not for improving it, or serving you ads, or for understanding your usage. Just for Firefox to follow your instructions. You type in a url, and it navigates to the url for you and saves it in your history. You type in some form data, and it submits it for you and saves it for later.

> It explicitly says that the license is for “operating Firefox” and “for the purpose of doing as you request”. Not for improving it, or serving you ads, or for understanding your usage.

It does not. That is explicitly stated as a subset of their rights. Before that sentence you might notice:

“This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice.”

So check the privacy notice and you find…

“How we use data

We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business”

So they can use the data in anyway that helps sustain the business.

Yes, their rights have 2 parts in their paragraph:

1. The data processed described in the Privacy Notice,

2. A nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox.

The 2nd is not the data they talk about in the 1st (a.k.a the Privacy Notice). The data they describe in the Privacy Notice in the 1st are not the data they have "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" in the 2nd. Don't mix 2 or these together.

Completely disagree with that interpretation of that language. Given the beginning sentence of “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox.”

Operate Firefox is an extremely broad statement. It then goes to outline that means everything in their privacy notice (which then also includes even more broad language) and then exclusive, worldwide license.

No good will or benefit of the doubt should be given to a terms of service like this. The changes here are an expansion of Firefox’s rights - therefor, a contracting of your own.

You do you. We are not the legal entities who are the ones that will decide the final understanding of those legal words.

If anyone thinks Firefox processes the data with "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" outside of "the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox" like in scenario 1 (the Privacy Notice), I would like to learn about which codes in Firefox that do that. It would be really useful as well if there would be legal disputes in court to Mozilla that could clarify these things.

No one wants a terms of service like that, of course, because we all agree implicitly that the softwares do what we input in it. However, not all lawyers or legals are "we", many of them always want things interpreted explicitly to make those activities "clearer" for their jobs when legal confrontations happen. Like Epic founder said:

> The license says that when you type stuff, the program can use the stuff you typed to do the thing you asked it to do. This is what programs ordinarily do, but nowadays lawyers tend to advise companies to say it explicitly.

https://x.com/looking5452/status/1895458253854711854

> We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business

I would say that those 3 vaguely worded things pretty much cover them to use consumer data in any way they want.

Exactly.

Typing on your own computer, and having the draft stored into local storage requires absolutely no policy at all. If anyone else's computer is involved with that, then it's a problem.

Also it makes no sense for a program that runs on your own computer to have "Terms of Use".

Yes, we all know that. But the ones that "don't want" to know that are the lawyers and the legal entities. Whatever we scream down here, Mozilla Corporation is the one who will face those legal confrontations, and whatever we agree implicitly here with the softwares won't hold candles to those lawyers and courts without explicit legal wordings.

I agree with you, but it seems that a lot of lawyers do not. Most of the other browsers have the same language in their ToS, as do many programs like Microsoft Office.

Exactly, Mozilla just tries to mislead people that their "web services" are indivisible parts of Firefox, but they're not, for me it's a software running on my computer.

I don’t think that they are trying to mislead at all. At no point do they call Firefox a service. Instead they call Pocket a service, and their VPN a service, and so on.

When did you request that firefox back up the content to your profile? Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested.

If firefox starts backing up your profile to a mozilla server, encrypted, you requested it. If there is an additional encryption key that lets mozilla decrypt it and sell it to OpenAI, you requested it.

Also, I am requesting that firefox send this post to HN by pressing the reply button. By the terms of firefox's ToU, this gives Mozilla a license to this content. That license is not limited to the duration of the http call if other firefox behavior that I have "requested" uses that content later. Perhaps they will scrape my comments from HN and use their content in targeted ads that firefox will display to me later. All allowed by the ToU.

>When did you request that firefox back up the content to your profile?

When you enable firefox sync or whatever? Is there any evidence they're backing up stuff behind users' backs?

>Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested.

The crash reporter has a checkbox that says "Tell Mozilla about the crash so they can fix it". I'm not sure how it can get more clear than that.

https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...

You may be literally correct, but the purchase of an ad company makes that literal assumption likely wrong.

The ambiguous nature of the changes favor some shady self dealing. Sorry.

I wonder if this could be a "money where your mouth is" thing for the EU.

If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by American techbros should be-- then they could provide a fair bit of a backstop to finance a dev team.

EU backing could also provide general street cred for the project-- it's both "financially resourced enough to not go poof" and "backed by an authority that both has a strong history of privacy protections, and is in a geopolitical scenario where they can't afford insecurity".