Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference?
Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?
Honestly, from observing my close family and friends as well as passing by strangers, everyone uses whatever default comes(i.e. Chrome on Android) or again Chrome(on iOS because they saw some banner ad somewhere to install it to access their password stored previously in android life).
The core portal to internet currently appears to be the blue-F(aka Facebook) icon which has an interesting search. People search in Facebook for specific topic and then will reluctantly move over to browser and again search on Google(always default). So, in summary no, everyone uses Chrome and does not know the difference.
Some of my colleagues seem to use Brave and Linux die-hards use Firefox(comes default with ubuntu last I tried ubuntu).
Every single Windows and Mac user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download Chrome. Why didn’t they decide to download Firefox?
Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs or whatever the demand of the day is won’t change that.
It will take some time for enough users to be blown away by how useful this is.
I wrote a simple user script one time that subscribes me to all discoverable rss feeds I run into while browsing. It seemed rather random but I was blown away by how interesting the websites I visit are to me. You can imagine it, now multiply that by 10 000 and you have a good estimate.
Google has to index 130 billion pages and is barely able to deliver half interesting results. If you query it with something like "Firefox" or "Google" it will find zero interesting pages. Stuff so boring you won't even bother.
In your history there might be hundreds of interesting articles, discussions, lectures, publications etc interesting to you specifically!
That obscure website you once visited, that one without any traffic, visited by Googlebot one time per week which then bothers to index 5% of it and puts the results on page 20 of the search results. Why it even bothers to index it no one knows.
Now say you want to read it again or you are searching for that obscure thing again 5 years later it is there in your history.
Mozaïk had full text history search in 1994 when hard drives were 5 mb and the www had 10 000 pages. The www now has a hundred thousand times as many pages but drives are a million times larger. Unlike 1994 you won't be able to visit a single digit percentage of it.
I’ve built something similar myself. It’s quite annoying that the browser only saves like 3 months of history.
I can understand the default not keeping forever, for privacy, storage, and performance reasons.
Writing comments takes only slightly less effort than writing a draft for a book. The Twitter or facebook history, even our comments here quickly lose value. It all vanishes into the hole.
In contrast, i once ran into a geocities page created by a very elderly couple in the US about their vacations. They were old enough to tell the story about how the world changed over time from an appropriately mundane perspective. They probably died before I found the homepage. It was an oddly interesting read. In 100 years it would be truly marvelous.
If the software is there we could probably wrap the proverbial Richard Stallman's browser history into a product worth buying. It would be every bit as funny as it sounds.
The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc.
I wouldn't. And I'm a user! Mozilla needs to be restructured. And ideally they diversify their commercial ecosystem as well. Because they are way too dependent on Google.
If you look at Rust, created by Mozilla, they are set up in a more sane way. There's a foundation. It's well funded with sponsorships from the big companies that use and depend on Rust. Those companies employ people that contribute to Rust. Many OSS organizations are set up like that. It works. The diversity of contributors and commercial sponsors ensures neutrality and longevity. No single company has veto power. As long as valuable tech comes out, companies stay involved. Some disappear, new ones come along. Linux development works like that as well.
Ironically, Chromium at this point is better positioned to become like that. The main issue is that Google still employs most of the developers and controls the roadmap. But there are quite a few commercial chromium based products: Edge, Brave, Opera, etc. that each have development teams using and contributing to it. Add Electron (has its own foundation, based on chromium) to the mix and the countless commercial applications using that and you have a healthy ecosystem that could survive Google completely disengaging if they'd be forced to split off their browser activities.
I use Firefox mainly because of the iron grip keeps over Chromium and it's clear intent to cripple ad blocking, grab user data, and exploit its user base. But I worry about the dysfunctional mess that is Mozilla.
Chromium is not a good alternative: 95% of Chromium commits come from Google. [2]
[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
[2]: https://chromiumstats.github.io/cr-stats/authors/company_aut...
Or ... Chromium is the perfect alternative ... as long as it remains open source and privacy invasion can be easily stripped out of it. Let Google fund most of the development of a privacy respecting browser (i.e. Brave).
And if it doesn't remain open source? Then it's time for a fork --- just like it is now with Firefox.
Bottom line: If you reject Chromium, shouldn't you also reject Mozilla/Firefox? Virtually all development over the past decade was funded by Google.
*When* Google asks them to remove manifest v2, what do you think they'll do?
It’s even more pointless than removing it from Chromium though: Firefox users would just switch to a fork that still supports it, or to a fork that supports blockingWebRequest APIs on v3 extensions, or to a fork that implements some other ad blocking method. With Chromium, they at least have Chrome users, many of whow wouldn’t want to even bother. (Those who do have migrated to forks already)
Yes, ManifestV3 nerfs adblocking, and Google loves that side effect. It will hamper Brave' internal adblocking engine.
I think the big interesting question is: if Brave figures out how to add improvements to ManifestV3 that aid adblocking without sacrificing performance or privacy/security, will Google accept the PRs?
Genuine question from a FF user.
For each profile, you would have to install again every extension, set every setting, every bookmark,.. of course no sync between your main profile and others.
Can't right click on link to open them in another profile.
No automatic opening of profiles when you go on a specific url
And so on.
On the other hand, brave will push it's crypto crap, web3 and 'bat coins' everywhere.
If you're interested in Brave, and social issues affect your choice in who or who not to support - check his wikipedia.
- Replacing ads on pages without owner's intervention, under the guise that they were offering owners a cryptocurrency
- Inserting their own referral codes on websites
- Installing their VPN software on Windows machines without consent
They also introduced a Tor mode into their browser that sent DNS requests unmasked to your ISP. I don't know why you would trust Brave at this point.
Do you think that in open source there's no ownership?
Why would they do that? (I mean, they wouldn’t stop it in one go, but they sure as hell will try to push users off the web.)
> If you reject Chromium, shouldn't you also reject Mozilla/Firefox? Virtually all development over the past decade was funded by Google.
Which is exactly the problem :-)
If Chromium can live on without Google – I don’t mind it. My primary concern is Firefox, though.
???
Google's revenue stream is almost wholly dependent on the web and the privacy invasion it facilitates. Pushing users off the web would be self defeating.
This is a non sequitur. Google supplies Mozilla with money, but Mozilla decides how to deploy that money. This is significantly different than Google directing the development of Firefox, which they clearly don't do. They absolutely do direct the development of chromium, however. It makes no sense to trust an advertising company to direct the development of your browser, but not to trust a nonprofit. Conversely, it makes perfect sense to place more trust in a browser developed by a nonprofit, even one funded by an advertiser, over a browser developed by an advertising company. Web attestation and manifest V2 are both examples of exactly why this is the case.
Google engineers write specs for new APIs. They get rejected by Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds. Google implements them anyway. Other Chromium-based browsers get these APIs as a result. Then they start popping up on sites showing Safari and Firefox “failing” to implement them. Then web developers ask why Safari and Firefox are so “behind” in implementing “web standards”.
This mechanism is how the web standards process is being subsumed into “whatever Google wants” instead of being a collaborative effort between multiple rendering engines. Google should not be able to unilaterally decide what is and isn’t a web standard.
Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know that Mozilla funds things that are wildly not Firefox-related, like feminist AI conferences in Africa. Meanwhile Firefox looks more and more like an also-ran compared to its competition. All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser, not this.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozfest-house-zambia-...
> All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser
Firefox is the best alternative to a Chromium/Google dominated web. As long as Firefox isn't kicking ass and being used by, say, 20% of web users, I argue that Mozilla shouldn't be doing anything else. This is especially prudent when a large part of Mozilla's (and therefore, Firefox's) funding is in jeopardy.
So, yes, I have a problem with Mozilla doing events right now, no matter what event it might be, short of a major product launch.
> > All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser
Good for you. That's not how donations work.
If you donate money to an organization, you are supporting them in the work they do. How they approach that work and how they appropriate and prioritize funding is likely numerous people's entire jobs to figure out, and just because you put some money in the proverbial hat doesn't entitle you to a say in those conversations, nor does it entitle you to an explanation for the results of those conversations.
I don't precisely know why this conference was held, but that's because it is neither my job nor my business. I'm assuming it was a long, complex process to get it done, and I doubt they would've done it if the organizers just felt like getting a free trip to Zambia, or whatever other grievance-politics motive you're implying.
Sure Mozilla can spend donations how it wants, but donors are free to not donate as well. For years many people have been saying that they want to support Firefox without all of unrelated social projects, but Mozilla has refused to offer that. I expect that a lot of potential donations have therefore not happened.
Consider it marketing, and think about if the market share would have been even lower if they didn't do outreach. Most people don't select a browser based on technical merits (heck, they don't even consciously choose). Saying they should spend every penny on developers is naive.
They should spend 90% on developers.
If you don't want something, don't think everyone else thinks the same as you. From my observations, if something is being called "woke", that means it's probably a good thing, actually.
If Mozilla had used the Google billions on improving Firefox instead of fart sniffing, Firefox would be a better browser now and its market share would be above 2.62%.
The misspending was (implicitly) part of the deal: the Google money would stop if Firefox started to seriously threaten Chrome's dominance.
What if the Tesla is slightly better?
So it's a question of if Firefox and Chrome are just competing in quality. I can see people swearing off Chrome because of Google, as well as the same with Firefox because of its activism.
Most people don't even know who the CEO of Google is so even if he were to be found with 17 mutilated kids in a moldy basement it won't have the effect Musk's 'tism has had.
Most people don't realize how they're being fucked over. My parents use adblockers because I set them up and they're not even that old, a lot of people believe surveillance is good and even on HN where privacy is a big thing many use less private products because the alternative is mildly inconvenient. The best way to convert them IMO is to offer them a more intuitive and snappier experience, especially on cheap older machines where it's really noticeable and nice integrations into things like email, pdf, etc. Just make their life as easy as possible with as little setup as possible.
To me I think the issue is "how can Mozilla be self-sufficient without Google?", and that means tightening their focus.
Those things should all get effort, energy and investment - but maybe Mozilla doesn't need to be the one driving it (to that point, maybe Mozilla can advocate for Google funding those things directly?).
They deserve an open, equitable web as much as we all do. I'm afraid that Mozilla's tendencies to waste money on such projects instead of using it to improve their main product aren't helping though.
Intel isn't hosting a hardware conference in 99% of the world. It's a great opportunity for Mozilla's mission, for those people, and for the world.
So—just out of this subset of expenses, there's probably some other stuff you could take issue with—Mozilla spent money in a 94% ratio on browser development, and 6% on "other stuff", of which probably .001% was this conference in Africa. And I think it's arguable that a lot of that "other stuff" is related technology! But even ignoring that, talking about how we can use the open web to improve life for people in third world countries is exactly the kind of thing that I, personally, would like Mozilla to be doing. And I'm happy for them to spend <5% of their budget on it.
Only because you assume that they should only be working on browser development.
Why not? This isn't Oxfam, this is Mozilla. To an outsider, the assumed point for all these other endeavors was to be profitable to provide more money for browser development. When that money doesn't primarily provide for that something seems sketchy.
According to their 2023 form 990 (the 2024 one isn't published yet) those sort of donations are usually on the order of 15k. You don't get much browser for that money.
Managers like to build empires?
My argument, more directly, is that a developer is not just a salary. You need support staff, office space, capital, and actual work for them to do. You need to hire, manage, and tutor them. Comparing developer salaries to money spent on one-time goodwill activities is ridiculous. Internal billing at enterprise corps usually estimate two times salary for "real cost", but that still assumes you're actually holding that cost against a tangible planned project.
I'm not sure this is the smoking gun you think it is.
Good. I'm going to donate some money then (to both parties).
It's not just that: Mozilla can't use any of your donation on Firefox. Firefox belongs to the for-profit, and money cannot flow from the non-profit to the for-profit. So in a way all of the random stuff that they do do as the non-profit is the inevitable outcome of their structure:
They have a product that people who care know is struggling to survive and so those people want to donate. Mozilla now has money that they can't spend on the product, so they have to find somewhere else to put it.
One might reasonably ask why the org whose primary purpose is maintaining the one independent browser engine is structured in a way that makes it impossible for donations to flow to the browser engine. I don't have a good answer that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory.
Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
These numbers are highly unrealistic.
A DOA specifically setup to build a user-respecting browser run by a Foundation where token holders could vote out the waste we’ve seen Mozilla and the like do, could work.
And for those crypto-haters, I’m not sqying token-based as an speculative investment, I’m saying here token specifically here for voting rights to control asset allocation and business decisions
The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million. Enough to keep a few dozen people employed.
Mozilla spends that on development, but firefox is only a small part of that.
It's $260M.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43341830
Where do you get "a few million"? Do they only have less than 20 developers? Why denigrate Mozilla?
> If you look at Rust, created by Mozilla, they are set up in a more sane way. There's a foundation. It's well funded with sponsorships from the big companies that use and depend on Rust.
Firefox isn't used by companies, but by consumers.
What alternative do you suggest? Google and Microsoft are certainly worse. Firefox is vastly superior to the offerings of these multi billion dollar companies. Chrome and edge are exactly the prisons that these companies designed them to be.
What specifically should laypeople do to regain something resembling a usable Internet? Firefox and ublock origin is the only answer I have.
Year Revenue
---- -------
2007 $75M
2023 $653M
And Mozilla has hit scale / become "big company" - with those kinds of revenues.
The reason why G&A outpaces R&D, is because now you have all kinds of work to do that you don't have to do when your small/underdog, like:
- regulatory compliance
- legal
- privacy
- advocacy
- public relations
- etc...
When you're the underdog, you don't have to deal with these activities and as a result, your expense base is more heavily skewed toward R&D.
Why does mozilla.ai exist?
Didn't we like a trust the product more in 2007 than we do now?
I mean, yay for scale, but haven't we lost something here?
There are other subsidiaries under the foundation umbrella like Mozilla.ai and MZLA/Thunderbird. This isn't something uncommon for large entity and there are many advantages. For example, it gives more freedom in term of decision making and spending to projects that aren't targeting the exact same consumer segment. Think about Thunderbird. Under Mozilla Corporation, it was always in the shadow of Firefox. Now, it's striving as an independent project.
AI threatens both browsers and search engines, is why. Apple, Google and Microsoft all have their own efforts.
Mozilla working on local-first AI isn't a bad idea.
Having said that I just have had the same kinds of questions/trouble as OP about Mozilla's wild spending and budget compared to seeing their devs at grungy linux confs in the midwest when I was an undergrad in the 00s.
You did help point out what I really wondered about also and didn't understand, so thanks.
The allegation of throwing is too light. They’re complicit in covering for Google’s obvious monopoly.
2023 $653M
CEO's largest accomplishment since 2007 was to put Mozilla on the brink of shutting down anytime Google's money stops flowing in.
That's a massive difference. Their revenue grew by $60m while the amount of money they got from Google decreased (by ~$15m).
Things do seem to be going in the desired direction
EDIT: some more history
2023: 75.8
2022: 86.0
2021: 87.8
2020: 88.8
2019: [^a]
2018: 95.3
2017: 95.9
That was the year their lawsuit with Verizon finished and they got paid their remaining due for the Yahoo search deal. Related, I think most their money from 2017 also came from Yahoo.
And selling user data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43209768
What’s the benefit of having Mozilla be this huge? How does it compare to the risk of shutting down if their revenue dries up, which is looking like a possibility?
As an example the Linux foundation [0] had 270M in expenses in 2023. Of which even we aggregate international operations and corporate operations the expenditure is less than 21M in G&A equivalent activities.
[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/lf_annualrepor...
I would agree with you there.
Sadly the art of troughing is a well known feature of larger NPOs.
That's why (IMHO) people should never blindly donate to NPOs without first taking a quick look at their financial accounts to get a feel for how much troughing is going on. Honestly, if I had my way, I would make it law to have a simple-to-read one-page summary of that data for every NPO.
I also do not buy the oft-cited argument "well, we have to attract talent by paying them 'competitively' ".
Well no. If the "talent" wants a fat paycheck, they can go work in the private sector. If they are going to work at an NPO, then they should WANT to work for the NPO, not just see it as another spot for their CV. In many (most?) cases they will be in charge of an army of well-meaning unpaid volunteers, its not a good look for the C-suite to roam around in private cars, businssess-class flights, have fancy "away days" etc. etc.
Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]:
> Expenses
1. Program 'Software Development'
2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M
2. Management 'General and Administrative' :
2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M
I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses.
Let's ignore inflation and COL and ballooning costs, etc. If we look at just the ratio of expenditure. We have an NPO (on paper at least) that just went from spending a ratio of 4 to 1 between developers and managers to spending a ratio of almost 2 to 1.
I am not familiar with what is typical in American NPO's but I can't help but feel that my money will not be spent on the right stuff.
[0] https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2007-audi...
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...