This is less and less the case each year. Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
I often see two demands made of Mozilla: (1) focus on Firefox; (2) become financially independent from Google. IMO these two goals are going to be in conflict with each other. They started their own VPN, launched MDN Plus, etc in an effort to improve their financial independence. The AI gimmicks feel like they're in the same thread. I don't like it and don't ever wanna use it but I can't fault Mozilla for exploring that option.
Based on independent audits they are accomplishing (2) and based on their amazing performance in interop-25, interop-24, etc they are also accomplishing (1) as best they could.
We could have chosen Firefox (most devs seemed to prefer it), but as the market share numbers bear out, most people are familiar with Chrome; most are not with Firefox.
If Firefox had specific features that made it easier for enterprises, or even internal teams at startups, then companies would happily pay $10/user/mo for something as critical as a browser.
There isn’t any such reason afaik.
Edit:
Some examples off the top of my head include
- VPNs
- user and permission management (identity)
- ad- and tracker-blocking
- internal auto-updating and easily managed/deployed extensions
Yes.
> Historically, Google's accounted for over 95% of Mozilla's revenue. But through the recent launches of a bunch of products it's gradually knocked that number down to under 70% and seems to continue decreasing rapidly.
Someone who read this might infer other products were 30% of Mozilla's revenue. But they were 10% in 2023. And this was lower than 2022. Royalties were 76%. Google could be under 70%. But interest, dividends, and investment gains contributed more than products.[1] Did you see more recent information?
> They started their own VPN
The servers were Mullvad's.
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
I use Firefox because I want to do at least something to keep the web browser market from becoming a monoculture again, but they’re making it increasingly hard to justify.
I also use because I care, but at 3% hardly any business does any longer.
We have "any browser above 5% market share" in deals with our clients. So FF testing is not even required
Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.
Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train their own models, there seems to be little danger of that. They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code and not in real danger from any AI bubble.
But yeah, Mozilla hasn't hinted at training up its own frontier model or anything ridiculous like that. I agree that it's downstream of that stuff.
So if somebody finds Mozilla's embedded LLM summary functionality useful, they're not going to suddenly change their mind just because some stock crashed.
The main danger I guess would be long term, if things crash at the point where they're almost useful but not quite there. Then Mozilla would be left with a functionality that's not as good as it could be and with little hope of improvement because they build on others' work and don't make their own models.
The upstream might earn less, and some upstreams might fail, but once they have code switching to competition or local isn't a big deal.
That being said
"This could've been a plugin" - actual AI vendors can absolutely just outcompete FF, nobody gonna change to FF to have slightly better AI integration - and if Google decides to do same they will eat Mozilla lunch yet again
Take that $1B, invest it sensibly, and use the income to fund the development of an open, free browser in perpetuity.
Nah, that’ll never happen.
And while I don't love the dabbling in ad tech, and I do think there's been confusion around the user interface, I think by far the most unfair smear Mozilla has suffered is to claim they haven't been focusing on the core browser. Every year they're producing major internal engine overhauls that deliver important gains to everything from WebGPU to spidermonkey, to their full overhaul of the mobile browser, to Fission/Site Isolation work.
Since their Quantum project, which overhauled the browser practically from top to bottom in 2017 and delivered the stability and performance gains that everyone was asking for, they've done the equivalent of one "quantum unit" of work on other areas in the browser on pretty much an unbroken chain from then until now. It just doesn't get doesn't mentioned in headlines.
> Given that Mozilla Foundation isn't swimming in cash, "investing" in AI (a well known money sink) makes very little sense and will definitely undermine the development of their core product (the freaking browser).
The browser doesn't make any money (the Google search bar money would not be replaced by another entity if they stopped). That is why Microsoft abandoned theirs and why Safari is turning in to IE. Every one of these threads lambasting Mozilla for the "side projects" doesnt seem to have an answer for how does mozilla make money.
Often it will be people complaining they can't "donate directly to browser development" not realizing that it will be peanuts compared to the google money. Most people in the market wont pay for a web browser.
If they aren't making money either way, I'd prefer they focused on the core product.
Or charge for an actually useful feature like Firefox sync which is currently free.
Does any browser with measurable market share not provide Firefox Sync's features without payment?
The US government (via the courts) has sent a very clear message to Google that they can be as monopolistic as they want without consequences. I cannot imagine Google will continue supporting Mozilla for much longer.
That's the problem: the number of things you have to disable to stop Firefox--a browser that sold itself on protecting user's privacy--from spying on you, or facilitating the spying of third parties, keeps growing with successive versions, to the point that you now need a running checklist of what to about:config (thanks to the "simplified" Privacy & Security window) and extensions to add.
I still use it only because Chrome is worse, and even with Chromium, certain extensions either aren't available or are a bitch to use.
And what's increasingly annoying is that many web sites (for example, banking and utilities) don't even bother properly testing for Firefox support, given how obscure a browser it has become. Your traffic is also much more likely to be flagged as "suspicious" as a FF user, so expect to spend much more time playing "spot the traffic light/bicycle/bus/stairs" games.