Firefox is NOT made by a nonprofit, that's the problem. It's made by a for profit corporation using the shell of a noprofit to claim legitimacy. This for proffit Mozilla Corp is primarily funded by an ad tech company and has itself dabbled in ads multiple times, contrary to the interests of the userbase that the nonprofit should be looking out for. These aren't minor misteps but repeated deliberate decisions to ignore user preferences.

The Mozilla Corporation is a for profit company completely owned by the nonprofit the Mozilla Foundation. Originally there was just the nonprofit, but that caused tax issues with the money generated from the search deal, and after paying a few million to the IRS they switched to the current setup.

I don't think it's fair to claim the nonprofit side only exists to "claim legitimacy." All of their revenue goes back into the corporation or the foundation.

I agree with boomboomsubban above.

This a very common arrangement used by charities to enable a commercial process that funds the charity. For example, high street charity shops may be part of the commercial sub-entity so that their accounts are processed like a normal company, but 100% of their profits become donations to fund the parent charity's activities, called the charitable purpose(s).

If they didn't separate into a parent charity with a commercial sub-entity, all of the activities of the sub-entity would be subject to charity auditing, accounting and purpose rules, which in practice would make it difficult to run a shop competitively, or alternatively the parent could not have charity status and the shop profit would be subject to tax instead of all being directed to the audited, charitable purpose(s).

In Mozilla's case, if it was a tax-exempt non-profit without a commercial sub-entity giving 100% of profits to its parent, it would not be able to take Google funding as a trade in exchange for making Google the default search engine without losing its tax-exempt status, and it might not be able to pay its software engineers a competitive market rate, even if it needs to do that to compete. It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.

> In Mozilla's case, if it was a tax-exempt non-profit without a commercial sub-entity giving 100% of profits to its parent, it would not be able to take Google funding as a trade in exchange for making Google the default search engine without losing its tax-exempt status, and it might not be able to pay its software engineers a competitive market rate, even if it needs to do that to compete.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing. Googles funding is not a boon but a shackle that holds FF back. Same for developers that expect SV market rates - those will be developers that are used to user-hostile software developement practiced in other SV companies.

> It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.

How do you know? Individual donations are also far from the only possible way to fund a real charity.

Look - I cant claim that there weren't repeated and deliberate bad decisions, and I can't claim that being funded mainly by google gives the best incentives.

But it is really a nonprofit in that (like the sibling says) the corp is fully owned by a nonprofit, not public shareholders.

And its not like google doesn't get anything out of their $. They get set as the default engine. Apple gets paid hundreds of billions by google for this. So its not like Google is paying Firefox for control over it's development.

Like, seriously, they're not perfect but its a pretty wide jump in behavior between it and chrome

Non-profit status and being publicly traded are orthogonal. There are tons of for-profit companies that aren’t publicly traded.

the point is - the corporation is fully owned and controlled by a nonprofit so it is essentially a part of the nonprofit. if you don't see this as a meaningful difference, I don't know how to help ya.

Yeah, I'd understand not caring. That's a pretty common and reasonable take, though I'd hope a tech website like this would be more pro-privacy.

But actively caring about browser companies, and choosing Chrome because Mozilla "sold out" when they added pocket is a pretty wild take imo.

Privacy… eh. I care… somewhat. I’ll do things I personally consider reasonable, but I think that, say, the people who completely clear browser state every 5 minutes are barmy (and also probably much more exposed than they think they are - the very act of trying to not Leak anything makes them stand out, if anything).

Yeah that's a pretty reasonable take tbh. I do all that, but I'm fully aware its silly and probably counterproductive.

& hey, if you prefer Chrome because you find it more usable or performant that's a perfectly good reason

I'm mostly upset at the people in this thread (presumably not you) who seem to be against Firefox for ideological reasons which seems completely backwards to me

Pretty reasonable to support the erosion of privacy and foster a "I have nothing to hide, and if you act like you do you're probably guilty lmao" culture along with an Orwellian monopolistic grip on the foremost medium of information exchange of this and probably the next century because of your personal apathy. :) #justreasonablethings

Hey, I'm pretty big into privacy myself. Firefox all the way, 100%. Totally feel you that it's awful.

As much as I'd love it though, I don't think it's reasonably to expect everyone else to care as much as we do. There's plenty of other issues that matter too that I'm glad other people are out there caring about on my behalf. Eg. I know being vegan is better but its a big annoying change and I haven't been able to do it yet.

I'm mostly concerned with all the rhetroic here that's trying to paint firefox as unsympathetic when they are clearly the people fighting on our side. If you don't personally care enough to switch to FF, or use Graphene OS, or run Linux etc. I get that, but pleeease don't also try to discourage other people too, y'know?

(& ofc the real solution is through policy and getting an American version of GDPR/California Privacy act, getting courts to stop the NSA etc. Being preachy online is counterproductive to getting broad support and the mission overall imo)

I already get pop ups from my insurance company (a major one I might add) that FF is not a supported browser when I log into their website. I assume that one day I'll be told to use Edge or Chrome and not allowed to log in at all.

I'm not a privacy fanatic and I don't really care if my browser supports proprietary DRM so that I'm able to watch shows on streaming platforms. However, I see a lot of potential for the remote attestation mechanism proposed by Google to give companies an easy way to enforce "We support this set of browsers on this set of operating systems" and effectively cut off support for Linux and browsers that aren't popular Chromium variants. That doesn't mean I can't go and switch companies but that requires a lot of effort on my part to do so.