I believe that the Mozilla execs have no faith in Firefox and instead are using whatever branding remains to position themselves as champions of digital rights.
And I mean sure, it's not a bad goal, but they are letting Firefox die in the process. And once you lost your place at the standards negotiating table, then what? They already capitulated when Google decided that browsers needed DRM, and I don't see them stopping WEI either.
I don't need yet another VPN. I need a strong browser to rival Chrome.
I'm just going to copy/paste my comment from the other day, because this thread is a perfect example.
HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for
1) being financially dependent on Google
2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox
3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous
Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming through the backdoor from other business units. The money can't just magically appear, so either they make it from Google, from Firefox, or from alternative services.
> I believe that the Mozilla execs have no faith in Firefox and instead are using whatever branding remains to position themselves as champions of digital rights.
That’s a charitable interpretation. An uncharitable one would be that, due to flaws in American 501c3 legislation, at least some people involved in Mozilla view their job as a sinecure. Capture of a non-profit for personal benefit is a longstanding phenomenon in the USA.
> Capture of a non-profit for personal benefit is a longstanding phenomenon in the USA.
No. Capture of a non-profit for personal benefit is key to the express purpose of non-profits in the USA.
The foremost function of non-profits in the US is to displace community organizations, especially democratic worker organizations which remotely resemble a workers' political party like you can find in other countries. Non-profit law in the US makes such organizations perfectly illegal while providing anti-democratic resemblances of them instead.
Yes, mozilla is desperate to diversify income so google can't shut them down, and if you are a manager who can usefully direct improvements and plans for a web browser project, google can afford to pay you basically any dollar amount to keep you out of the hands of mozilla, so they probably don't have stellar management.
Meanwhile firefox works well, is plenty performant, and isn't pushing "standards" that try to make it easier to advertise to me, against my wishes. Why would you use the browser made by an advertising company instead?
Yours is a false dilemma. Being aghast at Mozilla’s non-profit mismanagement does not mean that one is using any other browser. A lot of us here are using Firefox but hoping and praying that the Foundation will be called to account or development will be taken over by some more benevolent and competent force.
Your efforts come across as facile to me. You're wanting a democratic organization, or at least one capable of acting in the interests of the consumers despite the fact that more consumers does not necessarily benefit the organization. This is an unrealistic expectation given the political economic circumstances, being those of late-stage capitalism. Even the most benevolent leader is constrained by their circumstances and hard power. You cannot resolve this through the consumer marketplace; you need to engage in politics one way or another.
Look, I’ve only seen two comments from you (with your very new account), but both of them are trying to introduce an element of political battle beyond the subject of discussion here. Not interested, sorry.
The Mozilla "Foundation" does not develop Firefox at all. In fact they cannot do so. Because that would be tantamount to a nonprofit devoting resources towards the service of a for-profit business.
Have you considered that they are doing some of these things to survive? That Chrome nearly killed them? Literally the strings attached from Alphabet are that they give you Google as a default search engine. Default, as in... you can change it... trivially. This isn't like they are installing a keylogger into your browser and using it to learn about your behaviors. It isn't like they are making their browser the default on your phones and devices. It isn't like they are focused on selling ads and generating long URLs that have tracking data attached to them. Sorry, I got a little side tracked, but I guess that makes two of us.
What made Firefox originally successful (and gave it significant marketshare against a preinstalled incumbent) was the features. They simply made a better browser than the status-quo at the time.
I don't understand nor approve their current strategy of trying to make a Chrome clone - even if they actually make a perfect copy, why would people use it instead of Chrome itself?
The only way for Firefox to survive and thrive is to differentiate itself from the incumbents and offer features that those incumbents can't offer due to conflicts of interest such as built-in ad blocking. Make a better browser and people will come.
At the moment there is no reason for any non-technical user to use it over Chrome, since in its default configuration it's no better (and being non-technical means they are not aware of add-ons/etc). Give non-technical users an actual reason to pick it over Chrome.
Worse, their current strategy is actually alienating their current (mostly-technical) users, effectively working against their already-tiny marketshare.
With magic money? Do you think mozilla employees and firefox employees should starve? Should they be making firefox entirely as charity?
The other browsers are made by a GigaCorp that extracts a tax from pretty much everything on the internet, especially if you want to do any advertising, and another Megacorp that has billions upon billions of dollars in cash just waiting for a need and also extracts 30% on ANY financial transaction using their hardware.
Imagine people pushing stupid hard for everyone to use Meta's MetaVerse instead of VRChat because VRChat once had an advertising ID in their code or something. Like sure, that's not awesome, but like, what the fuck is the alternative?
> With magic money? Do you think mozilla employees and firefox employees should starve? Should they be making firefox entirely as charity?
Well they've got enough magic money considering the salaries of their C-suite, so short-term needs are absolutely covered.
Long-term the Google subsidy will eventually dry up but focusing on an enterprise-grade browser (see my other comment here) is worth a shot.
Charity isn't actually that bad of an idea either, since Mozilla Foundation is actually a non-profit (but somehow owns a for-profit company that pays insane salaries to execs? Shady as fuck). Developing a browser that is actually focused on the user fits with their purported mission and will do more to improve the web than all the auxiliary projects/initiatives they've done so far.
> Have you considered that they are doing some of these things to survive?
How many Managers does one need to negotiate prices for VPN and Pocket? So far, the excessive management does not make the impression to be very valuable for making money, or even let Mozilla survive one day longer.
Of course do they need to make money, but at no point so far did they make the impression that they made any serious attempt beyond some lip service. Well, except VPN, which is just a resale of a popular service, with a natural chemistry for their philosophy.. And I'm not sure how much money their VPN really made so far.
You see, Mozilla is stuck in this limbo where people criticise them for taking money from Google, but also criticise them when they explore alternate funding sources (Pocket, Mozilla VPN, Firefox Private Network, MDN Plus) because they're not focusing on Firefox and Thunderbird. Sometimes literally in the same comment, as the one above.
In other words, HN crowd will shit on them regardless of what they do.
> where people criticise them for taking money from Google, but also criticise them when they explore alternate funding sources
What aggravates me is nobody is asking why do you need so much cash?
- Why has it become so big that it needs to spend 81M on Management payroll per year? [0]
- Why has it grown so big that it needs to spend 21M in external consultants per year? [0]
- Why do you need 1000+ staff to roll out an open source browser engine / browser and an email client?
Mozilla had almost 8M in no strings attached donations in 2021. If I go to most open source projects and say you can burn through 8M a year, most of them would agree they could build amazing things. This is even without taking into account Investment returns.
The cow grew too fat and too close to SF's money vortex.
That's a whole lotta words to avoid addressing the contradictions in your statements: do you want them to keep being funded mostly by Google or do you want them to venture out into other funding opportunities?
It's one or the other, you can't have neither. 8 million is tiny in comparison to who they're trying to compete with. Thank god that's not their only revenue source, otherwise they'd be dead a decade ago. I guarantee you Edge has a higher yearly budget than that without even having their own engine.
> If I go to most open source projects and say you can burn through 8M a year...
Go ahead and do that, nothing's stopping you. You've been beating this same drum for the past three years[0], don't you get tired of it? I'm begging you, do something useful for the future of the web instead of shitting on those that do. It doesn't have to be Mozilla, donate to FSF, Ladybird, Internet Archive, Wikimedia, and so on and so on. Get involved, be the change you want to see, create your own NGO that will do something better and I'm gonna be the first one to throw money your way. Just do something useful with your time instead of chasing internet points by behaving like a parrot.
> On thing I feel we are still missing is for FSF, Wiki, Archive.org, etc. to effectively gather enough cash to start lobbying in politics and in industry much in the same way Meta and Alphabet do.[1]
Guess who's been doing that? Mozilla[2], the same NGO you've been shitting on for hours in this thread! Pick. A. Lane. Stand for something that's not downplaying work done by others.
> - Why do you need 1000+ staff to roll out an open source browser engine / browser and an email client?
Writing fast moving mature Software for multiple platforms, is not something you can do with three nerds in your spare-time. Web browsers are highly complex, and Firefox has still many historical grown baggage to improve and maintain. And let's be fair, their software has a very high quality-level, even we can dispute on the details. Whether 1000+ people are necessary for this, I don't know, but considering everything they do even in their core-area, it's not something which can be done with small budget.
> If I go to most open source projects and say you can burn through 8M a year, most of them would agree they could build amazing things.
Amazing by their perspective, but not by the standards of end-users. And 8 Millionen, that's around 666k per month, meaning you have either around 3-5 well paid workers who are worth that price, or 10-20 poorly paid workers, who are probably average competent at best. And this is nowhere near the number of people necessary for such a big project.
I think you're mixing up annual and monthly salaries/employee expenses. At 666K/month the 3 "well paid" workers are costing 222K/month and the 20 "poorly paid" workers are costing 33K/month. I'd be rather okay getting paid this poorly!
I like where you were going with your comment but the math doesn't support the specific argument.
I think this is valid criticism, but it's more nuanced than the usual "mozilla bad because google money" and "mozilla bad because not firefox". Thank you for providing data.
Is there a more sustainable path where they don't rely on Google so much? Maybe? Developing a browser doesn't seem to be cheap. Do we know how many resources are used in Firefox versus the rest? I'd like to see a strong argument that Mozilla could be fully/more independent while still developing Firefox.
The thing is, even if they're badly managed today, they're still the best agent fighting for the open web. Apple helps, but I don't think they care much about it and would happily change if it were better for their bottom line.
Firefox would actually pay for itself. The Enterprise spends insane money on (potentially dubious) security products.
The browser is the primary interface to untrusted and often-malicious code, as well as a window to the outside world. It's the perfect place for security features that would actually make a difference.
Sell an enterprise-focused browser with built-in ad & tracker blocking (important for security), website restriction policies (which are currently implemented via various hacks such as DNS blocking), logging and data loss prevention and centralized management. Use that to subsidize the free version.
They won't even need to restrict the free version's features; all the code can remain open-source. Enterprise customers pay for the support and the hosted services (case in point - Okta has a successful business despite there being plenty of free, self-hostable alternatives).
Mozilla has a huge competitive advantage here - they have brand recognition (especially among IT folks which would help sell it to the enterprise), a competent and up-to-date rendering engine (no small feat these days) and at least some skill left to work on said rendering engine. They're in the perfect position to actually be able to offer a browser product (as opposed to a Chromium reskin which is all that the competition does).
Oh fuck off. How is Mozilla supposed to build a browser that outcompetes two companies that literally build all in one corporate environments? Firefox could literally provide regular oral sex to the CEO and still be less attractive to businesses than whatever shlock microsoft has bought and re-sold.
> How is Mozilla supposed to build a browser that outcompetes two companies that literally build all in one corporate environments?
Do any of those companies' browsers actually come anywhere close to the feature set I just outlined? Chrome is functionally a very good browser but lacks those features, and Edge is malware disguised as a browser that needs a full-time sysadmin to keep on top of the group policies to disable whatever bullshit "feature" they release every few weeks.
None of them have ad/tracker/malware blocking, logging or data loss prevention. Not sure if any have website/domain blocking capabilities. All of these are features that big enterprises currently use expensive third-party solutions (such as TLS intercepting proxies) for. A browser that has that built-in would actually be an upgrade.
> Oh fuck off
Shall we keep it civil? I think we’re both ultimately on the same side in wanting a browser that puts users’ interests first instead of adtech or dubious corporate interests (I’m not even sure of Mozilla’s current strategy because the user-hostility and annoyance of Firefox isn’t even due to actual ads).
Thanks for explaining. I can't help but ask why you believe these things have happened? What went wrong and what is the alternative to Firefox?
I am approximately as cynical as they come, and I'm not sure how Firefox could even exist if Google weren't keeping Mozilla alive (on life support), so I am intrigued by your criticism. I'd like to understand your viewpoint and what ideology is behind it, if any. In your view, what should be done?
Yeah, I'm asking myself the same questions, too. It's obvious they have been trying many options. Some of them worked, some didn't. I criticized some of them in the past but objectively, if I was in their position, I might have made worse mistakes.
That's actually pretty big to say. All I have to say is really just make sure you make criticisms rather than complaints. They need to be constructive (__actionable__) and less emotional. Otherwise the truth is that you may be just throwing fuel onto the fire rather than water. It's easy to get these two confused.
