Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

ghacks.net

312 pointstiff148 comments

I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla, but I am still grateful for the work they do. It's nice to see that they have such a big resource pool to work with, as they are one of the few groups that I think genuinely cares for it's users.

It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

> It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.

...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it

I don't think Google provided much revenue in 2016; Yahoo was the search provider in the U.S. Mozilla is not tied to Google.

I wouldn't consider Yahoo much better than Google either though...

google was the default search engine in the rest of the world where it has the most market share except maybe Russia, also this was a move by yahoo in order to help with selling their business at a non negative price tag.

Google stopped paying Mozilla for that as their global deal expired and Mozilla signed with Yahoo.

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

> They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction.

IMO, this is a silly way to look at it.

Mozilla's existence is critically dependent on a single "customer" that requires the privacy-focused "do good" company to preset a user's default search choice to an anti-privacy track-you-everywhere company.

don't get me wrong, it's a great [and necessary] compromise for the money and being easily changeable. i hope firefox can regain user share so that google continues needing it.

That makes a lot more sense. Your initial comment without this context sounded like economic contact with someone reduced you to their level of "goodness", which I strongly disbelieve. That isn't to say that you shouldn't draw any lines about who you'll do business with, but this line in particular didn't make a lot of sense.

Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment.

How could that be a sound business transaction ?

Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.

> as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.

This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.

You're missing part of the picture here.

Yahoo has been the default engine in firefox... for the US market. it was still google everywhere else in the world except Russia where they went with yandex.

Mozilla got a lot of flak in Europe for not replacing google in the part of the world that mattered the most , where they have the most market share and where there is a good local alternative that actually respect privacy and was willing to do business with them (qwant).

And the reason for the yahoo deal is that yahoo was trying to sell and needed this firefox deal to better negotiate their own sale at a time when mozilla was actively trying to move away from google (well maybe not that actively).

To my knowledge there was not a time when google was not default search engine in firefox at all.

No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.

even if they don't have a explicit deal, they got search revenue sharing from google on those markets.

not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

> not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

Safe search/browsing has always been local.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing

That seems weird. There was no search engine that was willing to pay money to be default outside of US, China, and Russia?

There was no search engine willing to pay that would deliver good enough search results in those markets...

In Europe Google has a 90+% market share. At this point nobody even bothers to compete.

I suppose there is a depressing number of people that don't change shitty browser defaults to the better option.

It's staggering to me how that is a thing, but I routinely see people stung by the same malware attacks over and over, and they don't realize that streaming TV on sketchy sites and watching weird porn on an unsecured browser is like licking a gangrenous wound.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if Google sees Mozilla as a PR tool and a lightning rod.

Still whatever: I think we can all agree that the world is better with an alternative to Chrome.

That created an alternative to C/C++ (i.e. Rust) in the process of being an "alternative" to Chrome.

... and it takes literally three seconds to change your default search provided from google to any of the eight or so provided search engine, and a few more seconds to change it to any search engine at all.

Its a bit like the town sheriff being dependent on the main robber for sustenance. He/She is not going to be inclined to stop them.

Mozilla is happy to posture and trade on public goodwill and cave in to Google at every opportunity. This is a very convenient arrangement for both of them.

Now browsers have become so complex that only another well resourced corp can develop one, forgot about the typical open source project developing one. This is not an accident, gratuitous complexity is happening in other areas too. Guess who this benefits.

It's easy to support Mozilla if you are not a mega-corp https://donate.mozilla.org/

I think quite the opposite that they do not care for their users and blatantly disregard user feedback and users. From experience after having repeatedly told that I'm not significant/worthy enough for a variety of reasons for not using windows, not using gnome, not using pulseaudio, working with older people who have a hard time dealing with computers, having a use for disabling javascript, disabling spying telemetry and profiling, wanting to be able to install unsigned extension, being a power user, etc.

Each time I've been denied from mozilla it was justified by the fact that I was part of a niche segment of the user base and as such was not as good as a member of the large segment of the user base, in other words not really an actual user.

I may need help to see how it is a "do good" company, it does not seem very different from another company, it takes hundred millions of dollars out of advertising money coming from surveillance capitalism and one of the worst offender on privacy issues, tries to push their own agenda devised in a vacuum, deprives its users of freedom of choice, make its success on the work of volunteers but does not give them credit or respect, has marketing saying something but does not deliver. This is hardly "doing good" and seems quite in line with what to expect from a regular company.

I’m sad you have been downvoted so badly. Whilst I disagree largely, these criticisms are valid.

Don't get me wrong, I started by saying: "I tend to voice a lot of upset opinions about Mozilla..."

I have a lot of criticism about how they approach problems, and about how they treat their users. But I also think they are at least trying. They aren't doing the best, and they slip up a lot, but I get the feeling that they genuinely do want what is best for their users. Even if they sometimes don't execute that properly...

Why would you expect otherwise? If you're asking for some niche feature of course they'll blow you off. It isn't worth their resources developing features which only a small niche cares about.

Firefox is open source, so you could always put your money where your mouth is and write your own fork with the features you want if neither ff nor any of the other forks work for you.

Chrome needs at least some kind of a fragment of competition to keep them from stagnating. Lord knows neither of the other two (Safari and Edge) are even close enough to threaten.

I don't think stagnating is the risk with Chrome; I think Chrome running too far ahead and shipping things with only high-level buy-in from vendors (but no review of detail, or any plan to implement soon) is a much bigger risk.

Chrome is the client side of Google's play to control both client and server on the "Open Web" and, more broadly, to own the surveillance economy.

Maybe it's me having too high expectations with the amount of stuff Mozilla has been lining up and is releasing right now all within a short timeframe, but to me, it kind of already feels like Chrome is stagnating.

There's for example a handful of glaring issues that they just don't seem to care to fix:

- Every other month you hear of yet another Chrome extension stealing user data, impersonating another extension etc.

- I haven't been keeping up with it, but I don't think they ever bothered to fix the autofill phishing flaw that keeps on being posted here every so often [1].

- Their extension API is missing a few chunks that make it impossible to port NoScript and make ad blocking less effective.

- Chrome for Android still doesn't support extensions at all.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525

For those who will come in and complain about why Mozilla needs so much money:

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-... discussed just a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836027

"Mozilla ditched Yahoo recently however in favor of Google, two years before the five year contract would be up for renewal. The terms of the new deal with Google have not been revealed yet, and it remains to be seen whether this new deal will give Mozilla's revenue another boost in 2017."

Apparently Firefox 57 when it is installed tries to switch the users default search engine to Google.

Whether it asks for user permission to do so, I am not sure.

Do the terms of the deal actually require them to do this?

It did for me.

It certainly did not ask for me and just switched from startpage to Google. Also auto-installed the update (against my will) after I had voted to wait a few times, though that might have been autoupdate as it was on my work computer (have heard from others that it was not which I also suspect but I am too lazy to check). Mozilla is certainly losing trust with that, if it weren't for the lack of good alternatives...

There is a good alternative called waterfox (yup the name says it all) and of the recent update disabled the dreaded auto update thing trying actively to get rid of your legacy extensions.

https://waterfoxproject.org/

The auto update happened to me too and broke all my good extensions including All In One Gestures and NoScript.

How do you disable the auto update? For now I've manually installed an older compatible version.

A few years ago when Mozilla switched from Google to Yahoo, they updated Firefox on my Mac and changed my default search from Google to Yahoo. It was not a new installation, it was an upgrade, and I was not asked about the switch.

If you don't change the default search engine, then updates to the default search engine will affect you. If you explicitly change the default, then the updates should leave your choice intact.

As commented elsewhere: not true. I had to change settings (back) on quite a few accounts, so I'm certain of it. And yes, I did have StartPage as default.

I was slightly off; see callahad's description of the algorithm elsewhere in the thread for a better description of what happens.

But you've said what s/he said - you liked the default, but the default changed. That's what you both agree on. Had you not remained on the default search engine, your move would have been retained. This leaves the question of whether a past change first away from the default and then back would have been counted as a choice to be retained or as merely the default.

I had another provider explicitly set default search engine, but was asked if it could switch to Google during the Ubuntu update to 57.

Annoying.

Ubuntu used to have their own bundled add-on which may have affected those defaults

What kind of convoluted reasoning is behind this antifeature ? Please do not alter or change user space. Please consider how this kind of thing impacts the life of the many people who struggle with computers. Understand that this entails on what's left of trust one could still have with mozilla.

Or don't as I'm personally not affected and already have grown a deep mistrust for mozilla.

Think this is why Firefox took a dip in market share when they change search without asking.

In 2017 who’s still using Yahoo anyway for their search engine?

I was going to ask the same thing. But also why are people still using Google? I've been using DuckDuckGo for years and only use Google when I'm forced to (like in Chrome on iOS).

DDG's fine for some kinds of searches, but for search involving you as context (which can be useful) it is obviously not useful.

Because fairly frequently, I'll search for something on DDG, not find what I was expecting, and try on Google as a backup. And because in many people's minds, Google is search.

I thought the same thing, then I realized there was a significant selection bias: I was only looking at events where half the hypothesis (DDG fails & Google succeeds) is true. For example, how does DDG perform when Google fails?

That's true, but I wasn't thinking in that direction. I was just trying to answer "why are people still using Google?".

But honestly, if Google doesn't have it (down below whichever ad-driven first results I have to skip), it's a good bet that I'm not going to find it on other search engines either, unless some specific site indexes its own content better than the search engines do (archive.org comes to mind, for some things).

Of course, this is all colored by my search style and the topics I'm usually looking for information on.

If Google fails doubt it will be found on other choices. I will post something on a smaller site and Google will pick it up while the other search engines will not. So for me just easy choice is to use Google.

Put a !g in the front of your search.

DuckDuckGo is awesome.

Suppose I might as well configure my browser to use that pattern, instead of going directly to Google search, too. That would make it a bit more convenient to remember.

!g google

!gi google images

!define the free dictionary

!r reddit

There are a lot more, and I find them quite useful.

The one I use all the time is !m for Google Maps.

Can you give an example? I've seen this comment before but never have an issue with DDG.

I support google because they are enemies of microsoft/apple/facebook.

You are deeply mistaken if you really think those are enemies.

First apple is a hardware vendor of overpriced gadgets, totally unrelated to google market which is an advertising network.

Second the ship has long sailed on the feud between Google and Facebook, they now have ceased fighting and are each back on focusing on their own thing.

Do you have a recent example of google fighting microsoft ? heck even apple was friend with microsoft behind the scene, the fight was just for show. Remember how bill gates gave money to help apple stay afloat ?

Google is moving stuff from the Microsoft controlled desktop to the browser.

What are you referring to ?

google docs happened a while ago and it's been some time since microsoft has started moving its office suite to the cloud with office365.

Actually microsoft has been moving from the desktop to cloud for a few years now.

Two mobile platforms Android and iOS and you think Google does not compete against Apple?

Tell that to Tim Cooks high school

https://9to5google.com/2016/06/20/chromebooks-taking-over-ma... At Apple CEO Tim Cook's old high school, they are selling their ...

asking why people "still use Google" is like asking why people "still drink water".

Because the vast majority of users never change the default. Among the rest a significant part has an habit and it is harder to unlearn something than learn something new.

Because it works better.

You're missing the point, yahoo needed to be default engine in Firefox to help with selling itself at a certain price tag, that's about it.

It should only try to switch the user's default search engine if the user hasn't explicitly set a default search engine. You can verify this by install a Firefox 56 build from the ftp archive, explicitly changing the default search engine, and then letting it update to Firefox 57.

Not true - I had to explicitly remove Google (again) and set StartPage as default on all my installations. I think it happened with 57.0.1 upgrade though.

Hm, if that's the case, then it's a bug. If you could file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org it would be much appreciated. Even though it already happened we can try and ensure it doesn't happen again.

Apparently it is a bug. It works for search engines shipped with Firefox (such as DuckSuckGo) but not for others (such as StartPage of Qwant). See https://twitter.com/gchampeau/status/938757076213518336

I have a hard time believing this kind of happy coincidence benefiting their commercial partner could be a bug, it really looks like an intended feature.

It sounds like Mozilla just wants to keep users confined to a pre-approved list of search engines. Are these also business partners with Mozilla, like Google?

Here are some other HTTPS-enabled search engines to test. If I am not mistaken all have been mentioned on HN in the past.

    https://wiby.me 
    https://gigablast.com
    https://mojeek.com
    https://unbubble.eu
    https://ecosia.org
    https://searx.me
    https://symbolhound.com
    https://findx.com

It looks like a mistake, not malice.

you mean that the omission of the above lesser known engines was a mistake and they will soon appear? I grant that you're responding to a "response" that should have been a new thread, instead, since it's really a new topic - but it's not alleging the switch was malice.

What do you mean much appreciated ? My experience with bugzilla is that it is a place where users are ignored and told they are not part of a large enough portion of the user base to be significant for using linux, or for using alsa or for needing an option to keep the previous interface.

I do not dare going close to mozilla's bugzilla, it has been a waste of my time almost every time and taking abuse and frustration is not exactly an enjoyable experience.

But hey this does not really matter anymore as after over 15 years of supporting mozilla I have had enough of its utter nonsense and have now left firefox with the firm intent to never return and have stopped supporting anything mozilla while actively hoping it will fail and disappear, the sooner, the better.

Way too much disdain for the people using firefox, too much discrepancy between the marketing and the actual thing. Alienating long time supporter one by one is probably not the smartest strategy but hey what do I know, mozilla is making hundred more millions with a fraction of the past user base so they're probably successful by their own metrics.

I have no idea where you get all that. I've done a few reports on bugzilla, bugs in firefox on ArchLinux (so linux, and not a standardized setup). They've all been answered, and most have been fixed.

Sometimes, I've been told the setup I was using wasn't supported, but they'd accept a patch if I was willing to invest some effort in it. I did once, and the patch was indeed accepted.

Obviously, Mozilla cannot support every obscure platform, but then again neither does Chrome. I don't think your expectation match reality if you think that's the case.

I get that from using bugzilla from time to time since around 2005 maybe. Last time and one of the worst was the ALSA debacle. IIRC first time was about integration in KDE.

To recap the ALSA one, mozilla pretended ALSA had shortcomings it actually does not have (some things about edge cases of netflix and 5.1 audio or something) and it turned out it was Mozilla implementation that was so bad and pretty much abandone that no one at mozilla wanted to work on it. It was taunted at people complaining that for ALSA to stay they should do it themselves or find someone to do it, until someone came forward and offered to do it and suddenly it was too late so it was not happening. The other reason invoked was that a very little number of people did not have libpulse installed which it turned out was false (because most distro disabled mozilla's spying) and irrelevant (libpulse is often pulled as a dependency on ALSA only system). So suddenly it was the fault of distro packagers and people caring about their privacy had it coming because they took the extra step of disabling telemetry (which is not supposed to be enable on release channel anyways).

I supposed those bug reports are still somewhere in bugzilla, if you wanna look for them. The KDE integration one is one of the longstanding open ones, and openSUSE provided a patch for better KDE integration at some point but it was refused for some reason. you can find it on AUR https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-kde-opensuse/

Even a simple one related to the ALSA debacle was ignored, see they forgot to mention dropping ALSA in the release notes somehow they overlooked this "detail" but they thought to include a warning message with a link to an URL that happen to be broken. A bug report was filed to report this along with the correct URL but the fix that should have taken about a minute to implement had not seen the light of day after two weeks and AFAIK did not happen at all.

I sincerely doubt KDE, debian, arch, ALSA are obscure platforms, and turns out chromium supports alsa (IINM firefox is the only linux browser with a hard dependency on pulseaudio).

To be honest with time I have learned not to expect better of Mozilla or more like to expect mozilla to not deliver on its marketing promises and to dismiss user feedback.

/edit

here's the recent iteration of the KDE integration bug, this one has been opened for 16 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140751

here's the main one for dropping ALSA and making pulseaudio a hard dependency, it got locked and discussion continued on google groups somewhere: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056 there are other with several duplicates such as: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661

I can't find the main broken URL one with the duplicates, but it seems this one is about the same issue and had been marked as solved (Only took 3 months to fix a broken URL which was the only was to get details on why the browser suddenly stopped playing sound): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345439

To my knowledge there are many other examples in bugzilla in the last 10 years, maybe I've been unlucky and found myself in the worst of bugzilla making my experience not representative of the actual thing, but from what I gathered around on mozillazine, HN, distro forums and some other places my experience is not out of touch with what others have to say about theirs.

Judging from your comment, it sounds like the only bugs you filed are "YOU CHANGED THIS AND BROKE ME CHANGE THIS BACK NOW" kind of bugs, and probably for things that were consciously and intentionally done. That's not going to go anywhere because, quite frankly, they're not bugs, and most of the bug filers/commenters are unwilling to do anything constructive, like offer to maintain something.

My experience has been, rather, that Mozilla has had one of the most fantastically responsive bug filing systems. Actually getting bugs fixed in a timely manner is a different question, but that's independent of bug tracking systems.

Well maybe you should not judge from comments then.

Reporting bugs and HN discussion is obviously not the same, at all. I know how to make bug reports and have not had bad experience like those on mozilla's bugzilla anywhere else, well maybe on gnome bugzilla and occasionally here and there because over 20 years of reporting bugs you are deemed to have the occasional bad experience.

I'm not saying your experience was bad or even close mine, I'm only talking for myself here. Maybe I have been impacted with some of the most controversial bugs and you've not, maybe I'm actually more in a niche segment of the user base than you are.

Anyways thanks for judging and misjudging my person based on assumption, it always nice to be targeted by passive aggressive online message from a random stranger.

The fun part in your comment is that constructive minded people do not expect or ask of bug reporters to offer to maintain something for they understand that reporting bugs is actually very constructive in itself, a helpful and much needed activity. Instead of antagonizing bug reporters try working with them, as "we're both in this working together to improve something for everyone". Assume good faith instead of malice and to understand that this an actual person reporting the bug and cut the patronizing, it will help. If you do not feel capable of doing that, just say nothing it will be more constructive.

The bug reports you linked elsewhere are not bug reports--note that I make a distinction between bug reports and feature implementation requests. For feature implementation requests, demanding that developers drop everything to implement features is absolutely not constructive (and yes, that does happen). Even for bug reports, shouting at increasingly shrill intervals is not constructive. I'll admit that I did it once when I was younger, and when I was finally pissed off enough to try to fix it myself... I found out that it was far more complex than I had thought.

On my machine it stayed with ddg. shrug

Me too.

It did ask me, and only once, when I updated to 57.01 or something.

Maybe? It certainly continues to raise the cost to Google for the search traffic provided by Firefox. When Firefox switched to Firefox it boosted Yahoo!'s organic share of search [1], which if it held up at the 2% speculated would represent about (16.8B * 2%) 336M searches in Feb '17 [2] attributable to the Mozilla deal. One would need to work backward from the revenue per thousand (RPM) to see what sort of ROI that gave Yahoo!.

The story at the time was that Google walked away from the deal when Mozilla wanted more than they thought their traffic was worth, and now Google is back 2 years before the contract expires makes me wonder if Mozilla was more accurate in the relative value of their ability to generate search traffic. So now I'm curious to see how much Google's traffic acquisition costs have gone up (TAC) with this switch.

[1] https://www.digitalreachagency.com/blog/firefox-deal-boosts-...

[2] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases...

My handwave for the previous Google deal was that Mozilla was getting paid about 10% of the money Google made from Firefox searches. There's a lot of money there.

How that amount is calculated and how transparent it is (to Mozilla or similar partners)?

Google did not walk away from Mozilla in 2014. Mozilla walked away from Google.

I'm not privy to the search deal, but my understanding is that this is driven by our internal user research and metrics, which show that a significant number of users have a search engine other than what they prefer or expect. In these cases, users usually choose to directly navigate to their preferred search engine to search, instead of using Firefox access points. That’s a poor user experience, so our focus here is on ensuring users have the defaults they want.

The decision tree is roughly:

1. If the custom engine is one of our default options, keep it.

2. If the custom engine was set by an add-on, keep it.

3. If the custom engine uses HTTPS, prompt the user to actively choose by opening about:searchreset, and do not prompt again after the user has made a choice.

4. If the custom engine uses insecure HTTP, silently reset to the default.

You can open about:searchreset yourself to see what the prompt looks like.

Code at https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a928be5dacc3b544...

Re 3.: I think that's a terrible promtp. The prompt says, my settings might be outdated and I should switch back to Google as a search engine. What's the reasoning here? Why is implied that the settings are outdated if I use a custom search engine? No other settings are checked/affected by this prompt, so why frame it as a settings issue at all?

Re 4.: Why silently, why not a prompt here?

Using an HTTP based search engine should be explicitly opt-in, imo. Moving it to https by default seems like the right choice for non-technical users.

There's another firefox prompt which also annoys me.

Firefox sometimes asks me if I want to do a factory reset, clear all my settings and add-ons, "to make the browser faster".

I believe most users will find this question absurd. And Mozilla give it a pretty baity name, too. "Refresh Firefox". What if someone clicks Yes by mistake?

If you want me to take you seriously talking about revenue, don't show me half a balance sheet.

Links to the audited financial statements are available at the bottom of https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/

NB: The chart further down is in _thousands_ of dollars!

I think the point is they should have shown a cash flow statement.

You don't need a cash flow statement to show revenue. And if the cash flow statement is prepared using the indirect method (start with net profit, and adjust non-cash items) it may not even show revenue at all.

You don't, but it works a hell of a lot better than a subset of a balance sheet at a single point in time.

Probably, but sometimes both will be equally useless.

Why isn't a consolidated cash flow statement enough?

Mozilla has $500mm in assets, most of which is fairly liquid, and less than $70mm in debt.

Furthermore, they increased net assets by about a third in one year, and they cleared $160mm in profit from their $520mm in revenue.

They are in a very good financial position.

I imagine that if AOl had known the value of a browser back when they spun Netscape out, they would have made a different decision.

Given Mozilla’s revenue and market share, it means Chrome is a multi billion dollar product.

With the size of Chrome's market share it isn't just money; it's power too. Google has enormous control in this area, that is to say, the internet.

I would expect a company like Facebook to worry about this near-monopoly and help out the competition, or possibly add to the competition by making its own browser. That's a browser I'd never trust.

Facebook does have their apps though, which are independent from Chrome. But most people use Android, and Google controls that too.

Yeah, I'm often surprised Facebook hasn't published their own browser yet. Though then again I guess their other strategy is to move people away from browsers.

Wow, those income and expense figures are incredible! Am I the only one that didn't realise just how big Mozilla is?

I am surprised as well, especially the point that they must own so much furniture that it is specifically mentioned in their assets sheet.

Are Investments a tangible, liquid asset?

Or is this line item from subjective valuations, like owning equity in private unicorns?

That would seem to make a big difference in financial health.

Firefox, please I need my tabbed browsing back! One click and boom it opens a new tab after clicking a link, opening a bookmark, rendering a search result and etc!

Tab Mix Plus made Firefox my default browser yet it’s not supported and or there’s new substitute :-(

I reverted back to the previous release but then it seemed After a week to start displaying hacked behavior. Started opening tons of windows with each click.

Pale moon, Waterfox, maybe Basilisk.

Firefox as we knew it is dead, mutilated by parents that wanted something else than what they ended up with.

Get over it, firefox is dead. Mozilla does not care the least about you or your needs.

Your best option right now is waterfox (yup the name says it all), it has no plan of dropping support for "legacy" extensions and even has plan to offer its own add-on store to save the legacy extensions.

https://waterfoxproject.org/

As a TreeyStyleTabs fan, I am 100% happy with Firefox 57.

As you probably know, no other browser (other than ones based on older Firefox versions) supports anything like Tab Mix Plus. And there's a reason for that.

Mozilla should do Ubuntu.

Yes, and also continued to lose market share!* I wish they would stop changing the user interface so frequently.

* https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp

I beg to differ, I wish they would not remove the previous interface when introducing a new one and offer the user the freedom to choose the one she prefers.

This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox: depriving the user of the freedom to choose and forcing change upon them.

This constant interface change is affecting many of the older people for whom I provide technical support. They all relied on classic theme restorer extension to be able to use their browser and dropping support for the "legacy" extension gave them a hard time and the solution has been to drop firefox for waterfox or to drop the computer to get one of those tablets.

I agree the unnecessary change is tiresome. Unfortunately some influential folks prefer to treat UI like fashion.

That said, there are times when UIs must change to accommodate new interface devices like touch screens. And maintaining both old and new forever is impractical.

> This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox

Looking at this page, you seem to have more than one ...

Yes I do, accumulation over time.

Though most of the other I have are mostly affecting only me and my personal life. This one is affecting my professional life in a significant way as I have spent years pushing firefox to my clients cross platforms as a champion and good example of floss, and each of these changes not only impact my credibility with my clients but significantly increase support requests in a limited time period. I'm also deeply unhappy about this particular one because I witness first hand how it impacts the daily life of people have a hard time dealing with computers (older people, handicapped kids or all kind of computer illiterate people) and robs the of their confidence and freedom to use their computer. I have a hard time dealing with these inconsiderate short sighted decisions as if everyone lived in California was breathing tech.

This mozillazine comment sums it up better that I could : "Mozilla devs are making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum." and I cannot agree more with it.

I do have other major gripes but these are only towards mozilla not firefox. I actually thing that mozilla disappearing would be possible of the best thing to happen to firefox, without the arguably stupid decision making at the top firefox could be a top notch browser, or could have been sadly.

It's hard to argue that Mozilla has not mismanaged firefox when the former mozilla CTO says so in a blog post where he also mentions that mozilla head of marketing uses google chrome everyday.

Right now there are 81 comments in this thread and bigbugbag has written 18 of them.

I know that people can be salty about open-source projects, because you sort of feel like you can get involved and they're supposed to be the good guys and then you notice that billions of other people just as well want to get involved, or at least be considered, and that your opinion is in the minority and they can't make the impossible possible.

But man, how can be you this persistently salty about it? Even just writing all of these comments must have taken at least half an hour.

You're the type of user I learned to avoid once I started shipping software.

You think in a major internal overhaul that the old interface is just a matter of building a quick "[ ] Old, [X] New" radio button dialog.

And then you make a major, disproportional stink like how you've written 20 comments in this submission. Zero awareness through and through, and it's just not worth engaging with you beyond saying "well, I don't think the product is for you." -- A conclusion you seem uninterested in figuring out yourself.

I don't think you have the slightest clue about how hard it is to just keep old crap around when you're trying to evolve software. Else you'd know that either (A) it's not worth it or (B) the ship is simply sailing in a direction that you don't care about, so there's no point whining on the internet.

At some point you need to leave the movie theater so that others can enjoy the show. Leaving 20 comments in this submission just shows that it's an emotional thing for you. Time to move on. It's just a web browser.

I love the movie line, and I too long ago learned that user feedback about software I'd written could be nonsense or pure ego, BUT - I think you missed the "other elderly" point at the heart of the complaint. I'm over sixty and I'm constantly stunned by how computer illiterate other sixty-year olds are (and yes sometimes thoroughly flummoxed by UI changes myself.) If you're twenty such changes are trivial to overcome - you just ask your buddies what they did. Above sixty - your friends have no idea. Google usually isn't a solution for such general questions, either, particularly if a "magic term" is needed that they won't know. The young turk UI programmers, seem to assume everyone has better than 20-20 eyesight, single-pixel hand-eye coordination and a lot of background knowledge and UI intuitions that elderly people don't have - because they may update their equipment and software only every decade or two!

I suspect the answer may be a secondary, vastly simpler interface that can be maintained as a fallback for the elderly, without breaking the bank.

W3Schools isn't a terribly reliable source for market share, since they only measure their visitors, which is primarily webdevs. And Mozilla offers a competing service, MDN, so webdevs primarily using Firefox probably also have a preference for MDN.

Besides that, they don't separate between desktop and mobile. Marketshare on mobile hardly reflects user opinions, if this is what you were trying to imply.

Other sources, like NetMarketshare, show rising numbers on the desktop.

While this is true, it is unfortunately hard to deny that Firefox has been losing a lot of market share, and that the situation on mobile is especially bleak.

That said, keeping things the same would obviously only sustain that trend. Hopefully Firefox 57 and above will help them reverse it. I'm hopeful though, if it doesn't, I don't think there's much else they could've done.

Well, i've been running firefox pretty consistently since I switched from Netscape all those years ago. I've tried pretty much every browser out there, and have a fair number of them installed but came back to FF...

But 57, is likely the end. Yah, they fixed it. Its a little faster, but it still seems to consume RAM/CPU until my whole machine grinds to a halt. Previously, when it did this I could be assured that it likely wasn't consuming more than ~2GB and a little more than 100% of a core.

So, unless they fix this decade long RAM/CPU consumption problem they have, i'm getting rid of it. I don't mind having to kill it every couple days, I just can't stand having to wait 30+ seconds for the task manager to swap in so that I can kill it. At least on linux I can constrain its resources, but i'm not going to run it in a VM (like I do java) just to have some control when it goes all piggy.

(some of this is likely my own fault, and happens with other browsers too, since I haven't managed to cure my tabitus habit of failing to close tabs i still have interest in).

> (some of this is likely my own fault, and happens with other browsers too, since I haven't managed to cure my tabitus habit of failing to close tabs i'm still have way interested in).

I have the same affliction as you, but extensions have helped a ton. I use The Great Suspender and Session Buddy on Chrome: I can use the former to "close" an entire window of tabs and then dive right into that group of tabs with a couple of clicks. The only downside has been that I must have an Internet connection to restore the tabs.

Does Chrome fare any better?

Chrome has a serious issue with too many tabs open in the same window. Eventually the tabs cannot become any narrower and will ovwrflownto the right with no way to scroll. This is a known and unfixed issue since day one. So the Chrome UI does provide a sort of limit on the number of tabs you can reasonably have open and comparison becomes difficult. I use Vivaldi which is also based on blink and has a better UI for many tabs. This browser has way worse memory consumption than Firefox and I believe the results are similar to what you would get with Chrome.

I haven't seen memory or cpu problems, short of ~200 tabs open on a ~8 year old computer.

Why is someone just sharing their personal experience so heavily downvoted?

The Mozilla Treasurer and Chair are still taking $1M each, right? Why is this scandal going unreported?

Are there really no experienced managers willing to run this potentially great organization for $300k/year? Why would we want people who are willing to take so much money from an open source project?

Why are there 1200 people at Mozilla and so little product to show? Why do they constantly spend all of their revenue? Why is it continuing to lose marketshare? Why is there no oversight or improvement after years?

It appears a lot like Mozilla is a corrupt organization taking bribes from its competitor (Google) to not actually compete. There may even be a need for government intervention.

Mozilla spends all of its money, so it's in a perpetual state of needing more. Google probably makes it known that any serious competition would result in the money faucet being shut off.

A competent and uncorrupt Mozilla could have built a Google Search competitor by now and even better browser. It's disappointing.

When making bold claims and assertions, you should cite facts.

honest question: what exactly in what he said are not facts ?

Do mozilla not have 1200 employees and top people being paid 1M $ ?

Mozilla has around 1050 employee's give or take a dozen (at the Mozilla Corp at least, Mozilla Foundation has a few as well, but is accounted for separately afaik).

Some top executives and board members are paid 1-3M according to documentation out there, sure. If you compare to other companies where they'd be in charge of as many people at a similar level, this is substantially under what they could demand.

As an employee, they pay us well with great benefits, though I could likely make 2-3x as much at another company (just like the execs). I rather like Mozilla's mission and my work though, and the work-life balance is nice.

My comment was meant as a reply to bigbugbag below, not the original question. Not sure what happened there.

This is something I wondered about for quite some time now. How come so many employees and so much spent money with so little to show for it.

Reading the reason for dropping alsa support or refusing to have better linux integration it seems mozilla is short on dev time and resources which they clearly are not.

Do you remember when they got 10 000 people donating money to pay to place an ad for firefox 1.0 in NY Times while at the same time they had revenue in tens of millions of dollars ?

Mozilla had a strong stance against a content blocker in firefox for what ? 15 years ? Whatever they said to justify this position it is obvious that the actual reason is conflict of interest with their main source or revenue.

Isn't it strange that while their user base has been divided by 5 their revenue has been up by more than a hundred millions ? Even more so when this revenue is based on number of users being sent to search engine of this commercial partner.

Has anyone on HN and explanation for this ?

Yeah, massively overhauling their code base over the last year really is nothing to show for it.

Their user base has not been divided by 5. Their market share is way down, because they are not growing with the pool (not surprising given their lack of success in Mobile), which is a different metric.

They are paid for the number of eyeballs they send to their search partners, and it's still a few hundred millions users. Also, it seems that they were underpaid compared to other companies like Opera and Apple were getting per user.

I don't think anyone can really blame the decision, but they should be more straightforward where their loyalties ultimately lie. The fact that one of the best known alternatives to chrome and so called independent browser is in cahoots with Google is a sad state of things.

If you have the skill required to manage a 1000+ people org, you could easily make a lot more than $1M. Blame the ridiculous salaries in the Bay Area.

And no, there are no experienced managers who want to work in the Bay Area for $300K. You can fairly easily make more than double that if you're able to run a 50-person group.

As for "spend all their revenue", I suggest actually reading the financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...

"A competent and uncorrupt Mozilla could have built a Google Search competitor by now"

That... is funny. From launch to two years in (that's all I can find), Bing cost $5.5B[1] - or 11 years of Mozilla's revenue.

[1] https://www.geek.com/news/bing-has-cost-microsoft-5-5-billio...

1. I blame a corrupt board of directors for not making Mozilla a great organization that can attract great altruistic leaders that don't need to take so much.

2. Mozilla has blown almost every dollar it has ever earned. Hundreds of millions wasted on failed projects and useless activities. No one disputes this.

3. Mozilla revenues should be growing every year and not never reliant on a competitor's goodwill. And just because Microsoft wastes billions on something (or claims to for tax reasons) does not mean that is the fundamental cost. See: SpaceX.

I think Google and Yahoo, etc, have swung and missed a few times, too.

You don't want them to be dependent on a competitor... neither do I, but with "antimonopoly" (really market power, bundling and patent misuse) laws having not been properly enforced for decades, those few companies still alive to bid, are the only "market." Given the almost zero marginal cost of reproduction of software, it's been a perfect storm. Please give Mozilla credit for being one of the rare counterforces.

SpaceX has been able to snag lots of government contracts designed to increase competition, true. Similar government contracts to build public internet infrastructure under a BSD license haven't been offered, but they might be a great idea - however such proposals aren't part of the political scene right now. If you want that, by all means push for it politically. That makes more sense to me than punishing the messenger (that search monopoly is a problem), i.e. Mozilla.

Funny that you'd mention the BSD license: an overwhelming amount of early code released under the BSD license was paid for by government grants.

Of course, surveillance infrastructure remains heavily funded: "Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research." https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

I was thinking of things like the BSD implementation of the TCP stack, and the MPICH implementation of the MPI message passing standard.

> It appears a lot like Mozilla is a corrupt organization taking bribes from its competitor (Google) to not actually compete. There may even be a need for government intervention.

Yes, clearly I only pretend to work nights and weekends as cover for shadowy secret Google payments.

Yes, and I'm clearly blaming programmers at Mozilla for the problem ;-)

I hope you find Mozilla better run that it appears, and I hope you can do more great work there, despite its flaws, but it seems to me like you don't have the leadership or organization you deserve.

Arthur C. Clarke's law - sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic (and therefore easy.) So just wave that magic wand faster, darn it :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com