The State of Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

The State of Mozilla

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47 pointsatularora27 comments

This stood out to me in the sustainability document:

> As noted last year, the IRS has opened an audit of the Mozilla Foundation. We do not yet have a good feel for how long this process will take or the overall scope of what will be involved.

With so much flagrant fraud and evasion dangled in front of our faces every day in the news, it's great to know this is how the IRS is allocating its resources.

I remember hearing that the structure they have, where a for-profit company (Mozilla Co) is owned by a non-profit (Mozilla Foundation) is highly unusual, which of course is going to attract scrutiny.

Mayo does the same thing.

Ikea is also a corporation owned by a charity: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139?story_id=6919139

Wow. After reading that, I'm not surprised that they want to audit the Mozilla structure. To summarize: the charity that owns IKEA is almost certainly just a tax dodge.

IIRC the current structure is a response to the IRS audit. Originally, Google paid MoFo directly. Now Google pays MoCo, presumably MoCo pays taxes, and any surplus money can go to MoFo to be used tax-free.

I don't think that's the issue. I think it is more of a case of whether or not the corporation and the foundation really are two separate organizations. Until the new director of the foundation arrived (Mark Surman), the foundation didn't really appear to do anything. To the IRS, this may have looked like the foundation was only a tax shelter for the corporation and not a real thing.

Now there's all this Drumbeat Festival stuff, etc.. coming out the foundation. Clearly they are trying to position themselves as a non-profit that advocates for the open web rather than just a company that gives away a browser. Owning a corporation that gives away a browser is just part of that cause. Hopefully that's how the IRS sees it.

Sadly, I don't think a lot of the foundation sponsored stuff really ever links up with anything happening on the corporate side. At least from the outside, it still looks like the corporation wags the foundation and not the other way around.

Edit: Yes, the foundation does own the corporation.

Spot on. For added weirdness, they've split the parts of the child company into another one called Mozilla Messaging that gives away Thunderbird.

I definitely agree that the corporation appears to wear the pants in the relationship, but there is still a lot of link up that is organized by the foundation, especially with the Mozilla developer network stuff.

The IRS is probably a little concerned with a 501(c)(3) earning so much revenue from "search royalties". It has the feel of a real business not a traditional non-profit.

Mozilla, and organizations like it, weren't involved in blowing up the global economy either.

The IRS has its priorities all wrong, and really needs to focus its audits first on domains where fraud can and has lead to asymmetrically negative results, like the financial industry.

Once they take care of those, then they can turn their attention to companies and domains where the consequences of fraud are much more localized.

The type of fraud that brought it all down was more the domain of the SEC. Money is money to the IRS. There only concern is filling the coffers.

Like so many people I know, I've ditched Firefox in the past few months for Chrome. I loved Mozilla Firefox when it came out but the fast couple of versions they seem to have lost the plot.

I looked in "A competetive landscape" for some insight on how they would seek to be the best browser again.

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/annualreport/2009/a-compet...

But, all I see is horn-tooting. Where's the Mozilla I fell in love with?

I have been extremely impressed with the Firefox 4 betas. They have definitely restored my faith as it were. Previously, I had almost fully converted to Chrome myself.

I read that page and can't imagine what else they could possibly say. What were you hoping for?

I, too, would like to see Mozilla become more agile and cutting-edge. I still hold respect for them, though, as the organization that taught the masses "IE != The Internet".

I think that what is so great about chrome is the lack of useless feature and focus on the core ones (speed to name only this one). Mozilla, by contrast, seems to say Yes to everything and by any means become really slow. On my mac, I need to test on both browser and the speed difference between those browsers is phenomenal. Seriously, if firebug was on chrome, I wouldn't need firefox anymore. (I'm a bit sad about that)

> Seriously, if firebug was on chrome, I wouldn't need firefox anymore.

I'm working with the Chrome Dev Tools team to make them even better. Would love to hear more from you on what needs to happen. :)

Firebug has the option to show XHRs inline with the console. Also, in chrome console.dir prints the object collapsed. I find it annoying to have to expand the object in the console when clearly I want to see the object's properties.

Good call on auto-opening those objects-- I'll file that with the team. You can right-click in the console to turn on XHR logging.

What features does Firefox have that Chrome doesn't?

They might not be built-in, but the two things that sent me back to Firefox after using Chrome for ten minutes were:

- Chrome has no "Allow web pages to choose their own fonts" checkbox that I can uncheck. The web is a hideous typographic cacophony without this option.

- Chrome doesn't have the TreeStyleTabs extension. Chrome's default tab-handling is better than Firefox's default tab-handling, but TreeStyleTabs is just better.

Since I last tried using Chrome, Firefox 4 nightlies gained the new Tab Panorama feature, which is possibly even better than TreeStyleTabs unless you have a lot of tabs in your working set.

One important point that's not really mentioned in this document is that the increased competition is good for Mozilla's goals. Not only does it force us to work harder and better to grow Firefox's user base; it's also good for our deeper goals as a non-profit dedicated to innovation and openness on the internet.

Mozilla never wanted to just kick IE6's ass for years. A market with several high-quality browsers is a big part of what this community has been working toward.

The purple, blue and green-suited mascots in the foreground of the photo on the linked page are neat-looking.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gen/4784616521/

More photos featuring the same characters from the event:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fjoerfoks/5142119185/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fjoerfoks/5142111909/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fjoerfoks/5142708312/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fjoerfoks/5142103071/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fjoerfoks/5142096079/

It's fascinating that "underdog" is such a big part of their identity. Don't they make $80+ million a year in revenue?

Considering the skepticism that Canonical gets from the community, Mozilla's underdog positioning is really smart. (And now it's >$100M. Please donate!)

Let's look at the top competitors in the browser market, by revenue:

Apple: $65.2 billion/year

Microsoft: $62.5 billion/year

Google: $23.7 billion/year

Mozilla: $0.1 billion/year

Mozilla's revenue might seem high out of context, but we certainly are not going to win any browser wars by outspending this competition.

I was curious where their company pic was taken. It's Whistler, British Columbia. Looks gorgeous.

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