Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal
theregister.com
theregister.com
https://foundation.mozilla.org/fr/about/public-records/
Conveniently for them and curiously, they are only publishing the "consolidated" statements for the Moz Foundation.
But, for example, it looks like that the individual statements for the Mozilla Corp are never published or disclosed. That is very annoying as it is the main "entity" of the organization.
There is also no details about the split of costs and revenues associated with each main projects / services products / groups that are worked on for a given year.
So, for example, no one can have a clear idea of how much money is spent on dev, marketing or administration of Firefox versus Pocket versus VPN versus charities versus fellowships, etc...
If you look at the content of the limited financial documents, you can even have the impression that the foundation has no interest for the development of Firefox itself, and that they are just interested by it as a cash cow that generates (with the search deals) huge funds to give to whatever charities that Mozilla leaders are interested in.
With Edge, I'm under no illusions with regard to what I'm getting myself into.
Google and Microsoft both have the corporate predator instinct in their DNA.
That... Seems plausible given what departments were and weren't cut, and how opaque their spending is.
They took in ~$430M from, primarily, the search deals, plus a couple million each from some other sources like subscriptions is in there as income too.
They spent ~$280M on software development, $52M on marketing, $86M on administration and "general." With 1,000 (okay, 750) employees you're going to have some administrative costs. So it's mostly going to software development writ large, though you don't have reported the breakout of what's being spent on what projects.
As for the charitable stuff: the foundation took in $13M in contributions, and also about $13M from the corporation paying the foundation for the use of the trademarks (the foundation owns them). The foundation spent $18M on its charitable programs. Presumably this $18M is part of the $33M total consolidated spending on "other program services."
There's truth in the statement that a portion of Firefox's revenue is paying for some of Mozilla's charitable programs, but it's a very small amount relative to the amounts spent on development.
But it is really too limited because even if you know the overall 'spendings' for software dev, you don't know how much is used for Firefox, Thunderbird, pocket, random side projects, by dev for the foundation activities, by dev for charities on the Corp side.
And how the split is evolving years after years.
Also, you can't compare the administrative and marketing costs of the 2 structures to see if they are adequate.
And even the 'Foundation' budget might not be so much relevant as there is no assurance that the 'Corporation' is not funding some charities or fellowships requested by the 'Foundation'.
Can initial steps be taken to financially firewall Firefox development from the rest of Mozilla, as Thunderbird has done successfully? Start by moving the web standards advocacy brain trust to the separate org. Ask users to donate/subscribe. Begin the transition now, don't wait for the next negotiation with Alphabet/Google.
As donations grow, more Firefox teams can move to the independent legal org.
It's a shame Firefox doesn't sell a developer ready IDE, I'd subscribe to that myself if it means better MDN and that the dev tools team is better funded, and Firefox in addition to other donations from elsewhere, throw in a VPN subscription to sweeten it for most people. I'm ready to pay for anything that funds Firefox directly.
I've even seen some in QA who do have Windows just installing Thunderbird.
Disclaimer: Microsoft employee unaffiliated with Outlook/Exchange :)
Now you have GSuite and others copying that approach. In terms of clients, Outlook is probably a bigger Gmail client than Thunderbird within the enterprise due to the fact that business people in many places are only familiar with it. Yes, the protocols are supported in other clients, but going with something else is a in practice a peculiarity. I don't think that is healthy, but it's what's happening out there and impacting the potential of any other client.
In the early days, Phoenix knew what it was about and had a team driving a really focused product experience for what would become Firefox. This was a very important part of why Firefox had the impact it had.
Thunderbird always felt like a "me too" product focusing on email. In 2002, the set of criteria for global success (an integrated email and calendar experience) was already well defined. The product never got any razor sharp focus and an opportunity was squandered. It's hard to see how Thunderbird can ever achieve what it might have done.
It would have to be a fork with user support. Mozilla doesn't have much incentive to distance itself from its core product and even less incentive to provide a means by which their users can dictate what policies and products their financial support is for.
Mozilla has too many individuals in its organization, including its executive, who are not so closely tied to Firefox for this idea to succeed.
I think the OP's sentiment was that the name "Godzilla," is awesome and it would elate him to donate for the name alone.
Gozilla is proprietary networking software, nothing to do with Mozilla. So Mozilla can’t fork Gozilla.
Godzilla is a monster character and where Mozilla gets its name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)#/media/File:M...
I am not sure if that qualifies as an aspiration to be a predator.
That's exactly how it's done for the past 15 years.
Mozilla Corporation is in charge of Firefox development. Mozilla Foundation is in charge of advocacy. Mozilla Corporation is fully owned by the Mozilla Foundation.
Thunderbird development is handled by a different subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation called MZLA Technologies Corporation.
Yes, their naming mechanism is awful.
It's also wholly under the oversight of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Foundation has the ability to direct MozCorp to support its non-software development endeavours. Ie, by using Firefox push notifications to spread messages to users.
but the mozilla layoffs yesterday impacted both MDN and firefox. If the corp vs foundation is a distinction without a difference, why bother bringing it up?
Presumably many/most of those users are not happy with Google/Chrome/advertising/tracking.
If there is some sort of "threat" to Google from Mozilla, this is like Google funding antitrust think tanks. It is difficult to take Mozilla, the organisation not necessarily the work product, seriously.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/technology/global-antitru...
Neither the (NetBSD) OS nor the GCC compiler I am using, not to mention myriad other programs, needs to be supported by advertising. What makes the "web browser" different?
As the comments on the Register article point out, it seems $400 million/year is how much money it takes to develop/maintain a web browser.
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/08/14/mozilla_...
I wouldn't bet on that. A lot of non-tech-savvy people use Firefox because it was recommended by their nerdy friends.
If funding Mozilla resulted in no return, Google would have realized it by now. They have been doing it for quite a long time.
Conspiracy theory: the return on investment is that the active development of Firefox defends Google against anti-trust accusations.
Also, while lots of people gripe about Google adtech, they aren't angry about it enough to switch search engines. The company still has the best search in the business, specifically because they have a detailed profile on you. Furthermore, they're still moderately trustworthy by tech company standards. At least for me, I'd rather trust Google or Microsoft than, say, Facebook. My biggest concern with any new Google service is less "will I lose control of my data" and more "will this service stay live for longer than a year or two".
In six months to one year the fork will be in advantage over the original Firefox, and the new management will be able to focus on Firefox fork development.
Mozilla had approximately 1000 employees. If they are grossing 450M a year in revenue and 50% of their expenses are personal costs, tht means on average they are spending 225K per employee. for a non profit (even if its a non profit in the tech field and has to compete with tech firms for employees), that seems high. i.e. if one would compare them to Series A or B startups in SV, those would be reasonably high compensation packages (albiet without the stock option upside, but most stock options aren't worth the paper they are printed on, even for series A companies perhaps a bit more likelihood with series B).
Even if one says its 33%, that's still 150K per average employee expense. while that wouldn't result in a great SV salary, its would probably be competitive in most of the world.
just trying to understand where all the money goes?
> Mozilla spends as much as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on average.
Still doesn’t explain what they do with the rest. Presumably there are large infrastructure fees for things like Firefox Sync, which by the way just introduced storage limits:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/07/09/changes-to-storag...
But come on, how about saving some for rainy days?
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/#tax-... has some of the information you seek; see the various "Audited financial statements" links. The 2019 one will presumably be available once the audit (which starts on the tax filing deadline, so in July this year) is done.
> But come on, how about saving some for rainy days?
The 2018 financials show ~$520 million in net assets (assets minus liabilities) at the end of the year. The vast majority if this is in "cash" and "investments".
Because of this 90% rule, the company never set any salaries. After you passed the interview and they wanted to hire you, they sent your resume and job description to an outside consulting firm, which would then calculate what your salary would be. The consulting firm contacted you directly and let you know what your compensation would be if you accepted the job, and why.
It might be common, but it was very new for me.
Even though I am a developer and work for Big Tech, I got in through the backdoor via cloud consultancy. I looked at what it would take to even be competitive to not embarrass myself during the interview process and decided I wasn’t interested. I’m assuming that Netscape has similar standards . I can’t imagine that anyone who is good enough and disciplined enough to get through the process can’t get a job.
Mozilla doesn't just build CRUD apps. The problems its engineers have to solve are really hard ones, often completely novel.
I don't necessarily disagree with you about this, but the logic is kind of telling. If you're right, the only possible conclusion to draw is that non-profits shouldn't, and effectively don't exist in a modern capitalist economy. Why? Because a non-profit still has to compete on both the labor market and the commodities market, which means salaries about as high as their for-profit competitors, and making something they can sell (ideally to ad tech companies, since they have the real $, not ordinary people). Even if profiting off the business isn't supposed to be the motive, most people are going to be profiting. And perhaps it's no surprise that the people in charge of making these decisions are the ones who profit the most. Decisions are going to be made in almost exactly the same way as they would be made at a for-profit company. But this process of decision making is the thing we're trying to escape when we talk about something like Mozilla.
Maybe the problem is that we think of Mozilla as a typical case of non-profit organizational structure. Would an alternative structure be possible, for example Mozilla existing only to organize teams of volunteers, not to produce something that could be sold (i.e. to advertizers) but to make something good that people want? (Obviously, the people who run Mozilla have a strong material interest against ever finding this out.) I think we're imaginatively limited when we talk only about "businesses" as the fundamental actor in the modern world. Maybe being non-profit (even "anti-profit") should be about more than that.
Mozilla employs some of the world's best talent who could walk away any minute and double their salary. I'd even wager that it is a great service some of them do to stay where they are and not be lured by the big money they could be making literally anywhere else. The salaries they earn are more than fair, in my eyes.
I'm terribly disappointed that Mozilla lost so much talent not to attrition but to layoffs. Hopefully, they find newer sources of income and become financially strong again.
There are lots of companies I would take an employee from in a heartbeat. Taking a recent grad is a gamble in most cases.
That being said, I have to admit that I was very impressed with the work done by the two interns that were on my team (at $BigTech) who are leaving next week. But they had their own projects and weren’t on critical paths.
The manager who puts an intern on the critical path is a very bad manager.
Two bedroom rents in the cities nearby Mozilla Corporation's HQ are about 4.5k a month. That's about 54k a year just in rent. But you still need to feed yourself and family, pay taxes, send your kids to school, buy health insurance and save for retirement. In that context, 200k a person is frankly cheap; their competitors pay 2x that.
The means, according to the standards set by the federal government, the employee should make at least $162,000 in take-home pay.
The fed (Department of Housing, maybe?) guideline is that you should pay no more than ⅓ of your salary in rent.
That value is absolutely absurd. It seems clearly intended to apply to those making under 100k a year in rent. Take the extreme case. If the highest paid employee of Mozilla makes $3M a year, does that mean their rent should cost "less than" $1M a year? What does that even mean?
Money has a decreasing marginal utility for individuals. When you talk about 54k a year in rent on a $162k salary, that's over $100k left over after you pay for rent. In other words, more than twice what I and my partner made together last year, before we had to pay rent. And we have the same expenses as anyone making that $100k after the rent is paid. Food, utilities, childcare, and so on.
One person having over a hundred thousand dollars to spend after rent has quite a lot of money and should become relatively wealthy relatively quickly. The 1/3 figure just serves to hide this basic fact.
At one point I joked that I could buy an entire block of houses in Detroit. It doesn't matter if there is nothing for me to do there, no schools for my family, or preferred entertainment options/venues.
Pretty much everyone employed today is “in it for the money.” Whether for-profit or non-profit, we all want to maximize our income.
Which is why Mozilla exec leadership is still in place after a decade of losing market share to Chrome and flailing about trying to find a business model that works. Firing 25% of your company is a huge sign you fucked up. No shareholders, and only vague accountability to stakeholders. Moz Foundation board should fire her, though since she's chairman she has absolutely zero oversight.
In the 2+ years I've been at Mozilla, I think there's been almost complete turnover at the C-level.
For example, Chris Beard was CEO of Mozilla from 2014 through late 2019.
There's a frequent sentiment in these comment threads that Mozilla leadership is failing and facing no professional consequences, but I think that sentiment is misplaced.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
And here is an article about the same thing for those who want to skim through it.
https://www.idealist.org/en/careers/rethinking-salaries-and-...
Say you have thirty six developers. You need one manager for each six, and another for those managers. You need an office administrator, and at some point that person gets an assistant. You need a few IT people and other forms of maintenance.
I never really understood how they called developers overhead, when there’s all this that actually is overhead. Not a one of those people has billable hours, for any definition of the term.
That is the cost of these employees to their employer ("fully loaded"). The fully loaded cost is typically about twice the employee's nominal compensation, which would be ~$113k. This is about 60% of entry level comp at a FAANG company and about 35% of mid-career comp. [1]
Mozilla employs a lot of people who are willing to work under market rate to do a job they believe in, but I doubt they would be able to get and retain the people they need if they offered substantially less.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Apple,Amazon...
and yes, I called it personnel cost vs salary, because I wasn't talking about the fully loaded cost.
if people are willing to work at startups in SV for $150-$180K salaries (with significant experience, and I had enough offers from my time in SV to get a good handle on the market) those same people if they wanted to work at mozilla would earn similar amounts. but these are higher end engineers earning the $180K at a startup. mozilla has a significant number (article I just read said about half) of its employees work remotely.
I agree that outside the US comp is generally substantially lower. But given Mozilla's history and the people they would want to hire, I think it would be extremely difficult for them to move to a model where they primarily employ developers in cheaper countries.
That's going to depend a lot by how the company does comp. For example, equity was ~43% of my total comp last year, which means you'd need 1.75x just for for base+bonus+stock. And that's before considering taxes, healthcare, and office space.
Are you joking?
But similar numbers apply to companies that are competing for talent with the FAANGs.
Which I think solidly includes Mozilla.
See page 5 for expenses.
There are several comments here about Mozilla needing to save cash. The balance sheet as of 2018 shows 100+ million in cash assets.
Non-profits commonly warp to the point that they're spending virtually no money on their stated mission.
edit: It might be even worse if all salaries fall within a narrow range and all of the workers feel as if they are sharing in the success of the company: the economic motivation in that case would be to become a monoculture of revenue-maximizing behavior, where employees with opinions that threaten cashflow would quickly end up isolated and/or expelled. If everyone gets a salary bump after implementing a dark pattern, there will be a lot of people rationalizing the decision.
Don't non-profits usually have board of trustees that takes the place of stockholders/investors? They ought to be able to stop this behaviour.
If you want a non-profit that you donate to succeed, you should hope that they're attracting and retaining the skilled talent needed to achieve their goals efficiently.
Its pretty amazing they've been able to keep their street-cred alive this long.
Yeah, those cynical MBA guys who just couldn't stomach working for a homophobe... So what if he didn't want his gay employees to be able to marry?
/s, obviously.
That's where you are wrong, i thinks that everyone has the right to marry anyone else (within limits) BUT i also think that everyone has the right to express his believes, and that is why the WORLD and the Peoples are NOT black or White...can you imagine that i met a Christian Gay who was absolute against Gay-Marriages? Yes that exists and i'm ok with his believes, and when i was 16 i got smashed by a Black Neonazi, i was NOT ok with that...funny eh? In fact that was one of my biggest life lessons ever.
EDIT: And i don't say you have to accept those believe, but you have to accept the person who has those believes.
The Neonazi? Yes he was black(skin), maybe it was self hate maybe not..i really don't know, but what i knew he was really aggressive and no one liked him, maybe he just wanted friend's...that's what i think.
I'm not sure what you mean by "accept the person" with those beliefs. I don't have to accept anything. I must accept that they exist, obviously, but that doesn't really mean anything.
That you cannot kill him, mute him or trow him into a prison, that person has the same rights as you no matter what his believes are.
>or stand by quietly
Sometimes you should, sometimes you dont.
Mitchell Baker, current CEO, _is_ one of the founders. From wikipedioa[1]: "Baker was instrumental in the creation of the Mozilla Foundation"
Also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060372
>[...] She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and worked for Sun in the legal department. Netscape recruited her to help set up their legal department and that is how she became an executive at a technology company. She stayed at Netscape when it was bought by AOL to work on policy issues, but was eventually fired during a series of layoffs.
>The only "foundational" piece of Mozilla she authored was the Mozilla Public License.
Just a lawyer. MBA middle management. Not a founder. Right.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2003/07/mozilla-org-announces...
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2003/07/mozilla-org-announces...
I have. Your blanket statement, like so many generalizations in life, is wrong.
If we compare the 3 million ceo pay with a few different organizations we get wildly different rates. Compared to EFF CEO that get paid less than 300k, its an 10 times too high. Compared to the linux foundation, Torvald get a bit above 2 million so mozilla is still paying too much. Compared to IBM, and I would guess their CEO get way more than 3 millions.
What is the market rate for employees willing to work on free software and advocacy? What is the market rate of non-profit CEOs?
In 2019, the Linux foundation had $96 million in revenue and $71 million in assets [1].
In 2018, Mozilla's revenue was $450M [2].
So how could you possibly compare EFF CEO's pay to Mozilla's? If Mozilla's CEO performs 10% better than the market average CEO, that's significantly more valuable than if the same thing occurs at EFF.
The market rate of good CEO's doesn't simply decline because they work for a non-profit. It depends on the context.
[0] https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2018/#FinancialsModa...
[1] https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/the-linux-foundation,4...
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
I’m not in any way throwing shade on CRUD developers, as a developer that’s what I was until a few months ago, but the minute I saw the opportunity to pivot to make more, I did.
While the CxOs are still living pretty.
Hint:
They just made it up.
It is possible they made it up but that's entirely in line with the past deals they made. If this was a factor in the lay-offs then it should have been mentioned. No evidence from you, article claims a source told them this, for now I'll go with the article until other evidence pops up, after all it looks like they were spot on with regards to the timing of the deal.
Unless you are willing to tell us how much the deal is assuming you are privy to that info, then we'll use that figure instead.
Also: Why exactly do you believe this reporter who reported the previous day that the deal had fallen through?
Finally, and this is reaching, it would be terrible if it ever came out that the reason the Google deal went through is because Mozilla let go of 25% of their employees, specifically the Servo team. Of course that's total speculation on my part but the optics here aren't good at all.
Oh, and thank you for all the hard work on my daily driver.
I don't really have much to say about your speculation. You'll probably just have to wait until the next annual report.
The search engine deals are based on the amount of searches made by firefox users.
Many, many firefox users use firefox on a school or work computer.
The 'Weekly World News' was fiction, I hold the register to a slightly higher standard.
They thought that they didn’t have that ratio right which is why any company makes layoffs. You might personally think that companies have some sort of moral obligation to retain as many of their staff as possible, but the law and economics don’t share those views out of the box.
Additionally for not-for-profits the redirection of funds directly towards their ‘mission’ can again be argued as an ethical thing to do (eg for charities more money can go directly to whatever cause they are supporting) so ethics is never really a black/white thing.
I just hope that the 're-structure' wasn't dictated by the Google itself.
I believe that a viable strategy for them would be to instead focus on making Firefox better than Chrome on everything else but the Google Stack. If the Firefox experience is better on all other sites, Chrome will be gradually marginalized. It will be just a program that you keep open to do "work", similar to running MS-Office, while Firefox which will be considered the main web browser. This approach would keep the Google cash (from the default search engine deal) flowing.
But they should also work on alternative sources of income. A Firefox Account that syncs passwords (Lockwise), bookmarks (Sync) and provides file sharing capabilities (Firefox Send) is a service worth paying for. But they have to put some work on properly integrating all these features. And most importantly, they need to get rid from the lock-in mentality and support all the services tied to the Firefox Account on competing browsers by developing/porting the corresponding extensions.
~ someone similar to randoramax circa 2003-2004.
Worth noting that Firefox has won this battle before, and paved the way for Chrome/WebKit/Edge while doing so.
Chrome and Safari are much stronger competitors than Internet Explorer was then, so its understandable why Firefox is struggling. Being locked out of iOS doesn't help either, though I'm not sure it would make much of a difference even if they weren't.
They don’t need 51% and never will. What Mozilla needs is a solid 15/20% to buy a seat at the tables that matter (standards etc).
Btw, if iOS allowed any other browser, Safari’s numbers would go way down almost immediately. Way.
It's a whole different world today.
So I believe that Firefox has a good chance to gain ground. And Firefox is already doing great and feels much fresher, at least from Chrome. More importantly, we are a far-cry from the crippling incompatibilities of previous browser wars, which essentially required you to replicate the bugs of your opponents.
Also, a "win" for Firefox wouldn't necessarily be toppling Chrome from #1. E.g. a healthy market share percentage + being the top self-installed browser would be a win. Dominating the browser market may even hurt Mozilla Corp., as it could force an aggressive reaction from Google (reduced funding, or even buying them if they can get around anti-monopoly regulations).
Quite difficult when every developer I see is testing and verifying their product on chrome
What, of course, they've noticed and were working for already.
I use FF as my primary dev browser. The debugger lets it down and the JSON viewer in the network tab is annoying... but everything else is excellent. The CSS layout inspectors are particularly good.
Our test suite uses Selenium with Chromium, which allows me to cover both browsers to some extent.
The real interpretation is going to be somewhere in between, but the people choosing the direction the want the project to go are going to choose the interpretation that supports the decision that has already been made.
edit: The best way to kill a train network is to tear up all of the least utilized track. The vast majority of that track consists of the last few miles of travel, and although only 1% of people use a particular piece, 80% of trips use one of the pieces. If people are going to have to buy a car to get to the heavily utilized backbone, they're going to ask themselves why they're driving to a train rather than just driving to the destination. This leads to a decay of the backbone.
At a big pharma company in the bay area... that number was more like ~400k USD for a principle engineer.
So for Moz: ~286k USD per employee in the bay area is cheap, IMO... and I imagine their is a big distribution in that number across employee level and job descriptions.
It is true that for some skills Bay Area is the best and perhaps only available talent pool, even in high tech company like Mozilla that kind of talent is maybe 10-20 % of their overall workforce , for the rest there is cheaper and equally good alternatives available
I love you Mozilla, but please stop. Find a way to make money on what you do best: Firefox.
But that's not even possible. You can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which uses the money for whatever they like.
Personally, I think they're on the right track with the VPN service. VPN services are already something people are used to paying for, and one of the biggest issues with VPN services are trying to figure out who you can trust out of all the nameless shell companies out there. Mozilla is a trusted brand.
If the management of Mozilla can't find a way to profit from Firefox, other than leaching on the goodwill and branding, then I don't think they're sufficiently competent to full fill their roles.
And if I do trust mullvad, why wouldn't I buy access from them directly? The only reason to get the Mozilla VPN is, to help them to a little commission for ideological reasons.
Because far more people are familiar with Mozilla than Mullvad. Knowing they're the same service is just insight that can save a few euro.
You're right that they have indeed more brand recognition. Basically, the value proposition is: Out of all the VPN providers, we already did the research for you, to pick one that's trustworthy.
They have only spent effort on a reseller partnership till now, so if it fails to pickup not much Engg effort has been wasted either
If I were to use CloudFlare's VPN service of Comcast's DNS, I'd use it through Mozilla because their contracts stipulate extra protections.
"Mozilla has a legal contract with Google that prevents them from using our Google Analytics data for mining or from sharing it with third parties, among other privacy-protecting provisions."
If instead the opposite strategy is chosen, the one where Firefox is kept relevant, Servo and WASM would instead be strategically important.
This middle road is a risky one, which can lead to nowhere.
What's the use case for regular consumers? Is it about getting around geoblocking or using P2P file sharing without consequences?
Yes
It also makes you harder to track. If your ISP doesn't use CGNAT (ie. you have a dedicated ip), then your IP identifies you on a household level. Combine this with webrtc leaks or device fingerprinting and you can reliably identified at a device level. Compare this to a VPN server, which probably puts you in a pool of a few hundred/thousand people. If you rotate servers, it puts you in a pool of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
/s
Start with a VPN. Other products could be: password manager; secure storage like Dropbox; and one day even email. Anything which dovetails with the browser and includes privacy issues.
Having a well known browser brand is a huge asset to build upon.
Two ideas:
* Let us pay for Firefox development. I'm not sure how much that would bring in.
* Partnerships with news sites. You pay Mozilla, they keep 30% and use the rest to pay the news sites to not paywall Firefox.
Currently Firefox is basically funded by Google, how does that not clash with their principles? It's okay for take money from a company that directly profit from collection user data, just don't collect the data yourself?
They tried. Pocket and cliqz were attempts at that. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you weren't supportive of those efforts either.
Gears and valves are completely irrelevant to the vast majority of car users.
I'd sleep easier if Mozilla saved some cash for a rainy day. Is there really no way to maintain a browser with less than a quarter billion dollars a year?
I'd argue that Mozilla has a few more repos that need mending (i.e. Rust, Servo, MDN, ...) but if you pay an average of 100k$ salary and have like 10 techpeople per team plus some management/community management/project management you could do a rough estimate of <10 core teams * 15 people * 100k$/year + 5m$ for infrastructure/rent == 20m$>.
Even if you pay your CEO 2,5m$ afterwards, you'd still have loads of money left.
Not sure where all of it goes. And I'm a bit reluctant to just say "bad management" in terms of money allocation. Although I do hate this cut in workforce and feel like it's the worst management decision in tech in recent history.
That's just the foundation budget.
It doesn't include all the salaries of people working on the project employed by commercial companies (Collabora etc.)
Now with Google and Microsoft collaborating even more with PWA friendly features, the cash for a rainy day might not be of much help.
Isn't ironic, that after loosing PNaCL vs asm.js battle, Google is actually the main driver on WebAssembly?
You can maintain a browser for that cash (or buy Instagram or Whatsapp). But you can't maintain a bunch of execs siphoning money into the pockets while the org runs like a headless chicken.
I use DDG as main engine and it works for 95% of my search queries, you just have to be a little more exact with what you type. So if I know what I'm looking for, DDG usually gives me the better results. And if it's a general thing, the result are usually the same between Google & DDG (i.e. Who was the 42nd president or whatever). When I specially search for something that is marketed/an ad, then Google yields better results. For example "that shop around the corner". But for that you can just use DDG's bangs: "g! shop around the corner" will redirect you to Google Search with that query.
I work for Google, but nowhere near search. I'm just curious whether that's a difference in search bubbles, as I haven't noticed this problem.
To be fair, it’s most pronounced when I’m looking for something I found in the past and then try searching for it in the present. Using custom date ranges help a bit but it’s still biased toward big entertainment and “brands”.
So what it looks like to is that it doesn’t use historical rankings to show results but present rankings.
So let’s say I was looking for something sports related that in 2005 was on a regional site, today that site is relatively obscure so even if you limit date range it would down rank the legacy site even if back then it would have been at the top.
I was very happy when someone announced a project to make a thing that indexes your own search history. I believe that it had a Mozilla affiliation. But it never made it to the point I could use it (it might have worked, but I never found it?), which is a bummer.
How would you upload the content to said elasticsearch instance?
So I keep having to flip it on and off.
What's interesting is that a major complaint about Google, besides their data harvesting, has been about how their ranking algorithm operates and how it's abused. Maybe the problem is actually much harder to solve than people here make it out to be...
Of course it is, especially when have your own monetization interests to protect and consider.
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
My own free, private search engine with Google results.
The one downside for me is that iOS Safari doesn't support custom search providers, so I can't use it on my phone unless I switch to an alternate browser. That said, once iOS 14 lands I can set Firefox as my default browser and use it that way.
1. Long tail results. When DDG has few results, they completely ignore some of my terms to show me more, but useless results, even when I "force" terms. This is by far my number 1 complaint about them and I can’t fathom why they would do this.
2. Long tail results 2. While in 1) DDG has the proper results but just doesn’t show them, sometimes the result is not available to them. This is pretty rare though.
3. Google products. DDG sucks at giving me documentation (both API and help pages) for them.
I really have no problem with some abundance of affiliate spam, if anything, google is worse at that.
> for DDG, but I haven't been able to make it work.
My experience has unfortunately been the same; I often need to click through pages of DDG results to find the results I want, while Google tends to show it within the first 3-5 results. I tried using it for several months as my main search engine (last time I tried was 2019), and I basically just ended up typing `!g` in muscle memory when working.
For now, I'm using StartPage [1] which works quite well:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search.
> So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search
> results in order to remove all trackers and logs. The
> result: The world’s best and most private search engine.
>“The people who are included in the reduction are both true Mozillians, and professionals with high degrees of skill and expertise and commitment," CEO Mitchell Baker said in a memo. "This action is not in any way – not, not, not – a reflection on personal or professional qualities.”
>Mozilla's Servo team, which was working away on a new browser engine for Firefox in Rust, was closed down by the cuts. The group working on the Mozilla Developer Network – the essential bible for web devs and programmers – was hit hard, too, as were some of its security, policy, and tooling staffers.
How exactly would folks working on things like browsers engines, Security, policy and tooling not be extremely valuable for working on "products like its bookmarking app Pocket, its virtual social meeting rooms Hubs, and its $4.99-a-month VPN subscription service."?
Further the fact that $400-450 million dollars in new funding is announced days after large layoffs is says a lot about CEO Mitchell Baker's management and values. This CEO is the one who should be looking for a new job right now.
This is going to be down voted, but if I were running a software dev team charged with producing X and they spent all their time doing Y because they "need" a new tool I would question their value. Particularly if all the competitors are kicking our butts, and don't seem to need said tool.
So, rust is great and all, but is mozilla really the org that needs to ground up create a new langage/ecosystem? Outside of the tiny developer community using rust, what does it bring to the end users of firefox (you know the other few billion people on the planet who aren't developers) that couldn't have been done with just spending the time to fix compiler warnings/errors and enable some basic code analysis/linter functionality on the existing code base?
(which yes, I've fixed some bugs in firefox, its a giant mess, every time a new GCC comes out, firefox needs to have bugs patched just to run).
Also there were also far more than just Rust folks affected by this layoff.
I would yes “yes”. The other browser-makers all steer an ecosystem.
Safari runs on WebKit not blink, which has shared lineage but Google has no control over.
If Chrome adds a new feature, everyone else must adapt as well.
By the way, Chrome's market share has been trending down for a while. Only at 58% now.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272697/market-share-desk...
Firefox is inferior in all regards except privacy. People will claim it's just as fast as others, but even if it wasn't obviously false it wouldn't be enough. It should be undoubtedly better in all regards. With all the money of Mozilla they could've built a better, faster browser but they just didn't want to badly enough. And that's the tragedy.
For once I'm taking a not-conspiratorial line and think it's just all concerned parties wanting fewer bugs in software. But it does lead to an interesting line of thought for Mozilla...
Microsoft put a report out a while ago that memory safety issues account for over 70% of security bugs in microsoft products[1] which they attribute to unsafe languages in the codebase so it seems natural that they're interested in Rust.
[1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...
I am really thinking to switch from Mozilla Developer and Google search engine to something else.
Any recommendations?
"However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year."
so 400-450 million just from google.
per google, in 2018, their entire revenue was only 450 million.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=moz...
so if they are making more than 50 million from the rest of their country deals, it doesn't seem like revenue would have dropped that much