Out of Chrome and Firefox, one is one big level of indirection further away from Google's influence than the other.
Out of Chrome and Firefox, one is one big level of indirection further away from Google's influence than the other.
Mozilla Foundation is purely a donation-fed nonprofit, and most things you associate with "Mozilla" are made by the Mozilla Foundation. In fact, even Firefox itself — the open source project — is made by the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla Corp is just a company that employs engineers to work on Firefox. (I.e. their job is to be ordinary FOSS contributors to the project.) Those engineers might have a profit motive to do things Mozilla Corp investors/shareholders like, but that's fine, because those engineers mostly aren't part of the Firefox steering committee. The Firefox steering committee (along with all other Mozilla projects) is composed of people who are employed by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation; and/or FOSS people external to Mozilla as a whole.
(ETA: fixed the names. I originally called Mozilla Corp "Firefox Corp" — and it really basically is, as Mozilla Corp doesn't employ people to work on anything other than Firefox. IMHO "Firefox Corp" would be a strictly-better name for it.)
There's three entities:
- Mozilla Foundation: accepts donations and spends them on web initiatives, does not spend them on Firefox
- Mozilla Corporation: is owned by Mozilla Foundation, employs Firefox devs, has search deals with Google
- Firefox software: is developed by Mozilla Corporation, is funded by search deals
From Wikipedia: "Mozilla [...] is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. [...] The community is supported institutionally by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation."