Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

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This is my personal opinion only, so take it with a grain of salt.

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Mozilla can't save Firefox. It's not that Firefox can't be saved, but rather that Mozilla as an organization is not capable of doing so.

My take is this - Despite a history of being relatively privacy friendly, the vast majority of funding for the organization comes directly from Google (To the tune of ~90% of their total funding, straight from Google so that Google can maintain its position as the default search in Firefox).

That leads to insurmountable conflicts of interest - They claim they are for people and for privacy, but they are funded almost entirely by Google, and have to secure search deals for their continued existence (the latest just this year: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...).

In this light - I believe it actually BENEFITS mozilla to keep Firefox relevant, but not good enough to replace Chrome. If the browser genuinely becomes good enough that customers start switching from Chrome to Firefox en mass, Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.

While they've dipped their toes into paid products... most of them are not particularly relevant or compelling on their own merits (that's not to say they're bad, just not all that innovative or likely to drive enough revenue to replace the 500million a year google is paying them)

So not only do I not believe that Mozilla is capable of "saving" Firefox in this way, I don't believe they have the right incentives to even seriously try.

The unsaid part is that Google keeps Firefox alive so that they are not hit by anti-trust over in-browser search. That's why FF will always trail Chrome, its the designated loser. If it weren't for anti-trust, Google would have bought out Mozilla years ago.

You can't buy out an open source project. If Google bought it out and started messing with it, there would be an immediate outcry and Firefox would end up with the community fork winning out, just like it happened with MySQL and OpenOffice.

A browser would not do well as a volunteer driven open-source project. It is simply too big and too complex to be able to get by without full-time paid developers.

I don't follow this line of reasoning. Google pays Mozilla for the search traffic. If Firefox overtook Chrome in market share, Mozilla's position would become even _more_ favourable and they could command a larger sum from Google. If Google threatened to end the agreement, Mozilla could simply walk to Bing/DuckDuckGo or whoever else.

Right now, Google pays more than Bing or DuckDuckGo.

Perhaps Google just has mountains of spare cash, which DDG doesn't. Perhaps Google gets extra value as FF both provides search traffic, and keeps competition regulators off their back. Perhaps Bing thinks if FF changed the default search engine away from Google, 95% users would change it right back.

But if Bing is only willing to pay 70% of what Google pays - could Mozilla survive losing that much income? Or would it trigger a death spiral, with less money meaning less development meaning lower market share?

DuckDuckGo's total revenue is less than 20% of Mozilla's.

As far as paid products go, it seems like a no brainer to offer paid plans for privacy focused email or other g-suite-like collaboration services. It seems like Mozilla needs additional revenue streams.

>Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.

And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.

It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.

I think Google is fairly arbitrarily deciding how much money to give to Mozilla (and it's roughly their current OpEx) - They aren't just buying search, they're also buying "competition" in the browser space.

Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they still prefer it. Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is: https://www.pcgamer.com/firefox-is-conducting-a-study-to-see...)

So there's a tension here that's beyond just enterprise deals.

Last - that deal didn't actually work out very well for Yahoo, and that was when Firefox had nearly 15% of the browser market (vs ~8% today).

>Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is:

Or Mozilla is running market research to show that X% of users don't care about the default search to drive up the price. As the deal isn't arbitrarily Google deciding an amount to give them, it's a bid between the major search engines. Just like it is for Safari.

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