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Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

I switched back to Firefox a while ago, and love it. I keep trying to think of how it could be kept afloat once Google stops funding it.

IIRC they get $400 million annually. There are 200 million FF users. $2 each wouldn't be bad... But realistically only 1% of the users would donate and $200 is unpalatable.

Maybe another organization picks it up and runs it more efficiently or at a loss for advertising?

Or...?

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I don't really understand how a web browser needs 400m a year, that's a lot of employees

You can see how they roughly spend their revenue here [1]. Although it might be out of date now, it does highlight how expensive browser development really is at that scale.

[1] https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/15/how-mozilla-makes-money-a...

This does not break down how much money is spent on development of Firefox. I don't have references, but there has been many a discussion about Firefox development being only a small fraction of the whole, and the majority being spent on questionable endeavors (or perhaps I am thinking of Wikipedia?)

Do they really need 400m?

This question was downvoted but I think it's fair. There's a lot of evidence that Mozilla is pretty bloated as a company, and if they shed a lot of that bloat I see no reason to suppose they couldn't keep maintaining Firefox on a much smaller budget.

If you have it, it doesn't matter, you will spend it and scream for more. Look at wikipedia.

Wikipedia collected 162m in revenue (no ads!) and spent 112m dollars! I'd be curious to dig into what % of that goes to core wikipedia and what % goes ancillary projects. You'd have to dig very deeply into their finances to figure that out.

Firefox should set apart a large chunk of that 400m/year in an endowment intended for Firefox to continue and to be independent in perpetuity. That could easily be a multiple-billion dollar endowment by now and their spending and growth from that spending should be on revenue from that endowment.

If you're a company sitting on a large mountain of cash, then your finance team isn't doing its job. Money is there to be used, unless you happen to have some sort of monopoly. And Mozilla obviously doesn't.

Competing with Google and Microsoft funded competitors ain't cheap. And requires more than developers. People don't play that nice, at least not when there's an advantage to playing dirty. And there is.

One serious criticism of Mozilla is the fact that a major chunk of that money goes into the CEO's pockets and doesn't get spent on Firefox.

That single fact makes me reluctant to pay for Firefox. Unless I'm sure that all the money I donate goes to the right cause and not to a CEO's bank.

> But realistically only 1% of the users would donate and $200 is unpalatable.

I'd pay $200/yr for the privacy and control benefits of Firefox over google-controlled Chrome.

You might, but the majority of users, probably even a majority of the users on HN, would not. Unfortunately.

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