Mozilla revenue 2021 increases 20%
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
To be fair, you are correct in the mobile space, and that is now the lion share of devices, but Firefox does have a healthy 7.5% usage in the desktop space if the metrics on this page are to be believed.
“2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.”
From the App Store guidelines.
It’s not a choice thing.
*without jailbreaking
It sucks that Apple does this but it doesn't actually change the fact that Firefox use is at 3%.
I'm sure you really tip the scales.
> The people who actually care about browsers (and, perhaps, "anonymity", or "doing the right thing") have all largely moved on from Chrome.
Well then clearly most people don't care do they?
Isn't that the point? Firefox isn't having a significant impact. They aren't achieving what they say they want to.
Safari's having much more of an impact.
So what? Is there a limit to the number of browsers in the world?
What's the point in arguing who is better balance keeper?
Why get so upset about someone whom you are apparently certain has no impact?
But a datapoint of one is meaningless.
Google wants to avoid resembling a monopoly on browsers. But they also don’t want competition. Keeping Mozilla on palliative care may actually be worse than letting it collapse, the monopoly becoming obvious, and regulatory bodies forcing corrections of the situation.
(but who am I kidding, that won’t happen… maybe in Europe)
Maybe things have changed, idk.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865, contains all the links.
>Mozilla restructured its security functions "to better ensure the security of Mozilla and its users," Mozilla said of the cut. "Some positions were eliminated as a result of this effort, but the teams responsible for the security of the Firefox browser and Firefox services were not been impacted."
Seems relevant.
Their reasoning, whether or not you care to accept it, was that the executive level salary was nowhere near competitive in the market to hire or retain someone talented in that role.
The CEOs compensation was ALREADY huge and this just ballooned it.
The Servo team was objectively more important than the CEO feeling fairly paid when their expectations are so warped to begin with.
Can’t speak about the CEO salary but if they can generate more revenue than the servo team I suppose that’s a potential win?
Going back to main idea though: Google indirectly funded Servo and rust development by supporting a competitor.
It always helps to work together :)
I'm rather against being sold out, and suspect most Firefox users feel similarly.
Offering services essentially entirely separate from Firefox could work, but comes with substantial risk. Mozilla will be more trusted than some fly-by-night startup, at least among the techie crowd, but also can't just burn investor money and start over until something sticks. (Ironically, the only thing that comes to mind here for me would be a privacy-oriented email provider.)
The only maybe, theoretically, kind-of, plausible route I see working would be more of an open-core-esque model, where their paid offerings essentially implemented extension-like capabilities that would benefit substantially from deep integration with the browser. Think things that would otherwise be impossible with the extension API, or have substantial performance improvements if only Firefox internals could be messed with.
But. So many buts.
I'm not even sure their organization is setup to allow this kind of thing. I'm sure their codebase isn't, especially if it might require special considerations to comply with their charter.
Mozilla would also gain a bunch of perverse incentives to restrict or cripple base Firefox, which would bite them every time they added a new paid offering. For example, just how much more flack would they have caught for the new extension API if their own offerings wouldn't have to abide by any of those new limitations?
And it seems inevitable that they'll have to spend some serious effort to minimize the amount of browser fragmentation issues that would now occur within Firefox itself.
After all of that, the extensions most likely to get me to buy in - literally and otherwise - to the whole concept, would be ones that would seriously strain Mozilla's relationship with Google and many other companies. Things like deeply integrated ad-blocking and other privacy-focused features would be most likely to get me to not only accept the practice but even spend my money. But step one of weening themselves off Google's money probably shouldn't be "Burn bridges with Google."
So... yeah.
What else is Mozilla supposed to do? I'm not overly enamored with Mozilla these days. Increasingly I feel I'm sticking with them less because of anything they've done, and more because of what Google's done. But still, I find it hard to blame them too much for treading water.
Of course they're not such a great fit if you're hoping for a slightly shady company in a country with favorable laws to conveniently 'lose' various legal requests. But other than that, if you had to guess if $slightly-shady-company or Mozilla was actually upholding their promises...
*Who were funding and have neutered to the point where they've lost 90% of their market share in the last 10 years. Have fired all their developers and are spending the money on spending that looks a lot like what GFX did.
Mozilla is a dead weight around the neck of the internet. The best thing that can happen is that it dies and something new, run by people who actually make things, is created again.
When was the last time anyone was excited about a firefox update?
How exactly are they dead weight?
There is a lot of room here to criticise this project. It seems to be off the rails, and it is likely to go further off the rails.
Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015. I'm not seeing how this is can be made to an indictment of Mozilla corruption.
Charitable foundations aren't supposed to be corporations. If we've got an entity like Mozilla running a healthy balance sheet it should be a public corporation that we can all be shareholders in. So yes, I am upset by that too although that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
They've set up a situation where they are going to be corrupted. A billion dollars in assets attracts charlatans and they won't have sufficient defences to stop the money being siphoned off into pet projects and general shenanigans. There will probably turn out to be fraud involved sooner or later.
> ... Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015...
As far as I care, their purpose is to make a good web browser. This is absolutely an indictment of Mozilla.
>They've set up a situation where they are going to be corrupted. A billion dollars in assets attracts charlatans and they won't have sufficient defences to stop the money being siphoned off into pet projects and general shenanigans. There will probably turn out to be fraud involved sooner or later.
It is very confusing what you want - you want Mozilla to be publicly traded so that you can share in its success (and open itself up to being corrupted), yet have an issue with it not being publicly traded?
Do you just want to be upset?
But I don't think you can dispute the basic point here - there is a huge honeypot here to attract people with bad intentions, and they have failed to use it to promote any useful aims given the magnitude of the amount involved.
> Do you just want to be upset?
You've got me, I was bluffing. I'm not really upset. I just think it is bad form, philosophically. The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit. If they want to make money they should start a normal company and have shareholders.
They may attract people with good intentions as well - or do you have to be starving to be pure of heart?
PS: I don't see how they haven't promoted "any useful aims" - Firefox continues to exist, Rust exists, Let's Encrypt exists, and they are healthy. Those seem like promotions of useful aims.
>The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit.
Profit is just what is left over after what needs to be paid for is spent. Would you rather they have no money left at the end of every day? How do you imagine that that works?
The UK seems to disagree, for example: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-and-res...
I looked up Let's Encrypt on Wikipedia by the way because I didn't remember that being a Mozilla thing - they don't appear to come under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation financially and their budget is $3.6 million according to the sidebar, and a literal rounding error if we stick to integer percentage points of Mozilla's revenue.
In the open source world? If they needed a billion dollars to get people doing good work the whole thing would have collapsed in the 90s. That is the theme I'm going with - order of magnitude 3 OSS projects for a billion dollars is such a bad project/$ ratio that there is no way the Mozilla Foundation will turn out to be competent and honest. If you go to the wiki page [0] you can see a somewhat limp list of second rate projects that nobody uses. They are lousy stewards. They started with an impressive product.
Firefox with 30% market share and enough money was much more effective at getting useful results than the Mozilla Foundation with a billion dollars. People with good intentions will be trying to copy that old project that worked, not the modern Foundation that is floundering. It is unlikely they are attracting competent well-intentioned people or we'd be seeing better results. Their management is no good.
Actually they chose Gecko in 2015. Chromium came later on.
What is your best argument for why others should accept such a standard?
> Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that,
Any link to data justifying such a claim?
Blender: ~1 million (2020) Libreoffice: ~1.3 million (2021) Apache: ~900k (2017) Debian: ~340k (2019)
One can argue that browsers are exceptionally complex (even linux distros like Gentoo that build everything - including the kernel - make exceptions for firefox due to its complexity) but even considering that, the figures are staggering by comparison.
To be absolutely clear on this we have a situation where:
- most Mozilla advocates & supporters are so because of Firefox
- most of Mozilla's income comes from Firefox
- most of Mozilla's income does not go towards Firefox development
- Mozilla continue to provide financial supporters with no means to donate directly to the Firefox project
- Mozilla's income is 2 orders of magnitude higher than any comparable charitable foundation
Add to that the decline in Firefox's userbase & the stewardship of the project becomes really difficult to justify/defend
Secondly, I don't work for Mozilla, so unless you know of some source more granular than their very high-level annual reports, the specific & data you're talking about would need to be sourced internally. Mozilla don't publish any breakdowns on a per-project basis: for all I know the Firefox team may well be operating at peak financial efficiency.
If we're to speculate, the closest thing Mozilla publish to a per-project breakdown is under activities in their expense report where they have a "software development" category costing ~250 million (not Firefox software development, all general software development). That's still very high compared to other similar open source projects, but it's just over a third of the gp's quoted income figure. So you've got 2/3rds of that figure to look at before you even get near the idea of Firefox dev wastage.
I was responding to this line - "> Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that,". It's in my earlier comment. Its fine to criticize, but at some point you have to "provide the goods", so to speak.
If they had put a substantial chuck of this money in income producing investments for the last ten or twenty years (instead of executive perks), they could have a nice annuity right now. Could be called an "endowment."
It's completely outrage driven and feeds on fearmongering: "google bad, we good, give us money".
Having spoken to people who work at Mozilla they say the management is pretty toxic which makes me think they are being hypocrites with their message.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/how-to-delete-s...
Then they have an apparent advert for Disney?
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/disney-and-pixars-turni...
Remember when they forced an a creepy advert for some random TV show into everyone's browsers?
It's all just a big unhinged.
> With our lives so online, our digital space can get messy with inactive and unnecessary accounts — and forgetting about them can pose a security risk.
This is a good message about web hygiene. It does feel a bit negative, though, you're right. I wish they'd focus on more balance between "big tech bad" and "try this cool open source alternative" because there are SO many cool projects out there to help you manage a music library, or personal streaming, etc.
Indeed and yet they don't have any problem taking hundreds of millions of dollars from Google in exchange for letting Google be their default search engine.[1] Talk about cognitive dissonance.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
basically the browser version of the "you critize society, yet you have a phone" meme.
Just this competitor though...?
Apple and Microsoft certainly don't exist purely by virtue of being kept around by Google.
Well, they did, but they let it stagnate.
Competitors was honestly a mistake on my part because you're right. Just this competitor as Firefox is the only independent competitor left with significant usershare at all.
Is there any search engine that approaches the quality of Google search results yet, or ideally, improves on them?
They spend 111M out of 340M on managerial overhead, or about a third. This is on the higher side, but not too much out of line with the general industry (not saying that it's a good thing, but that's how the world works).
I have to wonder though, how much of that money is actually spent on Firefox? 530M in royalties, how much is that per FF user?
Unless anybody is smoking something really strong and suggests something like baidu search or yandex search.
Edit: and 43M less on software engineering.
They did lay off Servo and a Security team not too long ago.
It was $2.7M in 2020, now it's $5.6M in 2021.
With FF marketshare keeps dropping, idk what the hell Mozilla is doing anymore.
They have 750 employees, yet Firefox (their main product) barely sees any impactful updates.
Either there is a lot of bloat, money mismanagement, or just bad leadership (which covers the previous).
But that’s in the nerdiest, most niche programming circles, so I can’t believe its impact is actually measurable.
When Google makes it contingent on their annual "donation", they will.
First time I read about it I thought "how on earth has this not been the standard way to handle cookies since browsers were invented?"
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Revenue has grown, though. While I worked there, it fluctuated mostly based on how well Google was able to monetize ad clicks. Mozilla is selling more of their own ads since I left, and that seems to be paying off.
Wishing them the best, always :)!