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Comment by edg5000 | Hacker News Reader

I agree, I use Firefox everywhere. But we must not forget the following:

In 2011 Mozilla income was 85% derrived from Google, through the primary search engine deal. Around a billion was paid over three years as part of this deal at some point. Appearantly there was bidding by Microsoft for making Bing the default, which pushed up the pricing.

So every time Mozilla speaks out against Google, it is a bit awkward, since they are biting the hand that feeds them. I suppose they could take a deal from Microsoft, Yahoo or even DDG (or Baidu!), but without interest from Google I presume the funding would be lower. Quite an interesting situation. Thank God both Firefox and Chrome are open source. That is at least some small degree of insurance against potential freedom-limiting shenanigans by tech giants.

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Yeah, I mentioned this in another comment: it's really a shame that Mozilla spends the majority of that money (often poorly IMO), instead of putting it into an endowment fund or something similar that would leave them in a much better position for the long run.

It actually takes a lot of people to build and maintain a modern competitive browser. Not paying those people and instead investing the revenue would end the project in short order. Mozilla is already outgunned on staff by the other major browser makers and you want us to cut staff to save more? That's not realistic, IMO.

I don't disagree with you, but Mozilla takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year and I don't think they spend all of that on Firefox - possibly not even the majority of it!

I think that if they cut back on some of the other projects in the short-term, they could ensure the foundation was funded for the long-term - to support Firefox and anything else they deem valuable.

Perfect is the enemy of good. If you postpone or skip using Firefox because of this reason/excuse, you are even more a part of the problem than you probably realize ;)

Mozilla's opposition to such initiatives matters only because of their users. And there are no other significant fighters in this ring on _our_ side, unfortunately.

> That is at least some small degree of insurance against potential freedom-limiting shenanigans by tech giants.

Chromium being open source is a red herring. The web is a protocol between clients and servers, and having the ability to fork the client doesn't matter if all the servers ignore your fork and continue speaking the protocol dictated by the dominant client. You need to fork the entire protocol, which is to say, you need to fork the entire web.

Mozilla should really double down on Mozilla VPN. Judging by all the NordVPN ads on every major youtuber's video, the profit margins must be astronomical (or their business model must be suspicious). It should provide a good income stream for Mozilla. The entire space is shady and filled with dubious actors. It is just begging to be disrupted by a trustworthy organization.

I can't think of a single candidate other than Mozilla that has the technical expertise, experience, trust, reputation, resources (not to mention non-profit structure) built over 20 years defending the open web. I don't understand why Mozilla is dragging their feet on this. They should have owned the entire VPN market by now. VPNs aren't cryogenic rockets.

Don't Mozilla just resell Mulvad?

Yes. I don't know why though. I don't understand why they can't host and run their own OpenVPN instance. Or why MozillaVPN is only available in 30 countries (mine not included), 4 years after announcement. Or why i haven't seen a single ad for Mozilla VPN anywhere on the web other than in mozilla's homepage. Or what they are doing with their 800 million dollars in annual revenue.

VPNs are barely gonna make a dent in their income. What do you think the market is for VPNs? 99% of people don't know what VPN means.

Of the remaining 1%, most don't need a VPN for anything personal. It's literally just a handful of geeks who need VPN (mainly for secure piracy, or accessing different regional Netflix catalogs), and maybe a few dozen journalists living in dictatorships.

Mozilla needs to gut spending. Get rid of all the diversity /hr/evangelism people bloating their employee headcount and funneling people's donations to divisive causes like that org that doesn't hire white men (forgot the name but it made me cancel my monthly donation to Mozilla). They shouldn't need more than 25% non-technical staff, and the purpose of those 25% should be exclusively to support the technical staff. Instead they became another bloated Big NGO that's basically welfare for liberal arts majors in California.

VPN is not only for geeks. VPNs (free ones) are popular in Russia because Instagram is blocked.

But, conveniently, Russians cannot use paid VPNs anyway unless they accept Bitcoin.

If there is little money in VPNs, how is it that they are funding half the youtubers out there, potentially outbidding everyone else for the adspace.

Is the Mozilla organization generally responsive to social media? I have had a hard time trying to figure out where the organization responds to publicly, generally.

I would love to have a Mozilla hosted email and calendar service from them, for example. I don't understand why they aren't branching out into more common web citizen needed services.

Yet the development of the browser is seeing a smaller fraction of that income than most people believe.

Then let's make the situation even worse until it resolves itself.

Not really. Firefox is a large majority of Mozilla and Mozilla's spending. Feel free to read over our financial statements to confirm this.

> every time Mozilla speaks out against Google, it is a bit awkward, since they are biting the hand that feeds them.

Not at all. Controlled opposition has to pretend being an opposition.

Chromium is open source. Is Chrome completely open source?

Almost all in Chromium is open-source, there are some missing pieces though.

For example, the per-device configuration (GPU acceleration enabled or not, etc) is not there, the statistics collection infrastructure, the WebAPK minting code is not there, etc.

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