Why?
And I mean sure, it's not a bad goal, but they are letting Firefox die in the process. And once you lost your place at the standards negotiating table, then what? They already capitulated when Google decided that browsers needed DRM, and I don't see them stopping WEI either.
I don't need yet another VPN. I need a strong browser to rival Chrome.
That’s a charitable interpretation. An uncharitable one would be that, due to flaws in American 501c3 legislation, at least some people involved in Mozilla view their job as a sinecure. Capture of a non-profit for personal benefit is a longstanding phenomenon in the USA.
No. Capture of a non-profit for personal benefit is key to the express purpose of non-profits in the USA.
The foremost function of non-profits in the US is to displace community organizations, especially democratic worker organizations which remotely resemble a workers' political party like you can find in other countries. Non-profit law in the US makes such organizations perfectly illegal while providing anti-democratic resemblances of them instead.
People get so pissy about mozilla pissing away a few dollars here and there, or maybe is full of people just extracting cash from the brand.
Meanwhile google as a corporation extracts a tax on pretty much anything that touches the internet.
But sure, mozilla is the bad guy here and we shouldn't use their browser......
It’s more than a few dollars. For years now, the majority of the Mozilla Foundation’s income goes to things other than developing Firefox.
Meanwhile firefox works well, is plenty performant, and isn't pushing "standards" that try to make it easier to advertise to me, against my wishes. Why would you use the browser made by an advertising company instead?
The Mozilla "Foundation" does not develop Firefox at all. In fact they cannot do so. Because that would be tantamount to a nonprofit devoting resources towards the service of a for-profit business.
HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for
1) being financially dependent on Google
2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox
3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous
Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming through the backdoor from other business units. The money can't just magically appear, so either they make it from Google, from Firefox, or from alternative services.
- They are (recently) very top heavy for a non-profit foundation and are spending non-negligible amounts of money on C-level and execs
- Ideologically I disagree with them taking money with strings attached from Alphabet
- (Personally) their recent trends of UX with 'dummyfication' and mimicking chrome is a terrible loss
I am approximately as cynical as they come, and I'm not sure how Firefox could even exist if Google weren't keeping Mozilla alive (on life support), so I am intrigued by your criticism. I'd like to understand your viewpoint and what ideology is behind it, if any. In your view, what should be done?
> Ideologically I disagree with them taking money with strings attached from Alphabet
How would they get more sources of funding if not exploring other projects? Firefox would never pay for itself.
I totally agree with the exec thing, however.
In other words, HN crowd will shit on them regardless of what they do.
What aggravates me is nobody is asking why do you need so much cash?
- Why has it become so big that it needs to spend 81M on Management payroll per year? [0]
- Why has it grown so big that it needs to spend 21M in external consultants per year? [0]
- Why do you need 1000+ staff to roll out an open source browser engine / browser and an email client?
Mozilla had almost 8M in no strings attached donations in 2021. If I go to most open source projects and say you can burn through 8M a year, most of them would agree they could build amazing things. This is even without taking into account Investment returns.
The cow grew too fat and too close to SF's money vortex.
[0] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
Is there a more sustainable path where they don't rely on Google so much? Maybe? Developing a browser doesn't seem to be cheap. Do we know how many resources are used in Firefox versus the rest? I'd like to see a strong argument that Mozilla could be fully/more independent while still developing Firefox.
The thing is, even if they're badly managed today, they're still the best agent fighting for the open web. Apple helps, but I don't think they care much about it and would happily change if it were better for their bottom line.
Well the C-suite sure isn't writing code, so that's already a few million going to "the rest" as opposed to Firefox.
It's one or the other, you can't have neither. 8 million is tiny in comparison to who they're trying to compete with. Thank god that's not their only revenue source, otherwise they'd be dead a decade ago. I guarantee you Edge has a higher yearly budget than that without even having their own engine.
> If I go to most open source projects and say you can burn through 8M a year...
Go ahead and do that, nothing's stopping you. You've been beating this same drum for the past three years[0], don't you get tired of it? I'm begging you, do something useful for the future of the web instead of shitting on those that do. It doesn't have to be Mozilla, donate to FSF, Ladybird, Internet Archive, Wikimedia, and so on and so on. Get involved, be the change you want to see, create your own NGO that will do something better and I'm gonna be the first one to throw money your way. Just do something useful with your time instead of chasing internet points by behaving like a parrot.
> On thing I feel we are still missing is for FSF, Wiki, Archive.org, etc. to effectively gather enough cash to start lobbying in politics and in industry much in the same way Meta and Alphabet do.[1]
Guess who's been doing that? Mozilla[2], the same NGO you've been shitting on for hours in this thread! Pick. A. Lane. Stand for something that's not downplaying work done by others.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24654676
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36981953
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/bills?c...
Writing fast moving mature Software for multiple platforms, is not something you can do with three nerds in your spare-time. Web browsers are highly complex, and Firefox has still many historical grown baggage to improve and maintain. And let's be fair, their software has a very high quality-level, even we can dispute on the details. Whether 1000+ people are necessary for this, I don't know, but considering everything they do even in their core-area, it's not something which can be done with small budget.
> If I go to most open source projects and say you can burn through 8M a year, most of them would agree they could build amazing things.
Amazing by their perspective, but not by the standards of end-users. And 8 Millionen, that's around 666k per month, meaning you have either around 3-5 well paid workers who are worth that price, or 10-20 poorly paid workers, who are probably average competent at best. And this is nowhere near the number of people necessary for such a big project.
I like where you were going with your comment but the math doesn't support the specific argument.
How many people do you think work on the Chrome team? Then include companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Igalia, and others that contribute to Chromium.
The browser is the primary interface to untrusted and often-malicious code, as well as a window to the outside world. It's the perfect place for security features that would actually make a difference.
Sell an enterprise-focused browser with built-in ad & tracker blocking (important for security), website restriction policies (which are currently implemented via various hacks such as DNS blocking), logging and data loss prevention and centralized management. Use that to subsidize the free version.
They won't even need to restrict the free version's features; all the code can remain open-source. Enterprise customers pay for the support and the hosted services (case in point - Okta has a successful business despite there being plenty of free, self-hostable alternatives).
Mozilla has a huge competitive advantage here - they have brand recognition (especially among IT folks which would help sell it to the enterprise), a competent and up-to-date rendering engine (no small feat these days) and at least some skill left to work on said rendering engine. They're in the perfect position to actually be able to offer a browser product (as opposed to a Chromium reskin which is all that the competition does).
Do any of those companies' browsers actually come anywhere close to the feature set I just outlined? Chrome is functionally a very good browser but lacks those features, and Edge is malware disguised as a browser that needs a full-time sysadmin to keep on top of the group policies to disable whatever bullshit "feature" they release every few weeks.
None of them have ad/tracker/malware blocking, logging or data loss prevention. Not sure if any have website/domain blocking capabilities. All of these are features that big enterprises currently use expensive third-party solutions (such as TLS intercepting proxies) for. A browser that has that built-in would actually be an upgrade.
> Oh fuck off
Shall we keep it civil? I think we’re both ultimately on the same side in wanting a browser that puts users’ interests first instead of adtech or dubious corporate interests (I’m not even sure of Mozilla’s current strategy because the user-hostility and annoyance of Firefox isn’t even due to actual ads).
What are those strings, apart from being default search engine?
I don't understand nor approve their current strategy of trying to make a Chrome clone - even if they actually make a perfect copy, why would people use it instead of Chrome itself?
The only way for Firefox to survive and thrive is to differentiate itself from the incumbents and offer features that those incumbents can't offer due to conflicts of interest such as built-in ad blocking. Make a better browser and people will come.
At the moment there is no reason for any non-technical user to use it over Chrome, since in its default configuration it's no better (and being non-technical means they are not aware of add-ons/etc). Give non-technical users an actual reason to pick it over Chrome.
Worse, their current strategy is actually alienating their current (mostly-technical) users, effectively working against their already-tiny marketshare.
With magic money? Do you think mozilla employees and firefox employees should starve? Should they be making firefox entirely as charity?
The other browsers are made by a GigaCorp that extracts a tax from pretty much everything on the internet, especially if you want to do any advertising, and another Megacorp that has billions upon billions of dollars in cash just waiting for a need and also extracts 30% on ANY financial transaction using their hardware.
Imagine people pushing stupid hard for everyone to use Meta's MetaVerse instead of VRChat because VRChat once had an advertising ID in their code or something. Like sure, that's not awesome, but like, what the fuck is the alternative?
Well they've got enough magic money considering the salaries of their C-suite, so short-term needs are absolutely covered.
Long-term the Google subsidy will eventually dry up but focusing on an enterprise-grade browser (see my other comment here) is worth a shot.
Charity isn't actually that bad of an idea either, since Mozilla Foundation is actually a non-profit (but somehow owns a for-profit company that pays insane salaries to execs? Shady as fuck). Developing a browser that is actually focused on the user fits with their purported mission and will do more to improve the web than all the auxiliary projects/initiatives they've done so far.
How many Managers does one need to negotiate prices for VPN and Pocket? So far, the excessive management does not make the impression to be very valuable for making money, or even let Mozilla survive one day longer.
Of course do they need to make money, but at no point so far did they make the impression that they made any serious attempt beyond some lip service. Well, except VPN, which is just a resale of a popular service, with a natural chemistry for their philosophy.. And I'm not sure how much money their VPN really made so far.