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Comment by hellotomyrars | Hacker News Reader

The goal is obvious and not new. Firefox as a product is only useful to them as a handout from google to use as an antitrust defense.

The problem is that Mozilla hasn’t been able to find any product that generates any meaningful revenue.

It makes perfect sense for them to try to be an entity that can exist without their biggest competitor tossing them scraps.

How they should achieve that is certainly up for debate but it’s also clear that their attempts to add monetizable aspects to Firefox isn’t moving the needle much either.

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Firefox makes half a billion a year in revenue. It's not a handout like you claim, but a revenue share deal negotiated between the two companies.

If Google didn't pay for being the default search engine, or tried lowballing, someone else would make a deal instead.

The idea that it's some kind of a proactive antitrust defense is one of the more bizarre ideas that gets repeated on HN.

More than one thing can be true at the same time. Deals are usually made because interests are aligned. There is a direct benefit to an overwhelmingly dominant player to be able to point to any competitor. There is also a direct benefit to having people use your product. There is even a tertiary benefit of the money theoretically going to development for Firefox that could feed back into their own product.

If you look at the situation in the reverse, what sense does it make? Why would you pay a direct competitor to exist when the amount of money you put in to them is an incredibly large majority of their revenue? Firefox continues to become more irrelevant, and the amount of their revenue they get from Google doesn't really reflect that trend.

I'm not saying the only reason Firefox exists is for Google to point at it. That doesn't mean it isn't a major one. It also is pretty clear to Mozilla because they sure keep trying (and failing) to find other revenue sources

> Why would you pay a direct competitor to exist when the amount of money you put in to them is an incredibly large majority of their revenue?

One plausible reason is that Google is not a monolith: the entity paying the money is the Search division, which does not compete with Firefox. Chrome does, but Chrome is not a party to the deal. Search is interested in maximizing their own profit, not in maximizing Chrome's usage share.

> Firefox continues to become more irrelevant, and the amount of their revenue they get from Google doesn't really reflect that trend.

It is a revenue share deal. Firefox gets some specific (agreed) percentage of the search revenue from searches done via the Firefox search bar. If the revenue Firefox gets is stable despite reduced relevance, it is because the revenue is stable.

Relevance doesn't translate to revenue. What matters is the number of users and revenue per user.

> If Google didn't pay for being the default search engine, or tried lowballing, someone else would make a deal instead

This already happened with Yahoo. Mozilla got a ton more money, too.

It was utterly disastrous for them. It turned out that Firefox needs Google as the default more than Google needs them - well, for the stated purposes of the deal, of course.

I think the situation is simple. They are rendering one service that their users value, and it is making Firefox.

They should ask (not require) payment for that service. Yes, what they should do is basically to run a Patreon subscription, clearly marked "For the continued development of Firefox".

At a very accessible level of $3 / mo on average, and merely 5M subscribers over the world, they'd have $15M monthly, or $180M a year.

See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash, without getting handouts from its competition (haha), zero ads, and asking users to spare $2.75 here and there.

>They should ask (not require) payment for that service.

Sure - let them squeeze out the last drop of their one and only cash cow before it becomes utterly irrelevant - instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy.

>See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash,

Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash. Browser market share and corresponding user eyeballs are immensely valuable. That money isn't going back into Firefox development. This is why it is borderline criminal that they choose to focus on everything except Firefox.

Alternatively, what are they without Firefox?

With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Now Firefox can't be used to make webapps effectively, the only alternative is to use Electron and fortify Chromium's monopoly.

I'm not a Baker fan at all, but no such initiative was cut under her leadership, because none existed.

Electron won not because chromium was more embeddable, it won because it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies. Everything else you could do already before with XulRunner...

> it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies

That's exactly what "more embeddable" is. It made itself easier to turn into Node.js, Electron, etc. I don't think it was a pure coincidence.

XulRunner existed before Electron. Node.js used v8, but could have use SpiderMonkey instead (this is what Gnome did). These were choices, not situations where using Mozilla tech was impossible. In the end that cemented Google stronghold on the web.

> With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Will you name them? Mozilla cut embedding when Gary Kovacs was CEO. XULRunner, Graphene, and Positron were cut when Chris Beard was CEO. GeckoView was not cut.

> instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy.

What are they investing in now?

> Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash.

It's not neutral cash, it's Google's cash. The point is to get off the needle of Google's handouts and become independent. Maybe then there'd be less incentive to slowly drive Firefox towards irrelevance.

> what are they without Firefox?

With a small bit of conspiracy theory, that would be "mission accomplished" :-|

They have a donate button. Which is all about subscriptions. Which is why I went away without even doing a one time donation, as my original intention was.

I deeply resent being pushed into subscriptions and you should too.

One-time donations must always be an option.

But it's a recurring revenue what allows you e.g. to hire developers. Sad but true.

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