Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It is very nice to see your inside view. For me as an outsider: Mozilla is FireFox and that that doesn't seem to have registered with Mozilla management is irritating me beyond measure because it means that (1) I don't have a way to sponsor just FF and not the rest of Mozilla and (2) that quite frequently FireFox suffers because of resource depletion or crazy experiments that benefit Mozilla but harm FF.

To me that speaks volumes about the quality of management, and much as I'm sympathetic to your feelings I wonder what FF would have been like today if Mozilla had not been eternally distracted. I suspect that without FF Mozilla funding would dry up overnight and that alone is something they should respect.

View on HN

Back when I worked there (2010-2012), a lot of people thought Google wouldn't renew the deal. So there was a scramble to figure out how to make enough money to avoid layoffs.

Basically, how do you make another ~$100M/yr in case Google money goes away?

It's 2024, and Google still pays (more like ~$500M/yr from Google now) and Mozilla still exists. But it was hovering over people's heads back then, and still is.

okay, but did they figure it out? it seems they are stuck between two worlds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

they are spending serious startup money every year on nothing. it's as if they got the google disease with the google funds. :/

Yeah you'd think if FireFox is their golden advertising goose they'd, you know, make it embeddable and add the ability to fully style scrollbars so it'd be suitable across the board for modern development. And you'd think 500m a year would be enough to do this.

But here we are. And with FireFox fading I'm wondering how they plan on having a real impact with their mission.

If FF dies Mozilla is over.

Wouldn't someone else step in? It was Yahoo for a while. Firefox market share is pretty pitiful these days but the default search engine is still worth something.

Google will keep propping up Firefox to keep placate anti-comp. I recon Mozilla have more leverage than they think.

And I suspect Google pays that $500M in order to have something to point to and say, "See! We're not a monopoly!"

Yes, quite literally. And the answer is, Chrome is the better product, the users continue to choose the better option, if the government wants to consider that Chrome acts monopolistic, then the government is acting in extreme bad faith.

The statement or existence of "monopoly" is not one way direction to being "bad for the economy", the government knows this and speaks out the side of their mouth declaring it always is the case, and does not care, so Google is funding the opposition, as they must.

The only place I see Chrome is the objectively better product is when using google services, so your monopoly argument somewhat falls apart.

So why doesn't the government get in and break apart that monopoly that is Chrome, today?

Chrome has the highest market share of internet browsers ~this side of the great firewall~ worldwide (just checked, still is the case in China today, assumed it changed)! Far worse has been done to companies with less control over their respective markets.

I am being a bit facetious when it comes to features though, fully admit, FF is better in getting a few of those, and don't deny history especially with Firebug.

> So why doesn't the government get in and break apart that monopoly that is Chrome, today?

Wake me up when the government finds the gumption to break up any of the monopolies that are begging for it. Google is but one of dozens that should have been broken up before now.

Two words: regulatory capture.

Regulators are usually underpowered, overworked and short of funds. Any attempt to regulate the likes of Google effectively would be faced with such opposition that it would swamp the officials. Check out what happened when DOJ had an ironclad anti-trust case against Microsoft and how it all ended up in the longer term.

For the same reason the government hasn't broken up anything since Bell System in 1983: those 500 million that Google pays Mozilla is higher than FTC's entire yearly budget (430 million in 2023). It takes years to build a strong case, and companies can easily throw more resources at a problem than that. Monopolies don't even need to win the case, just drag the whole process on until the next election cycle, when all of a sudden the next administration is far less interested in following through. Rinse and repeat indefinitely.

Technically even Bell didn't lose a case, it broke up "voluntarily" before that happened.

Is Chrome the better product? IMHO Firefox provides much better tools for ad blocking and privacy. Those are both very important to me and areas I think Chrome is weak.

FWIW, my take back in 2010-2015 when I was at Moz wasn’t quite that cynical. I’m sure that was at least some of it, at least after Chrome started really gaining users, but Mozilla and Google had a good relationship for a long time before Chrome was popular.

Mozilla used to actually have their offices on Google campus (even though I started after the HQ had moved out, I was still given a Google badge for their cafeteria) and I believe the early Chrome team already had ex-Moz people on it. Goals around standards, etc, were relatively aligned, at least early on.

When Mozilla decided to go rapid release, Google was the one who walked them through how to do it (then Mozilla bungled it by diving into a very accelerated schedule and not considering how it affected add-ons, but that’s another story). It was all pretty friendly.

I’m also pretty sure Bing offered similar incentives for referrals, just without the flat-fee contract Moz had with Google, and they didn’t have the same antitrust issue in that particular space. Referrals and default search provider status have always been part of the financial model between browsers and search engines. Dealing that value back to themselves is one of the reasons search providers publish browsers.

I was pretty surprised when there was such a huge backlash against Apple for that recently since it had been SOP in the business for a long time.

To your point though, given the current market share of Firefox, $500M has to be about more than that if that’s an accurate number.

Pretty sure it popped up to closer to $300M/yr around the time you left, at least based on the internal rumor mill around the value of the three-year Google contract immediately prior to the Y! debacle.

That said, since it was MoCo and not MoFo, I think the specific numbers were never divulged. Take the rumor mill and my recollection with a grain of salt.

I guess that makes sense but for me the equation would be a different one: since Mozilla is for me synonymous with Firefox I'd allocate all of the resources to FireFox and that would result in (1) a much more secure future for FireFox, (2) reduced loss of marketshare (so a better negotiation position vis-a-vis Google) and (3) a much lower per annum expense to keep that mission alive. By burning a ton of money on unrelated things FireFox is now actively at risk of disappearing. Google can point at Edge now and say they're not a monopoly, they may not need FireFox for much longer.

You can honestly just tell every single person at the top there would love to still be making the money they are without having to support a browser. Their actual product passions lie in VPN subscriptions and other low effort shams, very little passion from the top towards building and maintaining actual technology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com