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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Developing Firefox costs $200M per year. You want to replace that with a community of volunteers?

For those doubting the corp is 750 peoples (2020). And the Software dev expenses are listed at around $200 millions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

750 people is a total number. Number of people involved into developing Firefox is way less.

$200 millions are the aggregated expenses of ALL software 'development' efforts of Mozilla Corporation like VPN, Relay, Pocket, mozilla.social, etc. And there are a lot of interesting expenses which are billed as development. According to Lunduke (1) who dived into the details a bit, there are many very questionnable expenses which are not related to Firefox development.

So the questions is still very open, how much does Firefox development actually costs? Developing Thunderbird costed around $2 millions in 2021 (2).

1 - https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... 2 - https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

Lunduke isn't an actual trusted source. He's biased and generally a right wing pundit by now.

Or does it? https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

Only a fraction of Mozilla luxurious spending goes for Firefox development.

OK, let's assume that the Mozilla engineering team is 500 people. I could not find reliable numbers, but this looks like the right ballpark. Let's assume that an engineer, on average, costs $250k/year; the cost for employer is much higher than just the salary. This is already $125M. There are also people other than engineers needed to run an org. Build infra also costs something. Let's assume that Firefox could keep being developed, as the sole product, for $200M / year.

Then let's assume that a Firefox user would be willing to pay, on average, $5 / mo, or $60 / year, to support the project. More in richer countries, less in less well-off. This would mean that about 3.4 million of paying users would suffice.

Worldwide, Firefox has 362 million users [1]. Only 1% of users would have to pay an equivalent of a hamburger a month to sustain Firefox. If 5% paid, it would be a price of a cup of plain coffee per month.

Now we need just one teeny tiny thing: somebody capable of organizing this.

[1]: https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/firefox-statistics...

What evidence do you have that 1% of users would be willing to pay a subscription to Firefox? Given that the alternatives are free and probably already installed, and given the friction involved with signing up for a new subscription, I suspect the actual percentage is much less.

I don't have any evidence, but a hypothesis that 1% of Firefox users care enough to keep it afloat looks more realistic than if it turned out that 100% of users would need to shell out $30/mo.

Numbers of voluntarily paying users in open-source projects are usually pretty low, so 1% looks like the right ballpark, and is worth further research, as opposed to rejecting the approach outright as unrealistic.

I'm speaking about the existing user base, who do not need converting. Also, you speak of browsers as of indistinguishable commodity goods; they are not. The pressure that Google exerts to slowly strangle ad-blocking extensions in Chrome will likely make more people consider alternatives.

Why 500? For example, https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employ... estimates estimates that only 40% of the employees are engineering. And they are all around the world so US salaries don't apply.

Also the question is still open, how many of those people are relevant for Firefox development. There are a lot of people working on other projects of Mozilla Co.

Mozilla tries very hard to not to answer those questions. They could have made a separate fund for Firefox development just like they did for Thunderbird. For comparison, Thunderfird team was 24 people in 2022 and development costed $2 million.

Better save your efforts into making sense of Mozilla's shady politics and economics and invest effort into promoting https://ladybird.org/ - a truly independent browser developed from scratch by a non-profit.

My idea was to show that even if we use rather conservative estimates, with some safety margin, running Firefox development on users' donations / subscription looks very viable.

Also, donating to a non-profit is tax-deductible in the US, so some donations can be larger as a tax optimization.

> we need just one teeny tiny thing: somebody capable of organizing this

That and an efficient way of making those payments. Can we please get an online payment method that's as simple as cash already?

If only HTTP 402 had been widely supported.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

If recent history is any guide, that would result in many people immediately losing everything in scams and hacks.

Anyway, $5/month isn't a micropayment and could easily be done through existing app stores.

So instead of Google paying Mozilla directly, you suggest that users pay Mozilla through an appstore while giving a 30% cut to Google?

Secure, anonymous cash payments would make so many things much easier. Want to read this paywalled article? Please pay €0.05. Download this application? That'll be €5.

Of course the anti-terrorism crowd would never let that happen.

~$200M Marketing Firefox

~$200M Developing Firefox

~$15M Executive salaries

~$1M Woke stuff

Lunduke is digging in the wrong place.

Stopping development of user-hostile features could reduce the cost somewhat.

Snark aside, it's crazy how it's basically become impossible to build and maintain a browser unless you're a megacorp or a billionaire.

I would like you to try to support this with evidence from their annual reports.

> Developing Firefox costs $200M per year.

Citation please.

The Wikipedia page [1] links to an annual report from 2022 [2] where it is stated (page 6) that the expenses for 2022 for "Software development" were about 220 Million Dollars [X], though I guess that the entry includes software other than just Firefox and there is no breakdown.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...

[X] Plus 58 Million Dollars for "Branding and marketing" and 108 Million Dollars for "General and administrative" ... ouch !

The annual report very deliberately didn't break out spending on Firefox.

$190M of which is the CEO's salary.

(an exaggeration, but it wouldn't surprise me if a big portion of that is c suite salaries)

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