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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet

No wonder nobody can compete, loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all.

The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.

There are no browsers left except the artificial ecosystem of Safari. Firefox is not a blip on the radar.

So, everything is chrome and chrome is the web standard. Having a single private company in charge of what is and what is not web standards is a little bit scary, as, like the cat, they don’t really need to see and serve the needs of the environment. They are fed at home.

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It is not the only way to build a browser.

It is the only way to build a browser and push adoption.

The problem is not the lack of direct revenues. It is the lack of marketing budget and control of platforms (Chrome dominates on Android for exactly the same reason Safari does on Apple).

Firefox is a perfectly good browser, but has lost its market share because Google has huge marketing advantage.

How much of Mozilla’s budget actually goes to Firefox? Last I checked making a browser wasn’t even on the road map

There's Mozilla Foundation (where making a browser is not on the road map) and Mozilla Corporation (which makes money by making a browser to finance the foundation).

Mozilla Corporation revenue is about half a billion, most of it coming from Google and only 2% (from what I found) going to the foundation. The foundation gets most of its money from Google as well, but separately, and the foundation's revenue is about 10% of Mozilla Corporation's. So overall over 90% of Mozilla's budget goes to software development and to cost centers that are associated to Mozilla Corporation.

That vast majority. And Firefox is massively profitable, too (with a rising share of income not coming from google, up to 15% the last time I looked).

Software development was 220 out of a total 425 M$ of expenses. General and administrative coming in second at 108 M$.

I don't know exactly what comparable software companies invest, but assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries this seems appropriate overhead to my mind.

Edit, all of this is 2022:

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

> assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries

With 750 employees for Mozilla Corp, that's unlikely. Even if 80% are developers that would be $350,000 salary on average.

good rule of thumb (at least in Europe) is that whatever your developer salaries are, double it to get closer to the actual operational cost.

There's lots of hidden costs, licenses, insurances, computers/servers, email hosting, document editing suites; that's before you get to the big stuff like office space and social contributions. -- then there's managers, HR etc;

Anyway, it's a reasonable rule of thumb. YMMV.

This is how it is in Denmark as well. Here the general rule of thumb is that any non-managing employee is 70-100k in expense a year. For some specialist workers it’a a little higher, but that is the general cost when you include sick days, vacation, cost-centers like HR, IT and so on.

Somewhat ironically that metric is often used to cut-costs on the long term budget at an increased expense to hire tempts when a team is understaffed for whatever reason. (I’m not sure if “temp” is the correct word for when a team of nurses is staffed to only function within the law when nobody is on vacation/sick. It’s what Google translate gives me for “vikar”.)

In the US that kind of nurse is specifically known as a "travel nurse" because they work on short term contracts and travel from hospital to hospital but in general describing these sorts of workers as "temps" is accurate.

Cool thanks, I was thinking a “temp” might be more like an intern or something.

I love how this went from "monopolies are bad" to "fuck cats".

Cats have a monopoly on suburban predation in many places. When is the DOJ going to step in?

After cats start selling their prey.

and televisions. Now you can't get a television that doesn't spy on you because of unhealthy funding driving the price down.

> loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all

Ding ding ding. This is a classic monopolist strategy. It poisons the market for any other potential competitors by removing all possibility of profit from the category.

It's kind of eyebrow-raising that more people in this thread don't notice this. And instead just assume of COURSE browsers can't be funded except by a monopolist using it to shore up their surveillance business.

Tangent, but I don't understand this argument at all:

> The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.

Please could you help me understand.

- If they don't _need_ to hunt for food, the frequency of hunting birds should go down (even if they still do it for fun sometimes)

- If they don't need to take risks to get food, why would they then take those same risks now for the purpose of entertainment? (That cancels out any meaning of there no longer being any risk in killing birds, so why mention it at all?)

My understanding is that you are implying that cats not having to kill birds out of necessity leading to them now being able to do it for fun is a bad thing. Is that correct? And if so, I don't follow that logic because of my above two points.

The points you raise would make sense if cats were purely logical, unfortunately they're not and a lot of what makes a cat work is instinct.

- Instinctively, cats will hunt.

- Lack of care about food source will make cats outlast prey who have to leave safe areas to find food.

- Lack of care about food availability can (and has been proven to) cause cats to hunt more often, not less- as the "cost" of going for a hunt is basically zero; there's no consequences for failure and even success is met with satisfaction but no "cost".

Anyway,there's better info on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

Thanks, your second point makes a lot of sense to me, and helped me to understand your point.

The Wikipedia article was also a good read.

Can you explain the cat thing? Why wouldn't cats who are not fed be forced to kill even more birds?

Is it because they would be focused on more efficient sources of food like mice instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

Essentially, in the wild, cats would be forced to hunt based on hunger, so they'd have to pick and choose what to hunt.

Since they're never hungry, they do it based on fun, and they can "out-starve" their prey who may be hiding but have a higher need to eat and thus: leave their safety.

> they're never hungry

IME cats are hungry as soon as they have finished their food.

They are predators while they eat too.

> in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet

Safari came into the world on a similar timeline so this isn't true

If you look at the code size and feature set of Safari 1.0, it’s really a different universe from 2024. Web browsers have become miniature OSes. They contain multiple 3D rendering stacks (WebGL, WebGPU), hardware-accelerated 2D compositors, multiple languages that JIT optimize into native code (JavaScript, WASM), and require passing test suites with millions of cases. The bar has been raised massively since Safari came out, largely to user’s benefit, and honestly we mostly have Chrome to thank for it.

All very good points.

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