Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Not focusing on Firefox is what brought it to its state today, so what should Mozilla do? Focus even less on Firefox and instead on ads, AI and begging. Insane.
EDIT: As an aside, it looks like Mozilla's VC fund invested in the funding round[0] of one of the former board members[1] of mozilla.ai which is kinda weird.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/credo-ai-series-b--...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...
"focussing on Firefox" isolates you from the vast majority of people who don't use it, and provides €0 of revenue per year to work on Firefox at all.
Sure there is; print ads are fine, and nothing prevents that style being used on the web (in fact, I'm aware of a local paper that does do that). It's just that advertisers really want to spy on users, so they pretty much always do.
Basic image/hyperlinked banner ads, located to the side and non-disruptive, and relative to the topic of the website you are currently visiting.
Actually, all 3 major browser engines are directly funded by Google's Ads. And while you may have noticed that Mozilla and Apple have been singing the privacy tune, you should've also noticed that they never did anything to upset their cash cow.
Mozilla diversifying their revenue would be an improvement IMO. But whatever they did in the past, people got mad, because many imagine that such a complex piece of software could be developed for free or from the donations of individuals that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
Focusing on anything other than Firefox (but ads and AI? really?) not only cheapens the brand, but also devalues and risks their Google deal.
I'm assuming you're saying that, since FF has a low browser share today, Mozilla focusing their effort to improve it would be wasteful, because that would be putting more resources behind a product that isn't popular.
If so, I wonder how that's different from any other company that wants to grow their market share. They probably face many of the same choices, e.g.: keep your core users satisfied, or try to bring in a new market. It's pretty intuitive to me that putting ads in Firefox would alienate their current core users, but how would putting ads in FF bring in new users? Wouldn't the result just be fewer people using Firefox?
If what they care about is the mission, then that seems like a bad idea. If what they care about is revenue, then I wonder how the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the Mozilla Corporation, squares that tradeoff with the mission they exist to serve.
Suffice to say that we all deserve better.
Yes, I am quite aware of the contributions they also make to those platforms, but at lease those can be forked from, that ain't happening with what Google/Apple/Microsoft are selling as mainstream OSes.
For one, Mozilla is still a US entity. As an EU citizen, I'd rather have my taxes go towards funding EU entities, especially in this climate. And I'd rather have that EU entity fork Chromium, starting to contribute to its development, as that would be a wiser bet.
And also, governments funding projects such as Firefox is a bad idea because the citizens of those governments come first. As one example, many online BBC shows are geo-blocked in my country. The EU is meant to serve its citizens, not the world, and you don't want the open Internet to depend on whom people vote for in the following election cycle.
The only way to fund a project that has global reach is via a sustainable business model, not taxes.
You have to analyze a project, and that might mean you need to fork it. It all depends on how much you need to steer and help. If a community is happy to welcome some formal stewardship, then that might work too. There is a company that contributes a lot to Libre Office. The same with Blender, where there can be cooperative development.
A hard fork is always possible, and nothing bad if the vision and needs differ from teams. Some might fork the EU stuff in turn. The free software model is designed to support that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42054867 ("Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division (techcrunch.com)")
I don’t know how you can be this out of touch with your users.
source: one of the authors of those emails
But from a strictly business standpoint, it’s a bit of an absurd position
But now every company thinks they can force everything on customers (idiotic ideas like "self-care"), the government, or even just the environment, usually doing enormous damage for 1/100th of that damage in gains.
At least we can rest assured of one thing: this trend WILL end. Through rational thinking? Through tears? Through violence? Through total catastrophe? That's the question. But end it will. Guaranteed.
I don't think anyone is accusing the Mozilla CEO of "stealing" the money.
The way to go at this without breaking incentives for people to start new businesses won't be easy and it won't be by way of redistribution like socialists (etc.) are so fond of. The best way is most likely to change societal norms so that it will no longer be seen as acceptable for a company to have a CEO (or CFO or COO or CxO) hauling in more than, say, 24 times the average pay in his or her company. That '24' number just fell out of my sleeve and probably needs some more thought but the gist is clear. In 2023 the average pay ratio for CEO to average was somewhere around 270 to 1 and that ratio has been going up for decades. By now you'd think that CEOs would have priced themselves out of the market but that does not happen. I suspect this has a lot to do with the makeup of the boards of directors which decide over CEO pay being manned by other (aspiring) CEOs who as a group have an interest in keeping up CxO pay.
Yes, this is a difficult problem to really solve but also yes, I think it is a problem and I think it is worth solving it.
I'm not sure I actually agree with this argument, to be clear. I don't even know that I think the CEO does all that much; Elon Musk is the CEO of like three or four companies while also leading a government agency, indicating to me that "CEO" is not a difficult job, so I don't know that we necessarily need "the best" CEO anyway.
Mozilla does not need to find future possibilities, it got its goals handed to it by Marc Andreessen via Netscape: create and maintain a browser. The task of a non-profit CEO is to make sure the company remains funded. This takes a different type of person, someone who has or manages to create contacts within places where money is to be found. The last series of Mozilla CEOs saw this differently, these women convinced themselves that they were there to 'change the world' by means of pushing ideologically loaded programs and propaganda onto it. They considered the true reason for being of their organisation - create and maintain a browser which competes against the duopoly by giving control back to the user - no more than a means to get the funding for their ideological crusade. They also increased their own piece of the pie markedly in the process in some strange realisation of Orwell's All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than the others quote.
You can criticize Mozilla's "women" for being political, but Elon Musk is the most politically active and powerful CEO in the world, possibly of all time.
From the 990s, it seems Mitchell took out $32,683,642 over the eight years from 2016 to 2023. With 2024 included, she could well top $38M -- not too shabby!
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112590. 2024 will be the last big comp year for Mitchell.
Then the people who wants to work on/support Firefox can solely work on Firefox, and other people who wants to pursue whatever tech-of-the-day is (eg. crypto, VPN, AI) can push whatever agenda they want in their own org.
Instead of the current state where the other-agendas people are riding on Firefox's brand name recognition while starving Firefox into oblivion.
They won’t do this because then they can’t redirect any of the donations and funding that people give to Firefox to <insert non-browser project here>.
Guess it is just a matter of time until Firefox is behind a walls too?
- We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS
- We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment
- We don't have anyone actively working on an Android or iOS port
- now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain
I wish them luck, but yikes what a very, very deep hole they are trying to dig themselves out of just to reach alpha that thumbs its nose at Windows and the entire mobile market
The hubris of writing a web browser in C++ after looking at Chromium and thinking, "pffft, those morons clearly don't know how to avoid UAF bugs"
Mozilla has constantly ignored the market and their users. Time for other orgs to take it up and time for Mozilla to not renew.
ie, instead of Thunderbird (which I know isn't developed by Mozilla anymore), create a hosted email platform with a PWA that can run and store data locally.
These types of products would have a virtuous relationship with Firefox.
If you want to use the web as your primary application runtime, you're currently stuck with closed-source apps, or pretty bad open source apps that are difficult to integrate.
Sandstorm did (and still is as a community project) try to integrate some existing apps into a cohesive-ish platform with nice security guarantees, but it wasn't really made accessible to every day users.
Something similar to Google Workspace, but open source and hosted by a foundation could be a nice default starting point and/or a principled platform to use, for a lot of users.
Um excuse me? Mozilla has been asleep at the wheel for years, letting Firefox languish while Mozilla plays squirrel with a dozen other things nobody knows or cares about. In fact, I guarantee you that outside of nerd culture, nobody has any idea what Mozilla is. But maybe they have heard of Firefox.
You should be shouting *Firefox Firefox Firefox!* from the rooftops with a massive new ad campaign aimed at growing marketshare rapidly. Then find creative ways to respectfully monetize your enthusiastic fanbase.
This seems like Software Business 101 to me, which is why I am continually mystified you seem unable to grasp these basics.
To Mozilla? No. Donations are not the same as paying for a specific product or service. I do not want to support their other adventures.
> What services do you want that shouldn't be available to non-paying users.
Librewolf, but by Mozilla.
To be fair, that was largely because Netscape was awful.