Mozilla's response to proposed remedies in U.S. vs. Google | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's response to proposed remedies in U.S. vs. Google

blog.mozilla.org

65 pointspabs342 comments

Expected, but this makes it clear that Mozilla's morality is dictated by where their paychecks are coming from. They're basically saying that they need to be paid by Google to challenge Google. That's not what Google is paying you for.

The hilarious part is that there's no alternate proposal, and nothing (here) addressing Google in terms of antitrust at all. It's just a plea for half-billion dollar yearly checks from their competitor, for reasons. They want to be paid by Google so they can continue to challenge Google, but don't challenge Google in any way, right here, right now.

The reason Google spent billions on Firefox is for this letter, not for hits from a browser with 5% market share that 100% uses adblockers.

edit: also, how far has Netscape fallen? This is embarrassing for me to read, it had to be embarrassing to write.

Yes, there is a lot of that message in this. We like to think of Mozilla/Firefox as "the alternative" but it's a bit of window dressing to Google, which allows them to show regulators aywhere they tried to foster independent code paths and browser diversity.

Maybe the answer is to donate Chrome to Mozilla along with seed money to invest in the markets, and fund continual development. Mozilla can continue to do the work we need, but independent of the advertising/adblock warfare. And a trickle of the money behind Chrome can be fed to Firefox as usual

>Maybe the answer is to donate Chrome to Mozilla

And end up with two shitty browsers instead of one? I don't follow

The judge says they have to divest.

Mozilla says hey we exist and need funding.

Google also point to Mozilla and say "look look we value diversity in browser"

So it's a mechanistic way to get out from under and meet social obligations.

Obviously if you don't like either browser it does nothing for you.

The lack of of an alternative proposal jumped out at me as well. While it’s not explicitly required the post feels incomplete without it.

I think they’re also underselling WebKit a bit. Under Linux it's not too far behind macOS/iOS and work to bring the Windows version up to parity is underway[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43305344

You are overselling webkit. It's not at parity, and even if it were, just maintaining parity costs $$$ per year.

Anyway, the obviously implied alternative proposal is: disallow search deals with major players like Safari, not minor players like Mozilla, or find some completely different way to address the search monopoly. The most obvious prior art is the browser choice dialog that was imposed on MS/windows. The DOJ doesn't want that because everyone would pick Google anyway.

The alternative is doing a rev share with another search provider who will not be able to pay as much per user as Google. Or for Mozilla to buy or make their own search egnine which is a lot of work and risk.

Mozilla is trying to compete against Google's browser and not their search engine. I don't see why Google wouldn't be paying for their search traffic as opposed to just letting Microsoft buy it.

This point, that Google is able to pay the most per user because it has the most economically productive search, is why I think their behavior is not anti competitive. Search is not a loss leader by any means.

I feel like browsers are more important to keep competitive than search engines. They dictate the standards that the whole web conform to, while search engines really just redirect people to the same sites. There’s also a much larger cost for users switching browsers than search engines. I still depend on safari as I can’t pay my rent on Firefox, while I can switch to kagi, yandex, or ddg immediately.

Additionally, a bad browser will always be more harmful than a bad search engine due to the shear amount of things it interacts with. Breaking the default search engine agreement is good in theory, but seems worse practically.

I’d argue a search engine with a monopoly could dictate which site get visited at all, based on any criteria. That could include standards.

But agree a browser monopoly is no better.

Finally, question: what do you mean you cannot pay your rent on Firefox? Curious.

Not OP, but I think badly implemented online-banking. With many banks it's like this:

Chrome on Windows/MacOS/Android, Safari on MacOS/iOS, or their own crap-app and NOTHING ELSE!

(Not even Chrome/Chromium on Linux or some Chromium on xBSD)

If you try to spoof that, and it doesn't work out, your account may be locked down for a while,

until you have proven (in person, in some branch office) that it was you,

and some corporate drone sternly waggles its index fingers at you for having the gall of even trying that (repeatedly).

This seems to be more often the case in the US than in Germany.

Your'e lucky when you have choices which don't fuck this up, or are wealthy, and thus 'important/valued' enough to ignore such shit.

But when you rent your house, you probably aren't, because why else would you?

In 2023, Mozilla reported $37,574,982 in investment income, accounting for over 58% of the non-profit’s total revenue for the year. [1]

Is that not enough to maintain a browser?

EDIT: this figure is for Mozilla Foundation only, Mozilla Corpotation makes about 9 times that amount (I assume most of which comes from Google). My point still stands though: $37M isn’t a terribly big amount of money, but it’s still a lot.

[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...

They can keep it going for several years, but Firefox marketshare is already sinking into irrelevancy territory, and they have NEVER had a real plan to do anything about that. Mozilla philosophy has been just to ride it down. Just trail chrome most of the time.

Just out of habit, I still test my stuff in Firefox (nobody above me cares). But market share is already getting into "only weirdos use this" territory. And "weirdos" also like a bunch of weirdo extensions. (And I frequently see HNers complaining about this.) So eventually, its like we just don't support weirdos.

Sure, but not sure how that's related to whether or not the Mozilla Foundation can fund development off $37.5M per year.

Marketing and evangelism isn't free, but I find it hard to believe $37.5M per year wouldn't cover everything they need to do. At an average of $200k per employee, that's 187 people. As you point out, it's their strategy that's the problem. I'm not convinced they need more money to come up with and implement a better strategy.

(Yes, I know they pay for more than just employee salaries. Presumably they have other income apart from that $37.5M that doesn't come from Google.)

"Marketing and evangelism" => the arrow has been going down for like ten years now. Better strategy?? Not in the OP. They are actually begging the government for pity.

Not just now, but Mozilla's own argument here is they can't sustain themselves in the long-term without an illegal trust agreement.

> Marketing and evangelism isn't free, but I find it hard to believe $37.5M per year wouldn't cover everything they need to do. At an average of $200k per employee, that's 187 people.

PitchBook estimated Brave had 191 employees before they cut 27 last year. Mozilla don't have a search engine. But Brave don't have a browser engine. And they couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.

Mozilla doesn't have the burden of trying to be profitable that Brave does. Not sure Brave has a search engine any more than it does a browser engine. Brave search is powered by Bing.

They claim they do serve 92% from their own indexes, though I’m not sure we can verify that: https://dkb.blog/p/brave-search-interview

Interesting number. I wouldn't be surprised if ranking comes from Bing and they serve snippets of the Bing ranked results from their "independent" index.

I mean, that’s the problem isn’t it? If we want Firefox to even have a fighting chance, they have to ditch Google and completely rethink their strategy. (Obviously, that means complete change of management, which is really unlikely to happen until the very minute it all comes crashing down.)

> Just out of habit, I still test my stuff in Firefox (nobody above me cares).

Personally, I develop on Firefox, then test on Chrome (and other browsers). I get the sentiment though.

I generally agree, but that's not what Mozills is arguing at all.

> The last unicorn–the web can’t afford to lose Mozilla’s browser engine

Their stated plan is to be the "endagered species", like the Dodo of browsers. Can you find enough weirdos to care about that?

> But market share is already getting into "only weirdos use this" territory.

I think this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop because of bad analytics.

Maybe initially some big, popular, otherwise important sites only supported some Chrome.

Then the 'weirdos' discovered that it worked perfectly with only one mouseclick changing the user-agent.

Time passed, more and more 'weirdos' spoofed their UA by default, because clicking is boring.

Analytics saw less and less FF, more Chrome(simplified).

Management saw less and less need to support anything else.

Pseudo-Cyber-Security rose up high in the sky, shining so bright, that it seemed just right.

Analytics still spitting out falsehoods...

...damagement...

...repeat.

I think Firefox "weirdos" are probably under reported in general because they go to great lengths to hide themselves from analytics. Therefore I also think the number of "weirdos" who change their UA while still allowing JS analytics is basically nil.

On any consumer site, mobile UAs just overwhelm the desktop ones anyway. Nobody cares about Samsung Browser, why would they care about some shit that's way below the fold.

As someone who previously worked on both Firefox and Chrome, it's not. The mandate of modern browsers is too large.

But Mozilla is definitely wasting a lot of money on stuff that doesn't contribute to their mission.

> But Mozilla is definitely wasting a lot of money on stuff that doesn't contribute to their mission.

Yes, I have noticed that too and every year they sink deeper with ads and shady choices

If they keep it lean and with a high standard the community wouldn't stop supporting it, but every 6 month or so they make a shady decision and lose more support

does 'a lot' mean like almost half?

I haven't kept up with Mozillas yearly reports for over a decade, but are you saying that they no longer rely 90% on search for income? And what is "investment" here? Doesn't sound like actual revenue.

My bad – that figure was for the Foundation only. Foundation + Corporation was ~10 times higher (I suppose that’s the 90% from Google).

Though it’s mind-boggling in any case. I’m sure there’s thousands of brilliant developers who would gladly work for Mozilla for like $50k/yr if it was truly independent. That’s 750 full-time devs from investment income alone (which was Mozilla Corp’s total employee count in 2020, so I assume that should be about right).

(Investment here, I suppose, is what it says: they’re buying a bunch of stocks and use profits from these for their charitable goals. Kinda like endowment kind of thing.)

> I’m sure there’s thousands of brilliant developers who would gladly work for Mozilla for like $50k/yr if it was truly independent.

I am not sure. Can you convince me with evidence?

Maybe they could offer that amount in some very LCOL area, I guess? But browser and standards development is highly technical, not something you can easily outsource to some offshore sweatshop. So 50k/year is kind of an insult, and even the purest souls would have a hard time turning down 4-10x that compensation at Apple, Google, and other competitors.

Not to mention, there are a lot of non payroll expenses to account for.

One more thing – I’ve started a petition to Mozilla to try to finally ditch Google: https://mozillapetition.com/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43340948

apparently it is. They earned $19M from program service revenue, and profited almost $25M.

So they could cut the entire Google deal, and still be in the black.

Not as profitable as before (obviously they've been investing their profit for a long time, to drive $37M in investment income) but not as dire as this blog post makes it sound

Your research excluded the income and expenses of the company which produces the browser. Mozilla Foundation's program service revenue is Mozilla Corporation paying Mozilla Foundation to use Mozilla and Firefox trademarks.

Mozilla entities in 2023 received $495 million in royalties. This was 76% of revenue. Royalties means search deals essentially. Search deals means Google essentially. Total expenses were $497 million.

In a way mozilla is proving doj's point that mozilla isn't an independent company due to the fact that mozilla probably has oriented their business operations with this search revenue in mind.

Thus if Google falls so does mozilla.

It’s still not too late to ditch Google. Otherwise... well, let’s hope the phoenix rises from the ashes again.

Should Firefox really be counted as an "independent" browser, when it is dependent on Google for most of its revenue?

It's always been for show; a show that Google's been running ever since it spurred the increase of anti-IE propaganda[1] and eventually caused MS to cave in and end up creating a browser based on what Google controls.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293

Didn’t Firefox rise from the ashes during the years of Internet Explorer’s waning monopoly? How did Firefox “take back the web” pre- Google funding?

It didn't. Mozilla were part of AOL until 2003. Google funding started in 2004. They released Firefox 1.0 in late 2004. And web browsers were much simpler then.

I think Google funding was there from early on. (Though I suppose it’s also because there was less corporate bullshit going on in Mozilla’s early days.)

It was a lot easier to build and maintain a web browser back then than it is today.

How embarrassing.

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