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Comment by jqpabc123 | Hacker News Reader

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future

Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

The end of Pocket is just another sad example.

As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.

Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.

Even if you dislike Pocket, its purchase/deprecation is an example of Mozilla failing to effectively use its capital.

They integrated Pocket as a proprietary service in their open source product 2 years before Mozilla acquired it. Removing the integration required editing about:config. The complaints were mostly during that time.

> Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.

They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear that no data was sent to a third party unless you explicitly clicked it and went through the steps to set it up.

Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party, so Mozilla decided to buy Firefox in an attempt to put those complaints to rest, since it would no longer be a third party.

In the end, those purists didn't stop complaining - they just moved on to different complaints. If you're curious to see for yourself, you can look up the conversations on HN and cross-reference the usernames against other topics involving OSS purism and Firefox.

In the end, everyone lost: longtime Pocket users lost a product that they had enjoyed because it got acquired by a company that never really had an active interest in the product itself, Firefox lost because of the negative PR which contributes to their declining market share, and Mozilla lost because of the massive waste of money this was.

> Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party

That's a horribly dishonest explanation. The way that Pocket was integrated into the browser was obviously shady. Most clearly, there was no reason for it to be anything other than an extension. Mozilla earned most of the complaints that they were shoving Pocket down user's throats. The complaints weren't even primarily about "OSS purism"; Mozilla was simply being disrespectful to their users.

The irony being that lots of the complainers then went to Google Chrome to "show it to those corporate Mozilla people".

I am constantly amazed at the amount of virol directed at Mozilla, especially from people who openly admit to use chrome as their primary browser. I can respect people like Stallman who stick to their principles to a fault (and I would argue indiscriminately), but I really don't get how people can criticise Mozilla for integrating Pocket and use that as a justification to start using Chrome. That seems like a huge cognitive dissonance.

Not strange, satisfied people don't usually run around declaring how perfectly OK everything is.

That they're being bought by Google so that they can focus on the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.

The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time.

Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top.

That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.

A lot of things look like incompetence at a distance, but get really fascinating up close. Does anyone know care to share what they know about the particular personalities, drives, and visions?

That would be pure incompetence from the top

For which they are compensated very well.

It just doesn't make sense does it?

No, but it's not mozilla-specific. It's true of almost every large corporation.

The way this world is going, you shouldn't attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice.

I still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.

Because Mozilla benefits from Google's donations (the majority comes from Google), and being a counterpoint to Google's Chrome is bad for Google, which means less or no donations to Mozilla. Google holds the key here. They have leverage over Mozilla.

They don't get donations from Google, but get paid to include Google as the default search engine, right?

No important difference though. Mozilla tried to switch to Yahoo a few years back and backpedaled. In terms of what users expect, they don't have a lot of options. Google OTOH could do without the users Firefox has left. And I've personally observed Google strong arm "partners". Not sure I see a conspiracy here, but I'm pretty sure that if Google asks for concessions, Mozilla will see what they can do.

You are right, it is not a "donation", more like a business arrangement or something. I am not sure it is limited to "be the default search engine" though.

It is

WebKit is a nice competitor, too. Look at Orion browser, it's a pretty decent competitor. Although they only target macOS, WebKit can be used on Windows and Linux, too.

Webkit on Linux is in terrible shape. Maybe in theory it could be a complete and useable engine but there clearly isn't enough interest to make it that way.

Orion does not target macOS only, well primarily yes, for now, but check out this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708445.

Someone said "It’s coming on Linux (scheduled for March 2026). See https://kagi.com/changelog#6479".

> nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it

The Linux Foundation is mostly a dumping ground for dead and dying projects. Particularly they seem to specialize in abandoned commercial open source projects.

I dont think the Foundation provides much, if any, developer funding for these projects. They list $193M in "project support" expenses but host over 1000 projects.

I thought that was the Apache Foundation?

Many Apache projects are still well maintained.

I think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by 100M+ per year.

They are not yet in striking distance to truly become independent, but they are making significant steps in that direction. The share of Google money in their revenue went from 90% in 2020 to 75% in 2023.

I don't think following the money actually shows what you think it does.

As a postscript:

Damned if they do, damned if they don't. There were plenty of people at the time arguing that Firefox maintaining one independent browser engine was idiotic and they should just switch to Chromium like everyone else. People like to lambast Mozilla over relatively minor advocacy spending stuff and cry that it should just focus on Firefox, but insist it should have obviously continued with Servo. Even though Servo probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference to Firefox post Quantum for a very long time.

The majority of Mozilla’s revenue came through Firefox—their flagship product and by far their most recognized project.

And yet, somehow, they still struggle to secure adequate funding for Firefox itself, while millions are allocated to executive salaries and various advocacy initiatives.

Wait until you see executive salaries at other companies that make browsers.

What do you even mean? They have adequate funding. Financially they are doing extremely well.

At what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income?

Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).

Not sure that's a realistic assessment of the cost of developing a browser. Mozilla gives Software Development exp names as by far the single largest expense at 260M$ in 2023. According to DuckAI 700 out of 750 Mozilla Co employees work on Firefox.

I am sympathetic to the idea that a global remote team, that doesn't pay Silicon Valley salaries could get this done cheaper, and thus would be a better candidate for such an Invest and live on interests approach but 15M$ budget seems infeasible.

Reading directly from the 2023 financial report: Revenues were 653M, Software Dev was 260M and change in net assets was 142M, so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour (and that is ignoring that you do need a legal and HR department, and some management, and some marketing if you don't want Firefox market share to fall further).

> so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour

I don't think that's correct. IIUC, Software Dev was 260M for Mozilla + Mozilla Corporation + Mozilla Foundation + MZLA Technologies Corp. + Mozilla Ventures + Mozilla.ai. With large increase of 40M from 2023 to 2022 so I'd bet a good chunk of that is going to Mozilla.ai knowing how the rest of the corporate world is acting right now.

Like the Chrome Mobile team is 40 people [1]. I can't image that web + support is going to more than 4x that so you get to ~160 people which at 300k a head is 48 million. I don't see how out of the 6 organizations that 93% (700/750) of the employees are working on FireFox and not a different thing.

48 million just in salaries against the $494 million that Google gave Mozilla in 2023 just seems like it should be extremely possible to save at least half of it. Sure, we've gone beyond the initial ~$150M but for all (?) of Mozilla's life the payments from Google have covered software development [3] and for Safari the payments were in the billions so if Mozilla focused on making a better browser with higher market share their payments would go up as well.

[1]: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success...

[2]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

So one of several teams working on Chrome Mobile (so not the rendering engine, JavaScript engine, etc...) was 40+ people. That tells us nothing about the size of the overall Chrome team.

I have seen comments on HackerNews that estimated 1000-4000 people working on Chrome at Google, but without a sound basis. Chromium had ~800 individuals author a commit, that's probably as close as we can get to actual hard facts.

The Platform Division which includes Chrome was 20.000+ but it's pure guesswork to break out numbers for Chrome for that.

Honestly my prior is that the vast majority of software dev work at Moz goes towards Firefox, I don't see any evidence to the contrary, including in terms of products released/developed. A modern browser is an enormously complex engineering feat, nothing else Moz releases is in that ballpark.

I guess bottom line is that we don't really know the exact breakdown.

What do you mean? Doesn't most of Mozilla's revenue come from Firefox?

How do you think Firefox is making money, since it has no payed features? Hint: it has Google search as the default search engine.

That's my point... The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. If you follow the money, it doesn't make sense for them to neglect Firefox.

The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google.

You obviously haven't been following the money.

The statistical global marketshare of Firefox is very close to that of Internet Explorer --- within a single rounding digit.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

Firefox users just block trackers, that's why you don't see them.

No. Check Mozilla’s own numbers if you don’t believe tracking stats.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Firefox users also tend to disable telemetry and any kind of phoning home whatsoever.

Possible perhaps --- but definitely not easy and thus highly unlikely on a broad scale. And this is by design.

The most *easy* and sustainable way to achieve this is by using a fork of Firefox --- aka LibreWolf.

https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...

Tops make goods money as is. All they need to do is to keep Fx the way it is.

And Google won't be paying more if Firefox becomes something bigger than Chrome. Google has no interest in it. All they need is a spoiler effect.

But Google did pay Mozilla even when Firefox was bigger than Chrome.

Mozilla is simply an antitrust litigation sponge.

Google knows it shouldn't be developing a browser. This paltry pocket change protects their pane of glass moat.

> The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google

This is not reflected in the numbers, at least from what I've found: 300m/year in 2011[1], 400+m/year in 2020[2], 485m/year in 2025[3].

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1543269/google-to-pay-...

[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

[3] https://nerdschalk.com/85-of-mozillas-revenue-at-risk-firefo...

Is mozilla being rewarded if the user base provably falls?

Google does not need Mozilla to have a sizable market share. They just need it as a semblance of competition in the browser space.

I can't believe how this is common knowledge, this arrangement between Google and Mozilla as a weak and incompetent "competitor" propped up to avoid being accused of monopoly and anti-competitive practice. Why isn't it considered a form of fraud, not even with extra steps - a direct relationship. Maybe there's enough plausible deniability that it's hard to prove criminal intent.

In the browser space, what Apple is doing is awfully manipulative of the market too. It's almost like this situation is being willfully ignored and effectively encouraged by regulators.

You’re the one who didn’t follow the money: they’ve made more from Google as their market share has decreased. Neat incentive, huh?

Nope it comes from Google.

Mozilla is basically paid by Google to have a multi-platform non-Blink browser around they can point to when accused of being a monopoly.

Having a quality browser is not required, merely it existing. So why waste money on novel web engine experiments when you can have AI conferences in Zambia?

Living large and loving life --- by selling out.

I think people are implying that Google told Mozilla to drop Servo, to make sure Firefox wouldn't leapfrog Chrome. And since Google funds Mozilla almost entirely, Mozilla had to comply.

Almost no technical aspect of Firefox have anything to do with how much money Google pays them.

Every day I login into Hacker News. Every day, I see Mozilla FUD.

It's wrong to name names without prood but after a point you start doubting your understanding of the world and at this point I'm beginning to suspect Mitchell Baker is a plant

I think without Mitchell Baker there would probably not have been a Mozilla. I'm fuzzy on the history but I believe she was the lawyer who originally set up the organization.

AFAIK she also wrote the MPL, but the thing is, people change and doing good stuff 30 years ago doesn't mean they'd keep doing good stuff decades later.

In any case it doesn't really matter much anymore since apparently she left Mozilla around February.

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