Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox' | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

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41 pointsspeckx101 comments

I love Firefox but feel little pity for Mozilla which receives $400+ million a year on search placement in their browser but spends only a tiny fraction on its development. The rest is wasted on greedy management and frivolous projects to give that same management an excuse to give themselves multi-million dollar payouts.

Everyone's only in it for the money. There are no good or bad people anymore, only...unfortunates. (that last line I stole from The Equalizer 2).

They also could have used those payments to build up an endowment that makes them not dependent on others.

Agreed. Put half of it in investments every year, and after a few years they'd have had enough to sustain a browser nearly indefinitely.

That said, the terms of the contract are not public, and it's possible that it was restricted in a fashion which did not permit such usage.

HN is incredibly inconsistent and two-faced about which Mozilla side projects are "frivolous" and which ought to be defended to the death.

Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both, and the main application for it at the time was some attempts to make a browser for running web apps in VR headsets at high framerates). Thunderbird was a side project.

But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time) without the heft to really push through the barriers while competing directly with Apple and Google.

It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets taken for granted. "What did Rome ever do for us" rewritten as a tech parable.

(don't tell me that "we're going to create a whole new language to fix security issues in our web browser" didn't sound a bit frivolous in 2012)

Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier). Google probably warned them that it would pull back its money if FirefoxOS managed to grab any significant market share. So it was destined to fail from day one.

I'm surprised they didn't integrate their own internet search engine into Firefox. But the contract with Google probably prohibits it and Google would immediately pull the plug on Firefox if it got wind of it anyway.

>Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier).

Firefox is like 25 million lines of code. Incredibly complex code, much of it decades old and wrapped in layers of legacy architectural patterns (see XUL, XBL), with severe backwards compatibility considerations (if you break existing websites or people's extensions, they might switch and not come back).

You suggest that NOT rewriting all of that in a couple of years is "hubris"?!? Rust 1.0 didn't happen until 2015 mind you, and Firefox OS was canceled in 2016. The timeline doesn't even make sense.

This kind of nonsense is why I can't take HN seriously when it comes to discussions about Mozilla. Criticisms are perfectly fine (and there are plenty of legitimate criticism to make) but people just abandon all logic when it comes to them for some reason and upvote mindless drivel because Mozilla Bad.

FYI, there are more than 6 million lines of Rust in Firefox, so it's not like it hasn't been happening.

Porting code from one language to another is much faster than writing it from scratch. I'm currently porting my own code from Python to C++ and it's a snap.

Mozilla could've chosen to port the C++ code to Rust, but they didn't because they had other "frivolous" priorities.

LOL, I love how people love to say what Mozilla _should_ do but clearly have no fuckin clue what goes on in that place.

People seem to underestimate what a (even somewhat) large codebase entails. Even switching the compiler version is serious effort. Replacing the compiler can already be unfeasible, but apparently, switching the whole language seems to be super simple from the outside.

Simple it ain't, but it's certainly doable if you have hundreds of developers working on it. It will reduce maintenance further down the line especially as far as vulnerabilities are concerned.

Hundreds of developers? Have you ever written professional software? There is no way a coordinated effort across hundreds of engineers is going to be efficient enough to do a port like this. Also, with most legacy software you can't port modules to test if your port is working. It becomes, mostly, an all-or-nothing kind of thing and with 25 million lines of code that's going to take a huge amount of effort and time.

Yes, I've worked on software projects with large numbers of developers. And it's feasible if the work is split up in independent projects that only require the API to be agreed on.

Exactly the type of work seen in a web browser, which has many interconnected but independent parts.

I also believe that if you have enough unit test coverage you can tackle any project, no matter how large. This is, however, lacking in most projects. Many only pay lip service to unit testing.

Then maybe I should tell them what they shouldn't do: waste their money on management and other projects not directly related to improving the Firefox browser.

> But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money

Yeah, for 2 reasons.

1. Mozilla is a non-profit that takes donations.

2. These "money makers" make their money by tricking Mozilla users into selling their private data to advertisers.

And if you pay attention, you'll notice that people don't generally complain because Facebook gave us React or Llama. They complain about the facebook moneymaker of selling private data and advertising. But even then, they don't complain as much about facebook because facebook doesn't take donations.

Any other non profit maintaining an open source project gets passes bc "volunteers don't owe you anything" and "submit your own patch" catechisms.

I'm not sure I'm aware of any other non-profit open source software maintainer who pays the bills by selling users' data.

Are there any you are thinking of who get a pass?

Mozilla doesn't sell user's data, they sell user's search traffic. Not the same, given that the latter requires a service rendered.

Mozilla does sell users' data. That's how the sponsored links and stories work

> Occasionally, sponsors may pay Mozilla to specifically boost the score of their site during frecency ranking. In these cases, the shortcut is based on your history, but shown in the sponsored section. This still happens entirely on your device; your copy of Firefox has a list of participating sites, which receive a higher score during local ranking. [1]

While the ranking happens on device, a smart sponsor will glean information from end users that click through because those links almost certainly track where the users come from. This is selling users' private data to advertisers.

And with firefox vpn, I'm sorry but that's a MITM. If you aren't paying a VPN provider, they are collecting and selling your data.

This is how every advert tracker works. They transparently and slowly gather data based on how you browse the internet. Just because firefox makes some efforts to slow it down, doesn't mean they aren't still participating in the market of selling user data.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy?utm_sou...

MozillaVPN is a paid service.

> asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM

Only because Mozilla refused to adopt PNaCL, people keep forgetting about this little detail when praising asm.js.

Rust while an interesting side project, the ideas were from Cyclone which probably would still be around if Rust hadn't happened, and it only really took off, because it became interesting for Amazon, Google and Microsoft, when despite all that money, Mozilla killed the team, and they picked a few of the core team.

> HN is incredibly inconsistent and two-faced about which Mozilla side projects are "frivolous" and which ought to be defended to the death.

HN is not a person. People's opinions differ. This is not 2 faced.

You forgot to mention their rebranding earlier this year: "Kit the non-binary mascot"

Everyone complains about the CEO pay but it's not that significant compared to the overall budget. The actual $$ historically goes to spending on high end office space in San Francisco, Paris, and other expensive cities and paying salaries to match the CoL in those areas. Kind of rich for a nonprofit.

But I'm sure people would complain if they moved operations to Brno and Warsaw too.

The head of a non-profit shouldn't be raking in millions. Not even in the Valley!

Instead they dreamed up the idea of being a multi-billion corporation next to the non-profit so they could give management commensurate compensation.

The fundamental problem with non-profit executive pay is that they earn their keep. Even more directly than CEOs in a for-profit space. The CEO of a non-profit has approximately one job: convince rich people to give the non-profit large amounts of money. It turns out, rich people know other rich people. And rich people who know how to convince other rich people to give them large amounts of money are a scarce resource, that non-profits squabble over.

So you've got a scarce labor pool, with expensive lifestyles, and a very directly obvious ROI. That alone is a recipe for high salaries. Combine that with the inflation that comes from the fact that for-profit executives get to hide a huge portion of their compensation as stock, whereas non-profits pretty much exclusively offer salary, and you end up with apparently bloated non-profit executive salaries.

Outside US, many non-profit organisations, the management gets as much money as most other folks that also contribute their free time. There are no goals and bonus to share, quarter earnings and whatever else.

> convince rich people to give the non-profit large amounts of money

And yet Google's funding remains 85% of Mozilla's income, so that 'convincing' doesn't seem to be worth paying for.

> spends only a tiny fraction on its development

No. People imagined this for some reason.

They're not spending $400 million a year on development. Unless you're including management fees of course.

Like many here, I think Mozilla has done a terrible job managing their money and they are largely to blame for the pickle they are in.

However, I don't see who picks up the reigns if Mozilla dies. Like it or not, Firefox is essential for a somewhat (increasingly less) open web, and (at least for now) Mozilla is essential to Firefox. For those who want to see Mozilla die but Firefox live on, what are the more likely outcomes in your opinion if Mozilla went down? Do you see a big corp (which it increasingly seems is the only way to keep up with the needed pace for a browser) stepping up?

How is firefox essential to the open web?

How is firefox not essential to the open web?

If what is left are Chrome forks, the Web is gone, replaced by Chrome OS Platform.

We've seen what happens when almost everyone uses one browser engine (Internet Explorer): that vendor gets undue influence over the direction of the web, and their proprietary extensions make it difficult for others to compete.

We would end up in the same place if everything is based on Blink/WebKit; arguably we're partway there already.

Hopefully Servo will provide a competitive browser engine and full browser in the future as well, with the bonus of being great for embedding. But it's not quite there yet. And other potential competitors have their own problems. Firefox is, for the moment, the most popular and only viable browser not based on Blink/WebKit.

Firefox provides one of two browser engines.

If there's only one browser engine the Web immediately closes up like a giant impenetrable clam. All of humanity will be left outside, doomed to scrape forlornly on the shell with our nails and dream of the pearls within.

Blink and WebKit have diverged enough that there are minimum 3 engines now, not 2.

Don't forget Ladybird. It's coming along nicely too and it's currently being rewritten in Rust, which should give it a leg up on the rest of the bunch.

There are a few others, mostly A.I. slop like NorthStar.

I will 100% forget Ladybird until it actually matters.

This is a discussion about real browser engines in the wild, not in-development ones.

More competition is better than less.

Without pressure from Firefox Chrome would have removed the hooks extensions need for effective ad blocking a long time ago.

Firefox will continue to exist and be maintained by open source efforts.

I often wonder if the current model has been driving away contributors, since it _feels like_ contributing effort to support someone else's paychecque.

Continue to exist in what form? Seamonkey aka Netscape Navigator still exists. Firefox can keep existing but not get updated enough to be a viable alternative to Chromium anymore.

Maintaining a Web browser is hard. I'm not convinced that an open source community would be able to continue the development.

Not at all, the golden age of FOSS is gone.

It might appear that FOSS has won, however in reality what happened is that corporations have managed to control the message thanks to business friendly licenses.

Exactly, and now that these same businesses have LLMs, the savings they got using open source is no longer relevant. I expect we will see far more personal open source projects and a divestment from larger ones. More 1 or two people open source projects and less 100+.

Lets flip the question, does it have to be at the break neck pace that nobody can catch up without spending huge money?

How many of those features were really organic, driven by actual pressing need and not driven by Google's needs.

In that I fully agree, but the reason it has to be at a fast pace is because when Google adds things to chrome, developers will use them and don't have to care enough about market share. I think unless Firefox gains enough market share to matter, we'll be stuck in this race.

Despite the oodles of money Mozilla receives it manages Firefox poorly. Because of that its market share has been slipping for years. Soon it may become so insignificant that Google will cut back funding to say, tens of millions a year.

And Mozilla keeps attempting to diversify its income stream by coming up with commercial services for which there are loads of alternatives, such as VPN. Why don't they just give up on that and spend all their money on Firefox? Hire someone with a deep technical background and a vision to take Firefox forward. As long as it doesn't involve A.I. I think it's worth a shot.

And when the Google money runs out, what will they do?

Then they'll go bust.

Having all those side projects won't make any difference in that sense because they can't even pay the rent. But it does make a difference in their focus on improving their main product: the Firefox web browser, which they are neglecting.

Mozilla has been killing itself. $400mil a year and very little to show for it in the browser. I still rep Firefox but ladybird could not come sooner.

Judge Mehta's reasoning is obviously correct.

> US federal and state competition authorities recently asked the court of appeals to overturn the part of Mehta’s ruling that permits these payments.

You get the "competition authorities" you pay for. Decades of government-bashing, bureaucrat-bashing, sidelining and shit pay give you this level of institutional competence.

Strong disagree. These payments are clearly massive tent pole of maintaining the monopoly and I think it was right for competition authorities to appeal them. In fact, IMO, Metha ruling was way to favorable for Google. Basically like, well, they did the crime but it's too much to disrupt so I guess we will nibble at the edges accomplishing little.

It sounds like you two agree.

Yeah, they should be forced to split Chrome into a separate business and stay out of the browser business permanently. Anything short of that either won't help or will further strengthen their monopoly.

Chrome isnt viable as a separate business. Its entire function is to be a loss leader / feeder for search.

Google should still be split, but along lines which are cohesive, financially viable and would level the playing field for competition, e.g.

- google workspaces / gmail / maps / search / chrome / youtube

- search index / cloud / datacenters

- youtube

- android

Browsers would work as a separate business if we stopped the anti-competitive practice of giving them away for free as a way to prevent competition in your other lines of business.

> split Chrome into a separate business

Bought by whom? Another monopolist bigcorp that surely won't care to monetize it? That is not how you reason about antitrust issues.

Not sell it. Split it into a separate business. Every share of Google turns into one share of Google and one share of Chrome.

The Firefox-Bing experiment proved that the amount of search engines the "free market" can sustain is one (1). You won't get more without proactive government interference and proper legislation. Meanwhile Firefox loses funding.

"Nibbling at the edges" is what the competition authorities are proposing.

"Nibbling at the edges" is all they can do since that was original proposed method. So they are appealing this particular nibbling at the edges but whole scale, break up Google was not in original remedy so authorities are kind of stuck.

Chrome should be split, Firefox or its forks (if Mozilla continues to mismanage) should be able to receive funds from Google but Chrome should not be allowed to be paid for Google search engine placement at least for the next 5-6 years.

I'm sure many other players will play top dollar to be the default on a browser that virtually commands all the market. That'll let us discover the real price of search engine defaults because the Mozilla payout is partly due to antitrust reasons.

In that case, I think we'll also see a visible decrease in "bugs" affecting Firefox on Google's properties.

Amicus brief? Wasn't that like a year ago?

Not their first foray into this case I suppose:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/amicus_b... (May 2025)

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/defendin... (Sep 2025)

for all the PR that mozilla floats about them being the guardian of free internet, i would wager that, today, most non-tech folks will have hard time configuring firefox properly. it used to be simple back in the days, now they have made it so complex to tie all of them together.

also, previously on android, when apps were cleared from desktop, the browser used to quit. now you need to go to menu->quit. otherwise it will keep opening new tabs.

a non-tech friend of mine was once complaining about their phone being very slow. i looked at their chrome and -- i kid you not -- it had 800 tabs open.

non tech folks are a goldmine for the data stealers, and firefox likely implemented that 'enhancement request' to make it easy for them, not for the user.

I've given up on technical solutions to internet spying and tracking. Even with NoScript, uBlock Origin and "Enhanced Protection" in Firefox turned on I always have the feeling Google and Facebook still know everything about me and sell it to the entire internet.

I believe we need to get legislation in place to ban the selling of customer information to third-parties.

Mozilla should start exploring a subscription business and tout its continued support for the full uBlock Origin among other extensions. I would pay a small amount annually to support its development and I bet I'm not alone.

I think Mozilla asking people for more money is the last thing users want.

They have more than enough money to be better, and focus more on development, they just... don't.

It may kill Mozilla, no reason to say it will kill Firefox itself. Perhaps Firefox would flourish a lot more if it is finally released from Mozilla's clutches.

That's extremely unlikely. Keeping up with modern browser features takes a very large amount of work.

That’s true but I think most people’s beef is that most of the funding for Mozilla isn’t going to that work. Wethers that’s the case or no I have no idea, but that’s the general sentiment

the CEO's pay in particular seems to have absorbed a large portion of the savings created by layoffs.

cf. Mozilla Firefox Is Dying (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44939271 and a list of posts from 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39303736

I would have agreed with you a couple years ago. But a few motivated volunteer developers and some LLMs could do it (possibly along with some moderate community funding).

Who would possibly take it over? Redhat maybe?

I don’t think Firefox survives as a community based project.

I would love to see it be funded by the EU, but it shouldn't be owned or developed by the EU.

Sounds like poor prior proper planning enabling piss poor performance (the 7 Ps) on Mozilla's part.

They need to figure out how to break away from Google. It's clearly an abusive relationship.

Mozilla also manages itself horribly. They need to do things differently. For one, stop paying the CEO an inappropriate amount of money. Second, stop loading up the browser with garbage features, hyperfocusing on side quests nobody cares about (VPNs, Pocket, AI garbage, etc), and get back to basics. What they were doing in the 2000s was glorious and they need to return to that.

At this point I want Mozilla to fail. They're actively draining resources from people who want to protect the open internet.

How are they actively draining resources from people who want to protect the open internet?

? They make $680M a year and use it to shill for the very company responsible for destroying the open internet. Firefox hasn't been easy to recommend for over a decade now. Where on earth is that money going if not to drain money from projects that actually work for humanity?

I'm aware that this very revenue is what Mozilla is complaining about. But the CEO could get off his fat ass and do his job finding an actual business model instead of just being a parasite.

> But the CEO could get off his fat ass and do his job finding an actual business model

HN would complain (and indeed has complained) every time they try to find a non-Google source of revenue. The advertisement for the Disney movie with a Red Panda got flamed despite being completely innocuous, Pocket and Mozilla VPN and Lockwise got flamed for being "distractions" or whatever, etc.

"Focus on the browser", everyone says, except that browsers are the most commoditized market you could possibly immagine, where their competitors (3 of the richest companies in the entire world) literally spend billions of dollars pushing their own browsers as loss-leaders, and also they come pre-installed on billions of devices by default. What kind of "business model" do you expect, exactly? Do like Brave and build a crypto scheme around in-page ad replacement?

> except that browsers are the most commoditized market you could possibly immagine

There's just blink, webkit, and gecko. What are you referring to?

> What kind of "business model" do you expect, exactly?

If Mozilla pays me $5M I can do better than "beg google", "ads", and "AI". It's like these mea freaks who run the organization haven't bothered to use their own brains for thirty straight years

Yes, I should give up my country and the rule of law to preserve firefox, Google's little bodyguard.

"The mafia is paying for some school kids' lunches, so please don't go after them or the kids will go hungry"

TLDR: Mozilla makes money from Google paying it to be the default search engine on Firefox. If that practice is outlawed, Mozilla will not have any income stream even close to replacing that.

Why is this a problem? I don't understand it.

Would this apply to services offering to "promote" your post/listing to the top of the page. Like what is the legislation and logic here.

EU should heavily subsidize Mozilla, so that this is not necessary.

Why Mozilla in particular ? Or its that just what you like ?

Gecko is the only semi-mainstream browser engine that isn't controlled by Google.

Webkit is not controlled by Google and powers Safari as well as some smaller browsers and many other applications.

Safari doesn't run on Windows or Linux. WebKit does run outside of Apple's environment but no major browser uses it which means you are left Firefox, a Blink based browser or a WebKit browser that 5 people use.

Safari runs on many, many millions of various Apple devices though, and I think that more than qualifies it as a major/mainstream browser, and the same for Webkit as a mainstream engine... especially considering Safari's market share is ~5x higher than Firefox. You may disagree though, and that's ok.

Mozilla wasted most of its money on crappy features no one wanted. They should not be subsidized by anyone.

It's not clear what this claim is based on. Most of its money? Firefox is an excellent browser, and probably much less funded than Chrome/Safari.

Read through https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-...: six years ago, Mozilla laid off 250 people, about a quarter of their staff, in order to focus on… two specific services that they have since killed (Pocket, Hubs), one service completely unrelated to the browser (VPN, though they have recently decided to set more money on fire by integrating some VPN stuff into Firefox, where it never had any place and is frankly an affront), and new and unspecified “security and privacy” tools (probably things like Relay and Monitor) which are almost certainly completely unrelated to the browser.

They are focusing on things that are nothing to do with their core product, and have been acting so for a long time.

Mozilla is deeply unhealthy, and has been slowly collapsing for more than a decade at this point. I believe that the significant majority of its staff are doing things of no or negative value to Firefox.

I suspect that ten developers not beholden to Mozilla but with a mandate to make a good browser would be better custodians of Firefox. If you raised the budget to forty, I’m all but certain of it.

They definitely shouldn’t. Mozilla has talented engineers, but it’s been catastrophically mismanaged for almost 20 years at this point. Keep Firefox, but let Mozilla finally die.

I’m curious where you start it. I was thinking about it a couple of weeks ago and decided “more than a decade” was safe to say, but I was thinking towards fifteen years, not twenty.

Nope. Why should my money (taxes) fund a US corporation?

Why not if they are working in your interest and produce open source code.

It's not in my interest. I couldn't care less about Mozilla. It's entirely their fault what is happening to them and to FF.

Here come the downvotes. People, donate your own money to Mozilla, if you're so concerned about its fate. Let me decide what to do with my own money.

They could fund Lady Bird browser. Less legacy code to worry about. Run it lean like Blender.

They won't do anything and everyone knows it. It's not like they are critically dependent on it as a 500 million people government, critically dependent on US software, and US and Chinese hardware, and therefore could find themselves with a problem that would effectively end their ability to work digitally overnight.

Oh wait ...

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