Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox’s revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser’s default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla’s ability to keep things “business as usual.”
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company’s actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search “partners completely,” which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google’s money suddenly dried up.
I have written this elsewhere many times and I know it’s extremely unpopular with FOSS crowd but truth needs to be told in here once again:
Everyday I use Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 10/11/Servers.
I’m an “IT guy” and have installed Firefox on literally hundreds of computers over a decade. I also install and setup extensions like uBlock Origin (with few comprehensive ad & malware blocking lists) , Dark Reader, Auto Delete Cookies, Crypto blocking and many more… but I have given up on Firefox 2016 onwards.
You could give Mozilla 10 billion per year just to develop Firefox but Mozilla can and will decide that they wanna spend only 1 or 10 percent of that money on actual Firefox development.
They will spend most of their money on anything but Firefox.
I mean I love world-peace, and cancer and aids free world too but with the money Mozilla get in a year, none of that gonna happen.
Mozilla couldn’t stop Russia attack on Ukraine; neither were able to solve Israel Palestinian conflict nor hunger and migration from African countries to Europe…
Then what are they spending money on?
What they could have done successfully is to spend all the money they made from Firefox towards Firefox development alone. But this is the thing Mozilla do not want to do and are open about it.
Now I don’t want Mozilla to stop developing Firefox either but because Firefox needs money from Google, Google must be allowed their monopoly on search… is utterly insane thinking.
If Mozilla cannot survive without Google monopoly, so be it.
I would say some open source/ Linux foundations/ Linux distros needs to fork Firefox and let Mozilla die peacefully.
What improvements would you like to see through development?
Semi-TLDR: Improvements under Mozilla? None.
They do not even want to develop a better (than Chrome) browser… they wanna “build a better Internet”.
Mozilla Foundation is making US$ 300-400 millions for many, many years (US$ 593 in 2021-22). If they could not develop a better Firefox all these years, it’s not happening __ with or without Google money __ ever.
When Mozilla /Firefox developers don’t even care/do not listen to feedback for simple things like ability to differentiate between active and inactive tab colors (why everyone that uses Firefox must play around with css to make Firefox usable?), expect them to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browser is out of question.
Longer, rant version:
According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments.
The fundamental issues as I see are:
Complete lack of vision. Utterly worthless CEOs. Spending money on everything else but development of Firefox.
Especially when Firefox made them US$ 510 million in 2021-22.
Instead of spending millions on worthless CEOs, why not spend millions on developers so people would use Firefox on their own, instead IT guys like me forcing friends & family to use it.
I try to find annual cost of developing & maintaining Linux kernel but could only find articles and PDFs from 2008/2017 mentioning total worth etc but not actual annual cost.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine every Firefox (desktop, mobile etc) stops working all of a sudden… IMO, the world and internet will not come to a full stop.
Now imagine what would happen if every computer, server, router, switch, phone, tablet, stops working completely at once, that runs on Linux kernel.
So if Linux kernel can be developed for $510 million (assuming its below this mark), why can’t Firefox be?
I’m trying to figure out why US$ 510 million is not able to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browsers.
Then there are issues related to lack of vision and no importance/urgency towards finishing a product.
Why only few extensions were allowed on Firefox mobile for many years without any explanations. Even developers of major extensions were not able to figure out the criteria to make their addon available on Firefox mobile.
What was the rationale behind it… Driving people away who were using Firefox mobile? If the product was not ready, do not fucking release it.
You need highly talented and additional developers to release product sooner… hire more, pay more. You got $510 mil just from Firefox.
I do not see any future for Firefox under Mozilla.
Only if some real big names (like Linux foundation etc) from FOSS world hard fork the Firefox, it might have a future.
I think, with real big name sponsors (pro-open source companies), search revenue will not be an issue.
IMO, the new organization (of course with big sponsors) of new fork must have one, single mission/goal… develop a great browser. New org must not have a mission statement written by MBAs:
“We’re building a better Internet”
Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
Something people will use it on their own for its merit.
How about… AI instead?
It’s strange how the Internet has been flooded by this news. Like leave Google alone or Firefox gets it. Very strategic use of the media might I say.
Mozilla gotta do something.
And based on their actions on recent years, that something is probably going to be: 1) firing more developers, and 2) increasing the compensation of their CEO.
I wonder how much of their income actually goes towards development. At a glance, it seems a great deal of unnecessary administrative bloat has been added to Mozilla.
I honestly don’t see why a browser company needs to be so large (>700 employees).
Not that I want people to lose their jobs, it just seems unnecessary.
Mozilla is not a browser producer, it’s a general internet charity that earns money by producing a browser. Most of their income goes to charity and reserves of which they have about 1bn – roughly four times as much as wikipedia just for a sense of scale, wikipedia doesn’t do any business deals to get at cash but instead does annoying donation drives.
They could scale down significantly while still keeping firefox development ongoing, they probably wouldn’t have much issue finding enough donations to fund development, but the strategy seems to be building reserves and diversify commercial income, things like the revenue share they get from pocket for sending people to ad-ridden pages.
When you’re currently donating to Mozilla you’re not donating towards Firefox: Mozilla-the-company can’t receive funds from Mozilla-the-foundation, those donations are going to charity work.
And, to make this clear: None of this is a grand revelation, or new, or outrageous, it’s basically always been like that and it’s always been a perfectly proper way to run a charity. Most of the recent pushbacks comes from people hating that Mozilla funds stuff like getting women into STEM, being outraged that the wider Mozilla community is not keen on having a CEO which opposes gay marriage (very staunchly so), etc.
Oh my, could you share more information about the homophobic CEO thing?
Search for Brendan Eich, nowadays he’s running the Brave browser.
Oh, him. Thanks.
nowadays he’s running the Brave browser.
Yeah, that’s what I knew him from. Figures he would go on to lead a browser infamous for its controversies.
They do more. They are also a vpn, and they are standing up new services.
There’s a reason why every other browser maker has given up and adopted Chromium. It’s not easy to support a browser and rendering engine across half a dozen OSes while keeping it secure, performant and stable.
While I do want competition in the web space, its a good thing that Google could get told to stop doing stuff like this.
I dont want Mozilla to die of course but companies need to be held responsible for all the shit they pull. I’d imagine if Mozilla wasnt able to maintain firefox anymore it would fall to the open source community like they said in the article and I’d probably still use it.
No one company should own the internet.
Good, Baker can go find an other x millions salary elsewhere because it’s necessary for her family (as she said in an interview), and Firefox can become a community project again that still pays salary to actual developers but without the expensive bullshitting C-suite.
On the other hand, might also be good for Firefox to not be 86% funded by the maker of its top rival (Chrome).
Right? Great knowing there wouldn’t be an adblock killswitch waiting for us all like the sword of damocles
I use only Firefox / Fennec, but fuck Mozilla. The obscene amounts they paid their CEO for stupid decisions, their shitty Pocket acquisition, regressions such as saving page as pdf simply disappearing on mobile. Let that rotten corporation die, the code is open source, someone will do a Gecko browser.
I would stand behind the idea of splitting Google in it’s seperate branches with no shared assets. Basically Google search becomes is seperate corporation, Google AI, Google Webservices, Google Ad Services, YouTube. etc… This will hopefully undo some of the webs enshitification since now the essentially most powerful company on the web has to actually offer good product for profit instead of compensating bad product with more profitable one.
That doesn’t produce any practical competition however. Some vertical splitting of the search business seems reasonable so we end up with multiple companies doing search out of it.
How exactly would you break up search? You can’t really do it geographically like the Bells.
Everybody forgets that if chrome and chromium breaks away from Google because of this ruling, it’s going to have the same issues as Firefox, if not worse because it’s an arguably worse product. The ruling has been pronounced, but what will happen because of it is yet to be defined.
That’s not it at all. The issue is funding Mozilla. Having it as the default search engine is something google currently pays them for the right for. If the DOJ says that’s anti-trust practices, then Google stops paying Mozilla for that right, and 80% of Mozilla’s funding dries up overnight.
I needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google
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At least 2, at the moment.
Three
Four… maybe even $10/mo after the manifest v3 chaos hits in full force.
Exchange rate is a bitch, but id chime in and do my part as well.
You’d need a hundred million people sign up for that $5 subscription to make up for Google’s bribe.
Your math is off. It would take 8.5 million people donating $5 a month, to equal the 510 million a year from Google.
My math (please correct me if I am wrong):
$510 million / 1 year
$ X / 1 month?
$510 million / 12 months = $42.5 million / 1 month
$42.5 million / $5 per person a month = 8.5 million people a month
You’re right. My European ass sees revenue and salaries as monthly
Also, Mozilla says that it spends only $220M on software development expenses, so if 100% of the money went to that it would only require 3.7 million people paying $5 per month.
But, IMO, if the Google money spigot is turned off, it might be that other companies that rely on web browsers (Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, etc.) will want to spend at least a few tens of millions on Firefox. That would mean that end-users wouldn’t need to support the entire cost of developing it.
Right now, everyone except Apple uses Blink which is a Google project tied to Chrome. Since Google has been found to have been illegally abusing their monopoly, the status of Chromium / Blink has to be uncertain. It would be smart insurance for these companies to ensure that Firefox doesn’t go away in case something happens to Blink.
Yup, and I could do $5/month, perhaps more if they really seemed to need it. I don’t know if there are 8-9M, but maybe.
They really should be working on improving their revenue streams. I think they should work on privacy-friendly transactions, like a Mozilla Pay where I put money into some kind of bucket, then purchases are paid out of that bucket. The system would work on something like GNU Taler, and they’d take a small cut for money going into and out of the system (or transactions within the system). I could use those funds to pay for online services, avoiding ads, tips to people online, or Mozilla services.
Is it not
5 x 12 = 60
$510 000 000 / $60 = 850 000
$60 is one year of subscription for if user.
850 000 users need to pay 60 dollar per year to amount to $510 000 000.
(Or 510 000 000/5 = 10 200 000 users per month to reach the same amount monthly.)
510 / 60 = 8.5I see that I missed a zero (510000000/60=8 500 000). That numbers didn’t seem plausible when I did the calculation.
You mean 510 million divided by 12. That’s “only” 42.5.
It’s a threat to the Mozilla CORPORATION, not the Mozilla Foundation nor the browser.
Nothing to be really scared about. Move along.
Almost hoping this somehow causes browser support to fracture again.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
Also because I’m tired of google dictating the www by being a monopoly. It’s 2024 and jpegxl is being treated as ransomware as if enabling a god damn image format is too hard for web browsers. HTTP3/QUIC was 100% google’s invention that they just threw onto the web because no one else is developing this standard anymore. Manifest v3 is an explicit attempt to limit user control over web content. They even cornered the market along with Microsoft using gmail.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
That can’t be helped. Hard to explain well without knowing how much CS you’re familiar with, but basically in order to guarantee security/user safety you have to sandbox each tab (basically running an entirely separate container program for each tab which constantly checks for illegal memory access to prevent it from being exploited), all separately running their own interpreters for javascript/typescript, HTML, CSS, all of which are very resource intensive (mainly javascript/typescript). There’s not really any getting around this, no matter how well you design your browser.
Now, theoretically, with the growing popularity/advances in WebAssembly, and increase in usage of frameworks/graphics APIs like WebGPU, you could completely get rid of that sandboxing and completely get rid of the extremely slow javascript and html/css, in favor of completely using safe, compiled Rust programs. There’s active research using versions of WASM which only accept completely safe code (mainly safe Rust code) so using memory bugs generated from user error to access data in different tabs becomes impossible (aside from potential unaddressed bugs in Rust itself obviously) and you don’t need to sandbox each tab – the program practically sandboxes itself. Then you could potentially have browsers with thousands of tabs perform perfectly fine, assuming each of the websites is programmed competently.
But that’s not going to happen, because billions of users rely on HTML/CSS and JS, and it’s not pretty to transition away from. Getting rid of it would be like getting rid of pointy shoes, or getting rid of US Customary Units in the US, it’s just not happening no matter how much benefit it would bring to users. It’s not so much of a browser company issue as it is everyone ever would complain and potentially trillions of dollars of damage would be done. Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
This is kind of true, but at the same time, I’ve also seen some pretty talented front-end devs fwiw.
If this hurts Firefox more than it hurts Chrome, that’s probably not a good thing for the health of the Internet. Google running the Internet unchecked would be bad for everyone.
quite a good chunk of that goes to their ceo anyway.
I am livid over her absolutely disgraceful management over Moz. When electron was building a de facto monopoly of Chromium on the desktop she made no moves to produces equivalent tooling. While Node grew into a behemoth she totally ignored it. The only thing that has come out of Moz in the last decade that mattered was Rust, and she’s already fired the Rust team. She is poison and serves only to suck up a salary that could fund development.
Mozilla needs its wake up call and to start being the underdog that makes something worth doing. With Manifest V3 and the anti-trust case on the horizon they have a fork in the road that will define what becomes of them. Hopefully she can make one good decision and it’ll be the right one.
thats ceos for ya.
i doubt they will escape from going through some bad times.
So Mozilla will find other forms of funding. That’s how this works.
