Comment by dralley
3 years ago
HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for
1) being financially dependent on Google
2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox
3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous
Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming through the backdoor from other business units.
As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time. Including _literally this week_ with Google's Web integrity bullshit. Whether it accomplishes much is a different matter, but it's not for lack of an attempt on their part.
>HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for 1...3
You summarise pretty much everything that is wrong with HN started appearing somewhere around 2013 before becoming mainstream in 2016+.
That is having zero understanding on business. Cash Flow, Revenue Generation, Sustainable business model, and market monetisation. Ironically on forum that is about startup and VC.
I do get that they aren't in a position where they have easy choices, but what they are currently doing is wrong. They need to be a much smaller and focused organization, which can generate funds from various sources and use them to do effective development. You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
In their current position they exist to give Google some protection against anti-trust allegations. That is about the worst spot for their organization to be in.
>As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time.
You are right. Google likely knows that they can completly ignore them, so they can say whatever they want.
> You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
Based on what logic? It's 20+ million lines of code touching half if the "hard" problems of computer programming - graphics, fonts, encodings, localization, JIT engines, hardware acceleration, support for multiple architectures (including aforementioned JIT), support for multiple operating systems, massive parallelism, sandboxing, WASM support, hardware support abstractions like WebUSB and WebMIDI, etc, and a massive swamp of compatiblity hacks, and literally books worth of new standards they have to implement every year.
Much of which has to be as high performance as possible while simultaneously not being ludicrously insecure, because the threat environment is basically as hostile as it gets.
The fastest way to "become a lean organization" would be to just give up and become yet another Chromium clone. Barring that, they have a lot of software to maintain if they want a truly independent browser. A modern browser is comparable in effort to supporting an entire operating system, because that's what browsers kind of are nowadays.
About the only other option is to lay off all their staff in SF and Paris and other HCoL areas and relocate to Central and Eastern Europe.
For 200M you can get around 1.5k full time developers, not including community contributions. That is quite a lot and they easily could add hundreds of more developers if they wanted to.
The specific number they pay is also not that relevant, what I am concerned about is their position. They have one "customer" that enables their entire operation. That is bad for any organization, if that is also your main competition you are in an even worse spot. The longterm sustainability of Mozilla depends on being able to operate independently from Google funding.
Their revenue is 800 million. It sounds like a lot of money for a browser Over the last 10 years their revenue would?? say 5 billion. That is a lot
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Mozilla can explore turning Firefox freemium and cutting relience on Google.
At 10% conversion, and $20/year price point, Mozilla would be making the same money it now makes from Google, but it would be coming 100% from its users, aligning all incentives. Then it is a whole new reality regarding product and company decisions.
The browser is the most intimate product we spend hours in every day to access information. The age of paying for your browser and have it work in your interest should re-emerge.
I would gladly give five figures to Mozilla if I knew it would go, without replacement, to Firefox. They don't. So I won't. Nothing else they do is remotely offensive compared to the mission creep.
How would you donate to Firefox? Firefox is the result of many things that cost money. That includes many expenditures like people's salary, toilet paper for the offices and a JIRA license.
It is a serious question - how do you expect this to work in such a way that you feel you contribute directly to the development Firefox? What does that mean in reality? Is that even possible?
Are you joking? I'm sure OP would be fine with any of the things you mention. The problem is that it's not even possible to donate directly to Mozilla Corporation [1] (let alone toilet paper for employees working on firefox), so your donation might as well go to any random unrelated project the Foundation decides to do.
[1] which develops more than just firefox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products but
They have one billion dollars and they're cutting back on Firefox software development. If anything they don't get hated on enough.
Bear in mind a lot of it is just concern trolling.
Many of the people saying this have as much interest in improving the things they complain about as anti-renewable comments have a genuine interest in reducing bird fatalities.
Mozilla (and Wikipedia as mentioned by the OP) have been subjected to a long running culture war boycott.
Similar to wind power, I'd guess their continued success in the face of this contributes to the feelings of anger towards them.
How is it "concern trolling" to point out that Mozilla is kept alive by Google and unable to allocate funds appropriately? I am a Firefox user and I want Mozilla do be serious competition against Google.
The concerns are legitimate and ofen raised by people who genuinely want Mozilla to be better. Accusing people of concern trolling when they point out legitimate issues is a sure way to never get these issues fixed.
>Similar to wind power, I'd guess their continued success in the face of this contributes to the feelings of anger towards them.
This is such an abysmal mindset. Both Mozilla and Wikipedia should operate with the goal of improving their product. Both are severely mismanaging funds away from the things people actually care about. The only things they really are successful in is raising funds.
Success for Mozilla is having a popular, open, sustainably funded and independent browser. In this regard they are a failure, but I absolutely don't want them to be.
Wikipedia is just trolling suckers into giving them money by pretending they are about to go under, when they are extremely well funded, so much so that huge amounts of funds vanish into undisclosed webs of charities.
2a - crazy CxO bonuses