Comment by qwerty456127
1 year ago
> The Justice Department also kept a Biden-era proposal that seeks to ban Google from paying companies like Apple, other smartphone manufacturers and Mozilla to make its search engine the default on their phones and browsers.
RIP Firefox?
Ah fuck.
Welp. They had a chance to be default alive and they fucked it by trying to spend the money on new initiatives instead of just spending the interest payments from an endowment.
Weren't the new initiatives pretty small compared to Firefox development?
Yes. And other than Firefox, Mozilla was spending money in two ways. First creating new paid products in an attempt to have revenue in case the Google money ever went away. None of them were successful enough to meet this goal, but it was a good goal. Secondly, they spent their charity donations on activism work. The way they are structured they legally could not spend that money on Firefox. They would need to restructure as a non-profit corporation (not tax deductible charity) to accept donations to spend on Firefox, like their Thunderbird subsidiary. I hope they do so now, and at least attempt to support Firefox on donations.
The truth is that browsers are a very complicated, very quickly moving, and very security sensitive piece of software. They spent all that money on Firefox rather than saving it because if they didn't Firefox would have fallen behind Chrome and Safari and it wouldn't be worth using today.
1 reply →
At the moment when I got upset about this, they were trying to do an awful lot, and it felt like the money was burning a hole in their pockets.
I know they cut back a little but maybe they’ve sobered up since? Haven’t had the heart to look again.
It will hurt but it won’t be their death.
They have been saving up a bit last year if you see the financial reports their reserves are just above $1B now and there are others who paid in the past (like Yahoo did till 2017) who will pay Firefox a decent amount if not like Google does .
My guess it is likely be Bing or probably a new generation AI company like OpenAI who will replace Google and perhaps even pay similar or close to what Google pays. The traffic is worth a lot. Bing attested to click flow as the reason they cannot make a better product in their testimony in this trial.
Also Google will either be allowed to continue the contract till its current end (I believe 1-2 more years ) or will pay fully and release Mozilla from their obligations (Mozilla is not party to the case so early termination without compensation would be penalty on them for no reason ).
Mozilla will need to make some significant cuts and layoffs no doubt will be hard on the team, but the product will survive.
They can start by reducing their CEO salary from check notes $6.9 million in 2022. It increased by millions in just a decade while their market share declined and they layed off hundreds.
Any other CEO in Silicon Valley with similar circumstances (25 years experience in tech leadership, increasing revenue dramatically despite shrinking market share, negotiating successfully with their biggest competitor, etc.) would be making $5M-$20M depending on stock compensation, which Mozilla does not offer. How does paying less than market rates for a CEO help improve Mozilla's lot?
Or are you suggesting that none of these CEOs should be compensated at current rates? If so, hate the game and not the player my friend.
Compensation is complicated and function of value added to the organization may not correlate to work put in. I have no opinion on what should be cut, just pointing out it won't the end of Mozilla without Google deal.
--
For anyone who wants to know what the other side of the compensation discussion would go like..
One could argue though the Mozilla leadership has also more than quadrupled their revenue from $150M in 2011 to $690M in 2024, despite loosing market share, revenue generated from their only competitor no less. It isn't a easy job to convince your competitor to be your primary source of income to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and keep increasing that every year.
Yes, Google is not funding the search deal out of the goodness of their hearts, but they also don't have to pay $500M+ per year to keep Mozilla alive if that is all they cared about.
Such a deal doesn't happen without a ton of work by Mozilla to build relationships, show value of paying 500M to Google etc.
If the leadership can no longer generate the growth/value they too will face the music sooner or later. Mozilla still would need competent people(this group or another) to be able make the deals to pivot to other revenue sources and they don't come cheap.
A for profit subsidiary of a non-profit in software world will always end up paying what looks like generous compensation perhaps even compared to the market for similar roles in pure for-profit companies, because unlike those companies, Mozilla cannot offer stock compensation on top of cash.
If chrome is no longer owned by Google I'll use it. That's the reason I switched to firefox in the first place.
In my opinion Firefox is better in all the ways except speed - Chrome still feels faster on old computers. And I prefer the browser market to still have some technical diversity no matter who actually runs it.
Firefox had Servo, a project that among other things focused on delivering faster technologies for a web browser. They had impressive results (integrated into Firefox as Firefox Quantum) but were suddenly fired
At that point I think Firefox lost a vision of a better future
Ever try installing chrome on an old operating system like Windows 7? It doesn't work but if already installed then much faster. Wonder upto what version works with win7
Eh, I tried using Firefox again for a few months when manifest v3 was announced, nothing worked quite right, then I ran into this: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
Who do you think is going to buy chrome? And don't you think they are going to want to recoup their investment?
I suspect chrome will get far less consumer friendly than chrome currently is if it is sold.
Some AI company could buy it and add some subscriptions based AI services. Or package it with optional but very popular and lucrative VPN, etc. There's a lot of potential business models apart from feeding advertising algorithms. Besides maintaining a browser is not stupendously expensive, firefox runs on about $500M in revenue.
1 reply →
chrome no longer supports effective ad-blocking extensions.
Isn't that because Google doesn't want them upsetting their advertising business. Breaking up seems like it will help this
Sort of. MV3 is less effective than MV2, sure. But it is not wholly useless. uBlock Origin Lite exists.
1 reply →
I recall it being claimed that Mozilla has the warchest to survive at typical spending levels for quite some time, without Google.
If I am reading their financial statement correctly, they have about 3 years of runway. $500M/year expenses, $65M/year revenue other than search deals, $45M/year interest on savings and $1300M assets.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
Firefox will be just fine. Mozilla CEO bonuses however...
This is complete nonsense.
I don't love the CEO bonuses, but they are objectively less than half a percent of Mozilla's budget. Google search on the other hand is 85% of their revenue.
I think it's now at 1% $6.3M of $650M revenue which is a lot for a CEO failing to keep the company viable from a clearly obvious eventuality.
1 reply →
Any other CEO with a similarly sized company, revenue stream, and user base in Silicon Valley would be making 2-3X what Mozilla's CEO makes when you consider total compensation.
Apologies for the cheap shot at sarcasm, however the point I was trying to make is this: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/09/this-is-a-pretty-dire-asses...
I recently switched to Vivaldi and have really liked it.
Is it going to support manifest v2 after it is phased out by Google or whoever is going to own Chrome?
Nope. And they're betting on their built-in AdBlock being a good replacement for uBlock, even though it's extremely basic, more so than uBlock Lite.
I made that switch quite a few years ago, got sick of dealing with extensions and configuring browsers. Vivaldi gives me enough out of the box to call it good.
time to try ladybird haha
Mozilla should have seen this coming and invested in their own search and ad infrastructure like Brave. They’ve had years but wasted their time on tiny features like Pocket.