Comment by jordanb
1 year ago
> I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions,
The problem is that Mozilla's customers are not Firefox's users. Mozilla's customer is Google. They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
I think it's pretty clear that the TOS change basically coincided with the removal of manifest v2 change in chrome.
My understanding is Mozilla contracted its footprint substantially to remain sustainable in a future without Google's monetary contribution.
To little, too late. They underwent massive scope creep, throwing money at anything and everything, while neglecting the core task of maintaining a standards-compliant, user-friendly/non-hostile, privacy-respecting browser ... resulting in such incidents as Mr. Robot ad tie-in and the global add-on outage.
Oh ... and I still can't customize my controls fully. (Add-ons only take effect after a page load.)
Had they actually kept their scope small and focused, they could have put the difference into an endowment that would let them give the middle finger to the Chromes of the world forever. Yet here we are.
Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service or how to comply with Google's advertising decisions.
Then they would let people contribute money to the browser (instead of to Mozilla Foundation which goes to enabling aforementioned trash fires) and to the salary of a multi-million dollar CEO after laying off developer staff and hiring more C-suite assistants.
Mozilla is a bad organization in every sense, a bad steward of Firefox, and the best thing that could happen is they do have their funding cut, they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.
>Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service
It's pants-on-head level of crazy talk to suggest that the VPN service is compromising Mozilla's finances.
It's a re-wrapped Mullvad VPN that probably was not expensive to roll out (it being inexpensive to deploy is probably precisely the reason they moved forward with it). It's like people are just workshopping arguments where they randomly claim these things are expensive without any substantiation whatsoever.
Mozilla is sitting on 1.2 billion in assets and investments. They're not underwater. They are indeed in a position where they need to diversify revenue, but the idea that the side bets have created running deficits is a narrative completely manufactured in comment sections.
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Isn't Mozilla's VPN just a thin UI over Mullvad's servers? I don't think it costs them much and probably brings in some decent revenue.
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I imagine their VPN service is financially viable if they've still stuck with it this long.
Aside from that, they've just about cut all other initiatives aside from "Firefox and AI". The latter gives me pause, but hopefully they really are more focused moving forward.
I think Mozilla has done alright, but I agree the folks is in charge of their business direction and especially PR are abysmal. Personally, I wish a company like Proton was at the helm.
> Then they would let people contribute money to the browser
People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income.
You are not the majority you think you are.
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> they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.
who is going to support, maintain and develop Firefox in your scenario ?
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o...
Yup. Firefox Relay, their own VPN, MDN Plus, and many more.
The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income.
Based on their interop performances Mozilla seems to be doing the best they can to do both. Firefox interop has improved significantly in the past 4 years (surprisingly, so has Safari's) and they've also rolled out more new Mozilla offerings that could some day replace Google revenue
> The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income.
There's no inherent contradiction here. Mozilla still doesn't give me a way to donate to them to fund Firefox. They haven't even tried. I want to fund Firefox development, desperately, but they deliberately structured their organization to make that impossible without paying for some other random project that has its own overhead.
I want Mozilla to offer a Firefox+ subscription or donation or something, anything. Let me give you my money! Just give me a way to be confident that you'll take it as a signal to fund Firefox and not as a signal that what your customers really want is VPNs.
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In a perfect world, I would have liked to see Firefox build what is now the Proton suite of apps.
I would still like to see Proton fork Firefox and operate their own browser once they've matured further.
> They pay Mozilla to exist
Do they? I thought Google significantly reduced their payments to Mozilla a few years back, which started Mozilla current random-walk.
Edit: As of 2023, they were as high as ever at 85% of Mozilla's finances coming from Google [1] . However the DoJ antitrust case against Google targets Google's payments to various entities (Mozilla, Apple) to make themselves the default search engine, thus threatening Mozilla's income. I did not immediately find sources for Mozilla's 2024 finances, but I can imagine they see the existential threat.
> and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
That's just conspiracy-thinking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
> They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
I am trying to understand how this works? If they pay Mozilla to exist, yet their intention is to destroy their competitor, why even pay for them to begin with?
I think it's partially Goodwill, partially business. Google does get some benefit out of being the default search engine for those additional users. It's not substantial, and Cromes is the dominant browser in the market, so I think Google is more just happy to keep Mozilla existing. Also, the existence of Mozilla makes chrome seem like less of a monopoly.
Source: pure speculation on my part
> They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
Come on, that is just crazy talk. I get that Mozilla has made some boneheaded decisions but this is baseless conjecture.