Comment by jqpabc123
5 days ago
It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future
Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.
5 days ago
It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future
Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.
The end of Pocket is just another sad example.
As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.
Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.
Even if you dislike Pocket, its purchase/deprecation is an example of Mozilla failing to effectively use its capital.
They integrated Pocket as a proprietary service in their open source product 2 years before Mozilla acquired it. Removing the integration required editing about:config. The complaints were mostly during that time.
Not strange, satisfied people don't usually run around declaring how perfectly OK everything is.
> Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.
They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear that no data was sent to a third party unless you explicitly clicked it and went through the steps to set it up.
Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party, so Mozilla decided to buy Firefox in an attempt to put those complaints to rest, since it would no longer be a third party.
In the end, those purists didn't stop complaining - they just moved on to different complaints. If you're curious to see for yourself, you can look up the conversations on HN and cross-reference the usernames against other topics involving OSS purism and Firefox.
In the end, everyone lost: longtime Pocket users lost a product that they had enjoyed because it got acquired by a company that never really had an active interest in the product itself, Firefox lost because of the negative PR which contributes to their declining market share, and Mozilla lost because of the massive waste of money this was.
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That they're being bought by Google so that they can focus on the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.
The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time.
Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top.
That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.
A lot of things look like incompetence at a distance, but get really fascinating up close. Does anyone know care to share what they know about the particular personalities, drives, and visions?
That would be pure incompetence from the top
For which they are compensated very well.
It just doesn't make sense does it?
No, but it's not mozilla-specific. It's true of almost every large corporation.
The way this world is going, you shouldn't attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice.
I still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.
> nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it
The Linux Foundation is mostly a dumping ground for dead and dying projects. Particularly they seem to specialize in abandoned commercial open source projects.
I dont think the Foundation provides much, if any, developer funding for these projects. They list $193M in "project support" expenses but host over 1000 projects.
I thought that was the Apache Foundation?
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WebKit is a nice competitor, too. Look at Orion browser, it's a pretty decent competitor. Although they only target macOS, WebKit can be used on Windows and Linux, too.
Webkit on Linux is in terrible shape. Maybe in theory it could be a complete and useable engine but there clearly isn't enough interest to make it that way.
Orion does not target macOS only, well primarily yes, for now, but check out this thread: https://kagi.com/changelog#6479".
Because Mozilla benefits from Google's donations (the majority comes from Google), and being a counterpoint to Google's Chrome is bad for Google, which means less or no donations to Mozilla. Google holds the key here. They have leverage over Mozilla.
They don't get donations from Google, but get paid to include Google as the default search engine, right?
No important difference though. Mozilla tried to switch to Yahoo a few years back and backpedaled. In terms of what users expect, they don't have a lot of options. Google OTOH could do without the users Firefox has left. And I've personally observed Google strong arm "partners". Not sure I see a conspiracy here, but I'm pretty sure that if Google asks for concessions, Mozilla will see what they can do.
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I think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by 100M+ per year.
They are not yet in striking distance to truly become independent, but they are making significant steps in that direction. The share of Google money in their revenue went from 90% in 2020 to 75% in 2023.
I don't think following the money actually shows what you think it does.
As a postscript:
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. There were plenty of people at the time arguing that Firefox maintaining one independent browser engine was idiotic and they should just switch to Chromium like everyone else. People like to lambast Mozilla over relatively minor advocacy spending stuff and cry that it should just focus on Firefox, but insist it should have obviously continued with Servo. Even though Servo probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference to Firefox post Quantum for a very long time.
At what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income?
Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).
Not sure that's a realistic assessment of the cost of developing a browser. Mozilla gives Software Development exp names as by far the single largest expense at 260M$ in 2023. According to DuckAI 700 out of 750 Mozilla Co employees work on Firefox.
I am sympathetic to the idea that a global remote team, that doesn't pay Silicon Valley salaries could get this done cheaper, and thus would be a better candidate for such an Invest and live on interests approach but 15M$ budget seems infeasible.
Reading directly from the 2023 financial report: Revenues were 653M, Software Dev was 260M and change in net assets was 142M, so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour (and that is ignoring that you do need a legal and HR department, and some management, and some marketing if you don't want Firefox market share to fall further).
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The majority of Mozilla’s revenue came through Firefox—their flagship product and by far their most recognized project.
And yet, somehow, they still struggle to secure adequate funding for Firefox itself, while millions are allocated to executive salaries and various advocacy initiatives.
What do you even mean? They have adequate funding. Financially they are doing extremely well.
Wait until you see executive salaries at other companies that make browsers.
What do you mean? Doesn't most of Mozilla's revenue come from Firefox?
I think people are implying that Google told Mozilla to drop Servo, to make sure Firefox wouldn't leapfrog Chrome. And since Google funds Mozilla almost entirely, Mozilla had to comply.
Almost no technical aspect of Firefox have anything to do with how much money Google pays them.
Mozilla is basically paid by Google to have a multi-platform non-Blink browser around they can point to when accused of being a monopoly.
Having a quality browser is not required, merely it existing. So why waste money on novel web engine experiments when you can have AI conferences in Zambia?
Living large and loving life --- by selling out.
How do you think Firefox is making money, since it has no payed features? Hint: it has Google search as the default search engine.
That's my point... The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. If you follow the money, it doesn't make sense for them to neglect Firefox.
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Nope it comes from Google.
Every day I login into Hacker News. Every day, I see Mozilla FUD.
It's wrong to name names without prood but after a point you start doubting your understanding of the world and at this point I'm beginning to suspect Mitchell Baker is a plant
I think without Mitchell Baker there would probably not have been a Mozilla. I'm fuzzy on the history but I believe she was the lawyer who originally set up the organization.
AFAIK she also wrote the MPL, but the thing is, people change and doing good stuff 30 years ago doesn't mean they'd keep doing good stuff decades later.
In any case it doesn't really matter much anymore since apparently she left Mozilla around February.