Comment by dralley
2 days ago
> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!
And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.
No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.
* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"
* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.
* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.
* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.
It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.
> There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults
if they had set up an endowment instead of blowing it on unrelated pointless crap for decades they would have been self-funded indefinitely
they were pulling in over $500 MILLION a year
>if they had set up an endowment
Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.
> that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue
oh for fucks sake, that's even worse than blowing it on stupid ideas
JUST USE THE MONEY FOR THE BROWSER
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500 million could net you about 50 to 70 million annually if you put it all on the S&P 500... A few years of this and you're a self-funded non-profit...
They're doing that. Their endowment is invested and it does grow by a non-trivial amount, though I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head.
Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of people with contributions from the community. It's far from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely from scratch, let alone maintain one.
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It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen.
With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.
If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.
Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.
Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.
>If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share.
Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.
You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.
But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.
End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers.
I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.
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> And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.
There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
>And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Wish I read this before posting my comment, I wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also "offer something new to generate revenue".
And the factual literacy of the drive-by critics is, unfortunately, sometimes brutally off the mark and even veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of falsifying financial statements or accusations of controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).
Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep Mozilla is or isn't making.
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