Part of what the DOJ is seeking against Google would severely impact Mozilla financially however, as they want to ban them from paying to be the default search engine.
That's enough to be (apparently) profitable. It doesn't matter if most people don't pay for search as long as enough people do that paid search can exist.
It's more like 0.005%-0.02% of queries and like 0.001% of users depending on what statistics for Google you go by, but of course still very insignificant.
Ah yes, the mystical 0.0073 units of people paying for search, assuming every person searches.
Over a year ago, Kagi hit 20k paying members. This puts monthly ARR between $200k and $500k ($10 to $25/head), roughly. That's 0.000273% of all people -- quite a jump!
Someone in an infosec podcast recently summed up the whole situation far better than I've been able to:
The vast majority of people won't pay for privacy.
Some people will pay for search. Some people will pay for content. It's really not many, though. Can you imagine if effectively everything on the internet was paywalled? I sure as hell don't know what the solution is, but we wouldn't've gotten to this spot right now, with all of the good and the bad of the internet, if the vast majority of sites and services on the internet charged for use.
(My best guess is that we can have the good that we have now with ads that aren't individually targeted. I literally have no guesses other than that.)
I have loved Kagi's "small web" where I find interesting items, almost like stumbleupon. It reminded me that not every site on the internet is optimizing for eyeballs.
Mozilla diversifies by increasing the CEO's salary for nothing.
Wiki:
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022.
The new CEO brings computing for AI money bleed that almost no one wants.
I'm not defending it at all, but I think it's worth pointing out this pay rate is below the rate most CEOs of tech companies of this size are making. I don't really know what the solution here is but I imagine any CEO they replace her with would also seek a high salary. I'd love for them to become a worker-owned cooperative like Igalia but I really don't see that happening any time soon
I don't agree with Mozilla paying that huge CEO salary, but…
Do you know Firefox's handy new offline translation feature? That's AI a well. And Firefox is the only browser that doesn't leak your web page when translating it.
There are plenty of other uses for AI, such as describing images without alt-text for the blind, or summarization. I, for one, want AI in my browser, you can't really say that “nobody wants it”, when many people clearly do.
Thunderbird is doing pretty good. They actually have a surplus in donations they have to get rid of. Yet Mozilla abandoned it and refuses still to accept donation for Firefox.
Linux kernel is backed by Linux Foundation, Servo web engine is backed by Linux Foundation Europe and both are making a great progress. Why can't Firefox be funded by companies like Linux is?
I think it absolutely would be great if a Wikipedia-like model were viable, but Wikipedia is like the extreme high watermark for that, and they get five billion visits a month, which I think is an order of magnitude higher than what Firefox has access to. Ramping up to Wikipedia scale levels of donations would be a serious project and a significant gamble.
Wikipedia has also been around as long as the internet itself and its current fundraising drives are the culmination of decades of momentum and cultivating a perception of the compact that exists between them and their users.
Also, I believe that even in the best of times Wikipedia is raising about half as much as it costs to run Firefox.
There's probably important caveats that relate to comparing software development projects with resources and content, because I think the most successful donation-driven examples are Wikipedia, NPR, and The Guardian. And what they seem to have in common is generating content to be consumed.
In terms of software development projects, to me the most natural analogy is something like VLC, which does indeed rely on donations and is orders of magnitudes smaller. Or maybe the Tor project which does rely on donations, but I think they're at the order of like 10 million or so, which is certainly promising, but not a like for like substitution for the revenue they get from Google.
Similar to Mozilla & Firefox, there isn't an exact breakdown for Wikimedia expenditures to know the costs associated with Wikipedia. For Firefox, it's often stated its costs are ~200m but those are all expenses Mozilla categorizes under software development. For Wikimedia, within their operation expenses, ~3m were in hosting and ~84m in salaries (related to programs). The salaries are stated to be for multiple initiatives, among which platform development is mentioned*.
*Although arguably the most important part of Wikipedia, and their other collaborative projects, are the volunteers maintaining and contributing to it, rather the developers.
Note that $15 million is nowhere near enough to pay the number of employees who work on Firefox. As a for-profit (unlike the foundation), Mozilla the corporation has to pay folks market rates, and if you're paying an employee in the US, you're paying that same amount on top as taxes, insurance, benefits, etc. etc. so $15 million gets you a few dozen people at most. Mozilla employs a few hundred. So you'll have to add a zero to that number before it's in the same ballpark (e.g. wikipedia would be a good example).
Is the AI coming at a prohibitive cost? I'm not sure I understand what is going to come of those bets, and I'm not a fan of AI everything so I hope it's only used in measured ways that are beneficial, but I certainly would rather them continue innovating.
I don't think they did a whole lot with blockchain beyond some very preliminary dabbling in decentralized web stuff which if it could have gained traction I absolutely would have supported but it certainly doesn't seem like it was a significant drag on developer resources or finances so far as I could tell.
And wouldn't that have to be the argument for any of this to matter?
So you made this claim about the blockchain and I did a little bit of Googling to learn more. And so far as I can tell they barely did anything beyond some like papers and very preliminary demo implementations of stuff like IPFS and dabbling with Web3.
Those were very preliminary ventures and not anything that commanded substantial developer resources, so I don't know what you're talking about. And look. I obviously disagree with people who claim that side bets compromised Mozilla, but the arguments sort into different tiers with some being understandable (issues with adtech, CEO pay), some in the middle (the non profit Mozilla Foundation is bloated!), some that are one step up from utter nonsense because they're at least expressed in coherent sentences but have little to no supporting evidence or theory of cause and effect (e.g. "Mozilla lost all its market share due to their side bets being prohibitively expensive").
But we're at a point where apparently these arguments have been seen and repeated so many times that there's a new class of commenters who have been making the lowest effort versions of these arguments that I've yet seen, and are the least interested in anything like evidence or logic or responsiveness to questions or anything that I would associate with coherent thought. Which is where I would put the blockchain argument.
> Those were very preliminary ventures and not anything that commanded substantial developer resources, so I don't know what you're talking about.
Are you sure they intended them to be preliminary? Maybe they backed off when they saw their users' opinion about Web 3-4-5 or whatever number the blockchain "evangelists" picked out.
In 3-5 years if Firefox will still be around are you going to tell me their "AI" initiative was just preliminary too?
What I'm talking about is trust again. Easily lost, hard to gain back. As I said elsewhere, I want a guarantee that my money is only spent on the actual browser before I donate.
> everything I said about the relative quality of different Mozilla arguments
You see "they're trying this promising new technology" i see "they're running around like a headless chicken, trampling the poor browser's body with their boots in the process".
I'm not going to look for mitigating circumstances until I see a pattern of news that the Mozilla org is at least admitting to working on the browser and not whatever is evangelized this week.
This to me is the ultimate sign that Mozilla has zero values or principles.
They've long advocated that Big Tech is a problem, but as soon as somebody tries to actually address it and this coincidentally impacting Mozilla, they abandon any and all principles.
That would be a good thing.
If Firefox is funded by donations, rather than by Google, it ensures there is no enshittification in the future.
And yes, donations can fund a big project, as evidenced by Thunderbird and Ladybird.
Nobody uses Ladybird, at this point it's vaporware. And Thunderbird is still based on Firefox.
The development of Firefox costs around $200 million per year. That's more than what Wikimedia can get from donations, and Wikipedia is a website that everyone uses. And you want to rely on donations from people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
And let's say that it manages to bring those costs down to $100 million per year or less and manages to get it from donations (when pigs will fly) … it still has to compete with a Chrome whose estimated cost goes over $1 billion per year.
If it costs $200 million a year to develop Firefox, then their management team is guilty of gross incompetence.
I am betting this is really paying for the crappy side projects and HUGE pay for the Mozilla Foundation people (just like all the BS spending the Wikimedia foundation does) and has nothing to do with Firefox itself.
Maintaining a fully compliant, secure, cross-platform web browser that competes with the biggest companies on earth absolutely is going to have costs like that.
I think Mozilla Foundation receives something like 5 to 10%. I'm not against the argument that foundations can be bloated and inefficient, but at this point, this anti Mozilla narrative is completely out of control and almost purely speculation driven.
They spent $35 million in 2022 to establish a venture capital fund... they are definitely using a lot more than 10% for BS not related to developing Firefox.
It would have been 5.9% of that year's annual revenue in 2022. It's not even from their annual revenue streams to begin with, it was a one time pull from their $1.2 billion (at the time) of total assets which includes a big pile of investments. Those assets actually grew by more in one year than the entire than the amount put into the VC fund. Also I thought we wanted them to be making side bets to position them for success in the long term?
There's also no cause and effect connection between the VC fund and their market share. It didn't siphon resources away from developers, and there's no such thing as a missing browser feature that would have restored all the market share had they simply not invested in a VC fund.
The 5-10% figure was in reference to 2021 but I think I was overstating that and the Mozilla Foundation actually gets something like 2% annually.
More charitably, it's driven by frustration more than speculation. Browsers are old technology, and some people think that maybe hurling huge amounts of money at stuff like this is unreasonable because projects can/should be "finished" at some point. Forever-development is very often actively harmful, and if it's actually necessary then it might be hiding problems in the wider ecosystem.
It's good that we have alternatives to chrome, but on the other hand the alternatives are not winning, and they prevent any chance of regulation (or having a reasonable discussion about whether chrome sucks, as we see here). There's a strong argument that mozilla IS google's antitrust shield.
Also can we just take a minute to seriously try to imagine the leader of the "Makefile foundation" receiving $2.4M in compensation, and generally burning a lot more money on dead-end "innovations" and then rebranding as "OpenSource.. And Advertising". Make is 20 years older than Mozilla, but does it look like the browser project will be finished or moving in a great direction any time soon while there's big opportunities for grift and graft?
Signed, a grateful but nevertheless annoyed and skeptical firefox user
> Also can we just take a minute to seriously try to imagine the leader of the "Makefile foundation" receiving $2.4M in compensation, and generally burning a lot more money on dead-end "innovations" and then rebranding as "OpenSource.. And Advertising". Make is 20 years older than Mozilla, but does it look like the browser project will be finished or moving in a great direction any time soon while there's big opportunities for grift and graft?
Make is pretty slow which is why `ninja`, funnily enough, was invented to speed up Google Chrome build times.
I’m the cto of the fork foundation where we provide important alternatives to spoons and work hard to serve our community with the kind of necessary innovations that putting modern food into that hole in your face requires.
If you think about it spending a few billion a year on R+D is the least you could expect when modern food is changing at such a rapid pace! And aren’t you glad the whole world isn’t spoons? I decline to discuss personal compensation because I don’t see how that’s relevant to the issues here!
I think it's unfair to call Ladybird vaporware this early. There's nothing suspicious about their development schedule for the scope of the thing they're trying to build.
I agree I don't think it should be in the alternative browser discussion until they do produce something, however.
And also, I think there's a positive to say about Lady Bird here, which is that in the event they succeed, that's as much a narrative about an extraordinarily talented and committed developer, And if they're able to put forward a credible browser, it will be a soaring achievement for them. Not necessarily something I would expect as a kind of default status quo expectation.
I think if you get these alternative from the ground up browsers, you get extremely limited things like Net Surf, noble efforts that I respect, but not going against the billions of dollars Google can throw into modern browser development.
YouTube is a 1st party service for Google, so you can't ad-block their tracking. And you aren't ad-blocking YouTube due to the spying, so don't be disingenuous.
Yes, it really costs that much.
Given Chrome's vast market share, I'm pretty sure its users like it. And you know what? Most users won't mind switching to uBlock Origin Lite, and the elephant in the room is that “manifest v3” also increases security, with Chrome being indeed the most secure browser.
> And you aren't ad-blocking YouTube due to the spying, so don't be disingenuous.
I don't watch YouTube. If all those influencers want to reach me, they should give me a written summary, I don't have time to listen to talking heads for hours.
However, if I ever follow an youtube link, it will be ad blocked because i run firefox with uBlock Origin, for as long as uBlock Origin blocks youtube ads by default.
>Does it? Or that's what the mozilla organization wastes on harebrained initiatives overall?
Yes! They published their 990, and it's mostly software development, but also stuff like legal and compliance and marketing. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but last time I checked, if you really want to make this argument, I think it relates to the CEO pay and the Mozilla Foundation and its advocacy, which are something around the, you know, taken together something like 55 million or so. You can make the argument that administration and operations as well as marketing and legal and compliance are bloated in some sense, but then you'd still have to make the case that there was a viable path to reinvesting that into development in a way that would change the tide when it comes to market share. But I think that is a confused vision of how market share works because the real drivers are Google's dominant position in search and on Android in the ability to push Chrome on Chromebooks.
Back when these narratives about Mosio's mismanagement started, I just assumed that they were highly informed people who knew what they were talking about. And maybe they really were originally, but it seems to have socialized a new generation of commenters into just randomly speculating about things that completely fall apart upon closer examination.
Mozilla thus far have been very reluctant to take donations to Firefox specifically. AFAIK you can still only donate to the Foundation, not the Corp, which means that most if not all of the cash will get spent on random non-Firefox-related things that you probably couldn't care less about.
I mostly agree, but I am slightly worried that it would lead to slower progress in Firefox. As it stands, Google's funding of Firefox is enough to hire a bunch of engineers to make Firefox a pretty competitive browser.
