While I agree with folks that this is a step backwards in privacy, I think it’s a good exercise to zoom out and understand Firefox’s position.
The browser market is highly competitive, and Mozilla’s competitors have orders of magnitude more resources at their disposal. As we all know Firefox’s market share has been dropping over the past years and unfortunately the revenue supporting all of Mozilla comes predominantly from their Google deal (which itself has been risked by the ongoing case against Google)
Unfortunately as well - unfortunate for Mozilla, but fortunate for its mission and users :) - the Mozilla corporation is wholly owned by the foundation, so there is no easy way to raise funds (donations amount to so little compared to its Google revenue). Given no access to traditional fundraising, Mozilla has limited options on sustaining its business.
All this is to say, Mozilla seems to be trying to diversify its revenue hard, and its previous on-brand attempts (Firefox OS, VPN, etc) haven’t yielded the return they expected from them, so I’m not surprised Mozilla is trying to make money off of ads and selling data. I disable data collection, though if it came to it, I trust Mozilla a tad bit more than its competitors to protect my data - initiatives like ohttp give me a sign that at least they’re trying
Mozilla were pulling in ~$500M/year on those search deals. So on year one, spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers for Firefox, put $450M into a trust to fund future development, and find something to waste $35M on. Then for the next 15 years, find something to waste $500M on.
The amount of money they've squandered is mind-boggling. If their goal had been to develop Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla Suite, and they had focused on how to sustainably do that, they never would've needed to diversify income sources.
Yes, this is how I see it, too. They’ve been operating as if their money hose from Google was (a) infinite and (b) cost-free. Turns out neither is the case, and now they’re dependent on it Google owns them.
They could have funded Firefox development for the next 100 years but they’ve pissed it away, and now they’re selling us out. It’s gross.
It implies maintaining the browser would better fund the mission in the long run than selling user data to adtech now as the user count continues to decline.
Google pays Apple 18 billion dollars per year to be the default search engine on Safari. If Firefox had managed to stay just as popular imagine how much more money they'd have been making on search deals these last 5 years and how much of that could have went to whatever mission they wanted. Instead they've got a whole lot of noise adding up to about nothing for income + a much smaller search deal than they should have. That's why "having a social mission" isn't inherently the issue, it's all about the management around balancing how the investment for the social mission is done.
I think GPs numbers are off by an order of magnitude or so though. I remember reading something like Mozilla spending 200 million/year on software development (not all Firefox) so it might take 300+ million/year just on Firefox to really have a big impact from status quo. Someone with the real numbers is invited to correct me on that. Browsers have huge teams of people, even Ladybird is using large components like Skia developed by other browser teams.
Firefox can't compete with iOS or Android for what should be obvious reasons - it is structurally impossible. Also, the competing browsers are way better today than in Firefox's heyday. There is very little reason to use Firefox today outside of ideological.
Firefox (and its derivatives) is swiftly becoming the only place you can run full uBlock Origin. That's a good reason right there.
Ignoring adblock, I think you could flip it. Chrome and Firefox are basically interchangeable, so if there's little reason to choose Firefox, there's also little reason to choose Chrome.
They've not developed the suite for... between 15 and 20 years I believe; and Thunderbird for over 10 years. For the past several years, Thunderbird is back under the MZLA Technologies Corporation, but - it is funded by donations (and doing rather well in that respect it seems).
So - Firefox is the "only" thing they need to develop.
Their weird org structure is their own fault. Millions of dollars squandered on things most people simply do not care about, while neglecting Firefox for a decade.
When Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix first came out, the org structure wasn't that weird yet. The hybrid structure came a few years later, and even then it was fine for a while, but somehow mission creep set in and they became this ginormous org that did nothing useful, but padded exec salaries at the expense of their only service that people actually cared about, the Firefox browser. They kept adding more and more ads and intrusive partnership and lost marketshare year after year until it became completely irrelevant.
Meanwhile, the Mozilla org tried to become some sort of EFF-wannabe, but heavy on the virtue signaling and low on producing anything of actual value.
At this point, I think Firefox would be better off spun off and managed by another FOSS entity altogether, not whatever the husk of Mozilla is today.
I too wish they would have spent money only on the improving the browser, obvious things like sync, and probably web standards, that's all they really need to do. They don't need to be doing stuff like "social equality" or web DEI or any of that. They don't need to be dabbling in a dozen side businesses.
"donations amount to so little" is very misleading stated like that because Mozilla just doesn't give us any way to donate to Firefox development or even just their FOSS efforts in general. Mozilla is one of the very few companies I've donated to even when I had little in the way of discretionary income, and is one of the first options people think of when they think of FOSS software they want to donate to. But then I learnt that any donations like this are highly unlikely to be spent on the software we're donating it for, and at that point I might as well donate to a random local charity instead.
I'm not gonna claim that donations would have rivaled the Google revenue otherwise, but they will certainly be many many times higher than what they are. Lots of people are willing to and even want to set up a regular donation to Firefox as the lone non-Chrome bulwark in the FOSS space. There would have been grassroots efforts to get more people to donate on the regular, hell I would have put in serious work on such efforts if we actually had a way to donate to keep Firefox alive and healthy.
It doesn’t help that they make it hard to donate to a specific product’s development. I’d donate to Firefox. I wouldn’t give a penny to anything of their other distractions.
(And others would support exactly the opposite, I’m sure. But no one gets to sponsor what they personally care about.)
(Would others? I don't think I have ever seen anyone defend that part of the equation. With Wikipedia's similar insanity--begging for donations to keep their servers on when they don't spend the money on that--I have at least seen some people who like what they do spend their money on as important to them, but I don't think I have ever seen anyone actively want to donate money to Firefox's random side projects instead of Firefox.)
I believe saurik is talking about Mozilla's spending on "advocacy" and other non-product causes, not actual products like Thunderbird. While there are a few actual products other than Firefox (like Thunderbird), most of the "distractions" kstrauser speaks of are of a much less tangible nature that basically amount to "whatever catches Mozilla management's fancy that month".
Reasonable people want people running the product they love to succeed, too. But when the equation involves obscene executive salaries, back tracking on _promises_, terrible decision that lost money, and overall just too much money to justify what's being done. The end result is what you see now: a lot of upset people and there is nothing _unfortunate_ for Mozilla.
I have a lot of trouble seeing what you are trying to defend here -- I really tried but couldn't. I find it pretty hypocritical to say that you disabled data collection while you trust them over your competitors to protect your data -- so you are saying that you trust them but you won't adjust your bottom line to help them succeed anyway?
I really mean well: sometimes you just shouldn't try to appear to be reasonable to a situation that isn't, it actually makes things worse for everyone. I used to do that and have learned some hard lessons.
And that's exactly the problem: treating it like a market. I don't want browsers to be a competitive market, in the same way that I don't want libraries, primary schools, firefighters or healthcare to be a competitive market.
In modern society, they're essential needs, which need to stop catering to the capitalist overlords and need to focus on the needs of the many.
But that ignores the reality. Chrome is implementing new (often privacy harmful) features and because the Chrome market share is high enough websites depend on them. Then the average user has to pick Chrome because "Firefox is broken".
The network effects between website and viewers make the market real and failing to gain a significant market share results in you effectively being cut out and failing to serve the needs of most of your users (unless you can match Chrome's insane pace of development bug-for-bug).
Firefox isn't broken, I literally use it all day long as my browser for work and home usage. Rare occasions I pull out brave, maybe once a month, for something that has an issue, and usually that's not it, it's an extension or something.
I also use it almost exclusively, but sites that don't support it (or more often that just don't test against it and have various broken features) are becoming more common. As the market share shrinks this will become more and more common.
I disagree. There's one dominant player with ~66% of the market, a distant secont place at ~18%, an embarrassing third place at 5%, and then a bunch of also-rans making up the rest [0]. This doesn't look like a particularly healthy, nor competitive, market.
I wonder how much success would have some subscription option (at least for small amount) like maybe $5 per year?
would that be more than my data are worth?
I really like Firefox and u would like it to improve over time and as this is one of my main tools for my work I could consider to spend a little on it
Opera did that for a while, but in a different era. I'd pay for Firefox today though, just to keep someone fighting Google's vision of the Internet (ugh) alive. :/
- More recent lectures on MIT OCW https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-1200j-mathematics-for-computer...
- A well-paced course that follows the textbook and uses online videos done by another one of the authors (Albert Meyer) of the textbook: https://openlearninglibrary.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:OCW+6....