I'm a Firefox user, so I have a vested interest in Mozilla's long term health and financial viability. But "marketshare nosedives" appears to be primarily an editorialization to fit the post's larger narrative.
One other thing to remember, is to check the falling of desktop usage, because a large part of the modern internet users are mobile-only, and the amount of people who use anything but what Google tells them to (or Apple allows them to) is vanishingly small.
I'm a Chrome user. Both on desktop and mobile because of the built in syncing.
If I were able to switch to Firefox mobile (Android), I would. But the rendering is often broken or awkwardly different on Firefox mobile. I thought this is a thing of the past...
That's an interesting angle. I suppose we could compare against Mozilla's stats on download numbers and telemetry? Though between users downloading from distro mirrors and disabling telemetry (I suspect Firefox users are far more likely to be privacy conscious and/or Linux users) those will also be fuzzy.
It's going slowly down - something that is unlikely to improve unless Firefox gets better distribution channels, especially on mobile. Giving up on FirefoxOS cut them from having the "default" browser anywhere.
They are working on a gecko-based iOS browser since the UE is likely to mandate browser diversity, so maybe that will improve things a bit - though this will only make the situation on iOS on par with Android where Firefox is not doing well market share wise.
Firefox's nosediving market share should represent a catastrophic, company-endangering situation. It's depressing that they don't seem to understand that.
I sense a great disturbance in the Force...
One asshole Mozilla employee responded with "no, the danger is too great" and spouted a crazy theoretical involving someone's pacemaker getting connected to Firefox and malware blah blah blah.
People pointed out that Firefox access people's cameras and microphones, and Chrome offers Web Serial support and users have to allow the permission and pick a device to connect to, a site can't just connect to any serial device.
Cue handwaving about "we have higher standards than that smelly privacy-violating evil browser."
What a bunch of fucking clowns.
1. Mitchell Baker is also chairwoman of the board of the Mozilla Foundation and is a founding member of Mozilla, and receives no stock compensation because there is none to give,
2. Google can definitionally outspend Mozilla on browser development and has used that to cement their market position for over a decade now, and
3. as long as Google is the primary source of Mozilla funding, they can (effectively) kill Firefox at any time, and diversifying revenue / building up a war chest of funds is the only defense against that,
just seems silly to me.
As a former Mozillian I don't like the choices Mitchell Baker has made (AI and services are poor plays IMO) but the obsession with CEO compensation at Mozilla has always smelled less like a genuine concern for alternatives to Chrome and more like holding a smaller player to an unreasonable standard.
A more interesting comparison would compare these numbers to the head of Chrome's compensation, and more specifically Chrome's spending and revenue vs Firefox's.
Then put the money saved towards allocating tens more top, full-time, aligned engineers to projects.
When I see leaders of a non-profit personally drawing more than is necessary to lead a comfortable life, I see a conflict between the mission and personal enrichment.
(There's the argument that non-profits need money, and supposedly you can't get good people to generate money except by hiring people who are personally money-motivated. But the evidence I see is that it looks like money and power potential attracts self-interested careerists, and you get people building fiefdoms, and incestuous relationships among them. Get an honest, smart, true-believer board, and anyone who tried to draw millions of dollars in compensation, or assemble an org chart of careerist execs, would get a regretful, "Sorry, this isn't that kind of 'non-profit' vehicle for wealthy executive lifestyles and careerists, and we don't seem to have alignment", as they gently dropkick the misaligned people out the door.)
Browsers just duking it out on features and ease of use is not how the browser market works—Google can and does leverage their dominance in non-browser markets to boost their browser, and Mozilla is not going to raise their browser share against tactics like that if they simply focus really hard on making a better browser.
Tying it to a more functional goal like successful diversification of revenue makes much more sense (even if you disagree with how they did it in this particular case).
I genuinely think that Mozilla will have to go out of business before she will step down.
What if the EU were to fork Firefox (Openfox?) and fund its evolution of a privacy-first alternative? Among other benefits, this would:
• Help ensure that key digital infrastructure is not solely dependent on non-European entities.
• Balance the US's outsized role as a gatekeeper for web innovation.
• Support the EU's user privacy and data protection values and comply-by-default with EU regulations.
• Help bolster Europe's economic and tech independence.
What else?
Most of EU funding for OSS project is spread out to lots of projects, with relatively small amounts - Gnome got $1M recently and celebrated as a "big" milestone. I'm not saying that this is bad, but that's not how you can fund a core browser team.
recent examples: address bar becomes search bar. referrer header always sent cross domain with full url. webextensions3. hundreds of apis that only benefit ad "viewability" detectors. removal of websocket permission (like you have for notification etc). etc
soon: adding Floc
"Privacy? Awesome! Wait! Wait! Not from us! Ban it! Ban it!"
I'd focus on the "balance of power" aspect. But that can be achieved by marketing Firefox, you don't have to fork it.
This has been on my mind for a long time. It would be good for everyone to have a real alternative to Chrome and it would be good for Europe to be less dependent on the US, as you mentioned.
In time, it might be possible to fund this off donations, but a bit of EU funding would go a long way to getting this off the ground. Unfortunately, the workings of EU funding programmes are a mystery to me.
No fork please. But do pay more contributors to work on the upstream codebase towards benefiting Firefox's downstream.
PS: don't forget eidas 2.0 has a loophole regarding SSL snooping, check EFF's article on eidas 2.0's article 45.
And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?
The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.
Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is that Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at 10% marketshare is enough to sustain the operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.
So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozill's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.
2022 Audited Financial Statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
2022 Form 990: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...
while in Mozilla a single person is receiving close to 7million dollars!
The best option would be for someone to fork Firefox and perhaps get it sponsored by Apache foundation. Then we can write it off.
Firefox is my daily browser across multiple platforms, and I worry for its future.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mark-surman-mozilla-25-y...
Google's Chromium project push new standards every month or so, and web developers are fast to adopt these standards and don't care about testing it on Firefox anymore. The Chromium monopoly is already a reality.
Yes. They got it fair and square --- they paid Mozilla for it --- and they still are.
When Firefox is no more, the legacy will be Thunderbird and Rust, not the Web browser, and despite how they won over PNaCL, it is Chrome that drives WebAssembly.
On the other hand, it could well become the de-facto standard browser for embedded applications, though. The browser frame can be ported to different UI frameworks quite easily and the code has practically no dependencies outside the project itself.
Also Chromium is there, it's open enough to be a base for Chrome, Brave, Edge, and probably a few more, and it's open source, forkable at any moment Google adds something unpatchably bad. (of course independent implementations are welcome, but the ultimate goal is a healthier web through user freedom, and that doesn't necessitate Firefox directly, a ChromiumFox would be just as perfect)
Last I heard it only borrows Windows 95's aesthetics and nothing more.
Firefox makes a lot of noise about their anti-tracking and pro-privacy features. I liked Suckless surf, but missed the granular JavaScript setting of noscript. And, I have no idea, but Privacy Badger must be doing something I guess?
Organizational baggage?
Who would want them to do that?
And Firefox is actually a very good browser and better than Chrome in some aspects.
If you’re happy with Firefox I’d say just keep using it.
Why should you be looking else where if it is working well for you? Unless you feel so wrong about CEO's pay I dont see how it is relevant until the product quality declined.
“ On January 28, 2020, the Mozilla Foundation announced that the project would henceforth be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary, MZLA Technologies Corporation, in order to explore offering products and services that were not previously possible and to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations.[69][70]”
Same as next year will be the year of mass adoption of Linux by consumers.
Yet history and trends point in the other direction
Switching from Chrome to Firefox isn't even nearly as difficult as switching from Unity to Godot (or say, from Windows to Linux). For the average user, Chrome and Firefox are functionally identical. If Chrome kicks off Adblocker, Firefox will be obviously better for a lot of people.
The article states that revenue from services is up from 50 to 70 million. Still only about 10% of what they make from Firefox, but at least that's independent revenue, going up, directly from consumers.
Can someone please provide a rational argument, not a kneejerk emotional response why focusing on the source of revenue that is Google independent and growing is not the better way to fulfill their stated mission, that is creating a privacy respecting and open web? People are acting like Ahab and the whale when it comes to Firefox, there's no point in dumping more resources into the thing if's going down anyway and makes you subservient to a tech monopolist.
For all those being annoyed by the decreasing usage of FF in favor of Chrome: If Mozilla & FF died, couldn't this create better scenarios?
Idea: Google might get into legal trouble, maybe even having to lose chrome, opening the market or Chrome / Chromium base for a fresh start?
There's a real opportunity here. People are increasingly distrustful of, say, Google. I use it because it's still performant, cross-platform and has sync. But , like many, are increasingly leerly abou tGoogle using Chrome's position to, say, attack ad blockers.
The ultimate question is how does and should Mozilla fund itself? Well, if the CEO can't lay out a vision and deliver on that then why are they still there? Why is their compensation still increasing despite not performing?
Instead we get platitudes about "add on services". Previously it was "VPN services" and now it's "AI services"? It's almost like the future revenue plan is always "<current buzzword> services".
I use both Ungoogled Chromium and Firefox on my main workstation, which runs Fedora Asahi Linux exclusively on Apple Silicon (I never boot into macOS), and should add that on aarch64, my overall experience with every Firefox build has been stellar. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Ungoogled Chromium.
CEOs are important -- not intrinsically, but to survival. Their actions are important. Their decisions are important. Their attention is important. And there's a lot of competition for good ones. If you get a bad one, it's an existential crisis, and the good ones can always go elsewhere for more money.
Want to help nonprofits and small corps? Support the passage of laws limiting CEO pay.
Is it normal for Non-Profits to not the include Income Statement in their financials? Because Mozilla doesn’t.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
Openoffice was forked to become Libreoffice and seems to have gotten beter for it.
Time to fork Firefox [1] and take over where Baker dropped the ball because she thought the rules of the game could be changed to make it no longer necessary to play to win.
I guess if what's Firefox needs is a reliable source of funding, at least recognizing that is a necessary first step. Who knows, maybe it could happen somehow.
For comparison, look at what the OpenBSD team has accomplished (and continues to accomplish) with a small core team and they surely do not have hundreds of millions.
IMO Mozilla is default dead and so is Firefox. With 500M of revenue, ~$7M going to CEO is >1% of revenue being sucked by CEO (not even net profit).
From a distant observer, Mitchell is a parasite.
The Chromium Hegemony is winning and Safari is barely alive.
Moz seems like a controlled opposition at this point.
why was it a goal, I have bo idea
Which is to say, at some point they might become annoying enough for Google to not want to pay them anymore, and then Mozilla would cease to exist shortly thereafter.
So with that in mind, Firefox as a dedicated separate browser with its own engine is an albatross around their neck. A source of significant ongoing investment and cost for comparatively little return. For the Mozilla "mission" and the CEO's personal goals and purpose, a simple rebadged chromium fork skinned up with open-web platitudes is a far better idea in the long term.
The problem is that Mozilla hasn’t been able to find any product that generates any meaningful revenue.
It makes perfect sense for them to try to be an entity that can exist without their biggest competitor tossing them scraps.
How they should achieve that is certainly up for debate but it’s also clear that their attempts to add monetizable aspects to Firefox isn’t moving the needle much either.
Given that Firefox has kinda lost the browser war it seems obvious that they should be focusing efforts on other things that further that mission besides dumping money into a browser a tiny slice of people want to use.
Because an ongoing antitrust suit against Google search could mean the revenue they get from Firefox is no longer an option.
Having said that, Mitchell was instrumental to several very important things, not all of them in the distant past. She also went years taking annual salary lower than she probably should have been taking. It frankly wouldn't be unreasonable to grant her lifetime emeritus status that comes with a no-strings-attached $1–2 million annual salary to sit on her hands and do nothing. (I do think that $7 million per year is pretty gross, though, especially given the current "state of Mozilla".)
Having said that, $7 million for a CEO who isn't earning it really isn't Mozilla's biggest problem, and it's not even its biggest financial problem. If you really want to be critical of its spending, consider this:
The annual budget for marketing and branding every year falls between $30 and $60 million. Per year. This is Mozilla. Empirically, it may as well not even have a marketing department.
When Chrome really started eating into Firefox marketshare 10+ years ago, one of the things that Mozilla folks used to complain about (a lot) is that Chrome's effective* marketing budget was higher* than Mozilla's total budget—browser development and other software eng. included. The perverse thing is that the same is true of Mozilla: you could take its annual marketing budget, pour it into a different org that works on a different browser, and what you could get out of it is an independent browser development company. What's more is that you could without too much difficulty get that company not only to profitable status in pretty short order (given that kind of budget), but get it to usage share that matches Firefox's own (given how low that is). This would take something like 3, 4, 5 years max, provided you have competent leadership.
That's the sort of profligate spending and a lot of other poor decisionmaking at Mozilla that really needs to be addressed if Mozilla is going to turn around. (I have given up hope that this is ever going to happen. I expect it not to.) People hardly talk about this aspect of the business, however—instead focusing on how much Mitchell is getting paid, which, to reiterate, is not in any sense the biggest problem that Mozilla is facing.
-- former Mozillian
Is your claim that this other browser company would ship an open source browser that is a) gpu-accelerated, b) cross-platform, and c) render Youtube, Tiktok, Reddit, bank websites et al. correctly, and be used by millions of people?
Sorry, what? She was underpaid for a few years, so should get a couple mil forever now? Can you at least list out the "several important things?"
How c[u]ome, with all the power of open source we still do not have an open browser with an open sync infra?.
emotions aside, this is dumb (some words cannot be used). Why can't we, as a group, stop complaining, and actually devote real time hours into developing the serenity browser to work as chrome / brave / firefox?
Why can't we, use the knowledge we have gained from IPFS and actually work on a distributed no server sync platform?
Why can't I, simply stop using the mentioned above software and devote myself into something more hopefully reliable?
I think it is hard to lose your daddy and leave home, but it's something we all have to do in order to actually grow.
But if you feel like you have to act, do so and do a show HN; I’m always willing to give a new browser a try :-)
Since I think apple should open up iOS more, I hope WebKit develops a healthy marketshare outside of that ecosystem.
I will not go further because it will turn into an all-bashing post, but Mozilla ( as you like to think of it ) is dead and has been dead for a long time.
Deal with it.
Have made zero changes to FF itself, but overall have found local AI a huge help in managing it all.
Seriously, Mozilla cant win. A large voice of people constantly scold Mozilla for anything it does. We’ve heard from Firefox devs on how this bash fest affects them and we expect them to crank out awesome software despite the abuse. Instead of picking the lesser of two evils they say oh, Firefox is N milliseconds slower than Chrome so I’ll use the greater of two evils.
Can we stop beating a dead horse? If you don’t like Firefox or Mozilla fine but don’t act like it’s unusable as a browser. It’s fine, it works, I don’t why everyone is so bothered by minor details when their goals and clearly better than their competition.
Sure it may be slow for YOU (whatever your use case is) or maybe your extensions broke but average users who rely power users to recommend a browser don’t care. If they can open Facebook and Netflix it’s fine. So use Chrome yourself and recommend Firefox to the people this crap doesn’t matter to. And maybe, if they see the numbers tick up, they’ll change course.
Did you say that Firefox is a 'money sink' for Mozilla? The thing that brings them half a billion dollars a year and corresponds to the vast majority of their revenue ... and is the only thing that gives them relevance .. to you, this is a 'money sink'?
Let me donate to support Firefox. Firefox, only. Hell, she can even skim off the top for her pay.
They don’t do this because it would trash the gravy train. So Firefox is held hostage to support a litany of nonsense that lets them travel to conferences to speak about AI.
I use FF is my daily driver for home stuff; work in chrome/edge. When I see things that are wrong, I point them out. We can champion FF for the good things it does and absolutely we can bash CxO club for slowly running it to the ground.
<< Honestly these kinds of posts are tiresome and unhelpful.
Not accurate, this is likely one of the few ways we can exert some minimal level of influence over this. And besides, what did not complaining ever achieve?
One of the reasons firefox is dying is because they are chasing market share and not listening to the users at all.
They look at Edge, Chrome, etc and try to duplicate them hoping to peel off users.
They look everything under the sun but what the actual users of their actual product want... Us users they just ignore us.
Honestly, this news/post made me lose the final shred of hope I had.
:/
[1] Google no longer unilaterally pulls on web standards. Google and Apple adopt a shared, first-class standard for native app development. Web gets "as native" APIs.
[2] No requirement of app store for distribution. Web installs and web as native. No scare walls or hidden-in-the-settings feature flags. The browser runtimes have full extension support with no removal of hooks necessary for eg. adblocking.
[3] First party apps are not defaults, not preinstalled, and more importantly, cannot re-assert themselves as defaults.
[4] If someone searches for your company or product by name, or a 1 edit distance variation, competitor ads can't show up before your website or app.
I think there are two realistic paths for the company. One is to make the browser amazing and edgy in ways that Google and Microsoft can't match (out of the fear of cannibalizing revenue or running into regulatory trouble). Mozilla has a shot at it, but it's unlikely to happen if they have a defeatist attitude about it internally, and are focusing on non-browser pivots.
The other path is to basically turn into some completely different company, throwing money at unrelated pursuits such as AI and hoping that you get lucky. But what gives Mozilla any edge with that?
And Firefox is their only worthwhile product, so moving away from Firefox means they're dying.
back in March Moziila announced $30m for A.I. services [0]
what's weird is that wound business strategy is usually "what are our core strengths?" instead we get
> A little over two years ago, Mozilla started an ambitious project: deciding where we should focus our efforts to grow the movement of people committed to building a healthier digital world. We landed on the idea of trustworthy AI. [1]
OK, despite my skeptisism what's the plan
> Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. We’ll share more on these — and what we’re building — in the coming months. [0]
While that's all very nice, who on earth are the customers? Is there a eshop somewhere lamenting "our recommendation system is not people centric" ?
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozillas-vision-for-trus...
I think they mean content recommendation systems used by social media. Mozilla Foundation likes to larp as a social media startup or something. Their big angle is that existing social media doesn't shut out 'bad people' e.g. people with opinions to the right of wherever the American west coast zeitgeist is this year. They want recommendation engines that only serve 'good people', or which engineer people's opinions to be more 'good'.
But of course they don't actually have a social media platform worth a damn for them to impose their own agenda onto, so it'll end up tacked onto a mastadon instance nobody uses, or incorporated into the 'New Page' of Firefox, or maybe turned into a browser extension that tries to block or inject stories on other social media websites. All a huge waste of time and money.
They tried hopping on Blockchain train and ended up jumping back off after getting roasted by JWZ [0] "we are reviewing if and how our current policy on crypto donations fits with our climate goals. ... [although] decentralized web technology continues to be an important area for us to explore."
I guess AI is gee whizz enough to escape the Planet Burning argument for now.
A piece of software - with climate goals.
They had a stab at VR with Mozilla Hubs [1] - and copied off Meta by also not including legs in the avatars! Your personal Hub for only $10 a month. Judging by the code commits it is, er, stable [2]. No-one explained how a GPU driven chatroom meets the climate goals!
Imagine if they put all that effort into innovating the browser.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870787/mozilla-pauses-cr...
Correct.
For instance, the CEO of UNICEF USA makes 620k a year. https://www.unicefusa.org/about-unicef-usa/finances/financia...
Mozilla is a tar pit designed to prevent alternative browsers forming. Firefox deserves better.
