undefined | Better HN

0 pointsglenstein1y ago0 comments

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.

0 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

photonthug1y ago· 2 in thread

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

jjmarr1y ago

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_(build_system)

photonthug1y ago

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!

1 more reply

FuriouslyAdrift1y ago· 1 in thread

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.

glensteinOP1y ago

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.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse