I kinda get why they (and other companies) have to try AI at the moment though.
It’s not what people claim it is, but it could end up being an essential tool for the modern world, and if they don’t invest in it early their business might end up getting left behind.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before
Best example I can think of is Kodak and digital cameras. They invented it then sat on it until it was too late because they didn't want to cut into their film scam.
It’s quite unbelievable that it was literally right there. The logistics were like 60% solved for them already, the remaining 40% was just making sure the online content remained linked with inventory and fulfillment, and expanding that capacity.
“We think online shopping will be just a fad” - the unimaginable hubris…
I was refreshing myself on wiki. They launched prodigy, but it was too early for online shopping to be popular. So they probably got a bad taste for that kind of thing. A concept in venture capital is that it's all about timing.
Mozilla has a finite amount of money. If they're (as far as I'm concerned) wasting it on AI nonsense, that's less development funds that can go toward Firefox.
While ML does have legit uses in many specific cases, this whole "throw 'AI' into everything" hype/trend is just blockchain all over again. IMO, the ones who are overreacting are the ones swept up in the hype.
In that there is a finite amount of money, there is also a finite amount of development that can go on at once. If they just pile tons and tons of bodies on what you might call useful endeavors, it can lead to bloat and the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
I hate to see AI (I suppose we mean specifically GPTs in this instance) trashed all the time, just because companies use it incorrectly. They shove it in every hole they can to hike the stock price. But it's a great tool, that arguably needs more time in the oven, which has legitimate helpful uses. Especially in the context of a browser.
For example, in Arc Browser I can semantically search the page/article for anything and it will show me the location of the information I need (ever tried to find the recipe itself in an article about the recipe?). I can also do some obvious stuff, like summarize and translate sections, which I could do by copying it into a dedicated service, but it's definitely much more convenient being built-in.
Would be much better if it ran locally off the NPU, but we are not there yet.
Downvotes from the people who believe that all “AI” is an LLM/GPT that must be trained on the collective stolen works of all humanity and requires all of South America’s collective power supply for just a day’s worth of queries
Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects and just focus on delivering a good browser.
Algo the lack of google as financial support means they'll rely more on donations, which would mean that they really need to focus on offering a good browser.
I'll gladly donate to firefox if I would see they are really focusing on it.
I have nothing to prove to you. Besides, even if I did present it, you wouldn't believe it. Even if I presented it with doxxing information you would note it for future harassment campaigns and also claim you don't believe it.
So... as I said previously... suck it.
5.60 USD to mozilla every month. Not much, but if everyone did it, they would be bigger than google and tell them to eat shit livestream.
Your dick dumbass. Not a copy of your fucking bank statement lmfao. Were my lips on my dick sucking emoji face not clear enough?
Ya'll take yourselves way too seriously lol. I'm glad you contributed. I haven't, besides hopefully spurring you on to, in which I'll take some of the credit for it. So you're welcome.
I think in the future I will try to donate like 10 dollars a month for free software that I use, including Firefox, KDE, Thunderbird, Wikipedia, Lemmy, etc.
I think it's very important to support open source financially, because without it we would all be fucked by huge corporations. And I might sound overly anti-capitalist, but I think that most of them should be broken up.
The moment that it's possible to donate directly towards the development of firefox, there's roughly 10€/yr with their name on it. As it stands however, Mozilla is not funding FF at all, but rather extracting money from the project.
Mozilla (not Google) got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO's salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic. It basically got rid of the innovation that could have made Firefox a faster, more secure, and pleasant experience. Rust and Rust-based Servo, as a replacement for Gecko, were two of those side projects. These are the things Mozilla needs to invest in.
Also, I think Mozilla needs to ask the user upon install what the default search engine should be from a list of search engines including Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Yahoo. Maybe the order of those could be arranged based on how much they're able to finagle from the search engines.
The real monopoly is their control over Chrome. That's what they should be forced to split from the company that owns the search engine. Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.
Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.
I'd go so far as to argue the exact same for development of: Operating systems, automotive, smartphones, residential fiber...
The ulterior motive is simply never in a user's best interest when every function ultimately becomes part of the "influence towards the purchase of goods and services" funnel.
While I find your assertion inspiring and very worthy of consideration, I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development. Apple sells the hardware that goes with its OS(es), so they get the hardware revenue (not to mention the App Store and iCloud subscription revenues). They would have to start charging devices to use their operating system or something, and I have to wonder if that would be possible under open source licenses.
I would love an open, sustained, and even open source, secure operating system for phones that's the target of app development. I think the Linux stack should should develop an NPR/PBS type ecosystem public funding of development (with maybe the corporate underwriting of those networks being equivalent to contributions from corporate employed developers to the open source code) and I'd love for it to be a real competitor in the smart phone market (knowing the Android stack modifies and sits on top of Linux).
I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development
Cuts from app purchases and in-app purchases. Of course, developers can implement their own payment gateways and distribute their apps in third party stores, but nobody would do this at risk of being removed from play store.
Right now it's already set as the default search engine and you have to work to change it to something else as I understand it. I'm proposing that no default is set and that the user is asked to select one upon first installing Firefox from an ordered list of search engines. If that's already the case (it's been a while since I installed Firefox from scratch), then I'd argue that's fine. And it allows other search engines to contribute to be higher up in the rankings.
I can't think of anything that would replace the revenue that Google pays Mozilla that sustains the development salaries to hopefully keep Mozilla competitive and hopefully making it the best performing, convenient and private browser.
For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.
By their own account, it's not meant to be lucrative.
"Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.
Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."
Straight from Mozilla's About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users' privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don't actually want.
You're right of course, but you're also wasting your breath.
In 2024 the business sociopaths have so many people so twisted and screwed up in the head that they can't even CONCEIVE of the idea of a person or organization focused on delivering a product sustainably rather than "MONEY MONEY MONEY, NOM NOM NOM!" for eternity.
I really hope that's sarcastic, because Rust is one of the most valuable additions to the whole IT field in a good while.
Entire industries have been stuck on C/C++ for decades. Industries, which are normally extremely late to any form of modern software development, are now practically jolting to get Rust integrated into their toolchains.
Similarly, languages without runtimes allow for building libraries that can be called from other programming languages, which so far meant C/C++. That's a big reason why many widely used open-source projects like OpenSSL, SQLite, OpenGL etc. are written in those.
Even if, for whatever reason, you think Rust is awful, getting a third language into the mix will allow many more people to build similar libraries, which is again really good for everyone.
Maybe that CEO will also quit, because other companies offer them a higher salary.
It's so easy to say they should just pay their CEO less. I mean, I get it, it's a ridiculous amount of money that no one needs. But few people, who are qualified for that job, will just do it out of the goodness of their hearts for a salary far below industry standards.
I don't think companies care. If you're the CEO of Mozilla for a year without it imploding, you're looking very experienced compared to some of the applicants that medium-sized Silicon Valley companies, like Dropbox, Evernote and such, will get.
And if Mozilla is only paying you $200k, they'll consider it an absolute bargain to give you tenfold that.
I mean, they do... the higher my pay goes the less actual work I do (thinking is not actual work). And I keep getting promoted.
It's dumb as hell but the only answer I've come up with is maybe not everyone can do the "stupid monkey shit" (i.e. "Someone get this herd of retarded cats to do literally anything").
what the fuck could the CEO possibly do for a company that seems to just fucking zombie its way along, it does literally nothing and hasnt died, what could the CEO possibly be qualified for, it's not like they're gaining more market share from having a good product
They are the face of the company. If they are shit at communicating it will affect share prices which could end a company. They have to say the right things at the right times or they could potentially break laws by saying the wrong things.
There’s a lot of stuff they need to know and it’s not cheap to get that knowledge.
I love all the vague, ambiguous examples that say nothing.
I mean, the Intel CEO just literally quote the Bible... I guess you need a lot of education for that
Look, I understand you can't get a high school dropout to do this job, but can they really justify earning 10000x more than other people in their companies? Are they 10000x more valuable??
Look, I understand you can't get a high school dropout to do this job, but can they really justify earning 10000x more than other people in their companies? Are they 10000x more valuable??
Everyone here is talking past each other. There's one crowd raging that CEOs do literally nothing, which is objectively untrue. When that is pointed out, people assume it to be an argument that these CEOs should be paid that much, which it's not.
CEOs do things. If they're non-shit, they'll work significantly more hours than normal workers. No, that does absolutely not justify paying them magnitudes more. Their salaries are inflated, because publicly traded companies pay them that much.
Because while the effort a CEO puts in does not match the salary, the impact of their work does so more closely. As in, if they're doing a bad job, the losses for the company will far exceed that salary.
More importantly, though, you want to keep one CEO for as long as possible. Even if their strategies are mediocre, constantly changing CEOs and therefore flipflopping between strategies is worse.
If they are shit at communicating it will affect share prices which could end a company. They have to say the right things at the right times or they could potentially break laws by saying the wrong things.
I notice, very glaringly, you didn't mention a SINGLE thing about the company running efficiently, being profitable, producing something of value...
It's not that the company could end if it doesn't do well at what it does. It's that the company could end if fickle, short-term focused asshats aren't happy, and to keep them happy, you need a head fickle, short-term focused asshat at the helm.
Nope, they aren't. The Mozilla Corporation, which does Firefox development and has the CEO position that everyone's talking about, is a 100% subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which is the organization that you can donate to.
i dont even fucking know who C suites at mozilla, i havent even googled their company in years to see if they even still exist. The only sign of life from this company is when i update my system and firefox also gets updated.
Also, it's pretty cheap to get that knowledge, just don't ever say anything that might lose you money.
What I primarily meant by that, is that you do need some knowledge about financials. Which isn't hard to learn, but the group of people willing to learn about it has very little overlap with the people willing to do something out of the goodness of their heart.
I know many of us don't really like AI stuff. But it is just a door opener - and Mozilla needs funding like any company.
The product we sell at our company also has AI features. So far AI got us to talk to many more customers. So far none of them bought the AI stuff - even if in my opinion it would provide productivity increases. For us AI is a net positive: it cost us 2 weeks of writing gluecode, didnt sell at all, opened many doors for selling the main product.
It is shocking to me how many people on Lemmy hate Firefox
Although some people are Google fanbois or reactionary dumbasses, I think most of what you're misinterpreting as "Firefox hate" is actually love for Firefox and hate for what Mozilla has done to it.
Most Firefox-critics' feelings towards it are more like this:
Consider that many of the same people think of Arch as a viable daily driver distro for the everyman. Some folks are more accepting of jank than others.
this does mystify me. only time I nearly dropped firefox was when they did the big change that broke add ons but firefox with the addons I like is the best browser for me. nothing they have done has been consequentially bad. philosophically maybe but the actual effect is not bad compared to any other options.
For the money they are (were I guess) handed to set that it’s clearly worth it.
Not disagreeing with you. I just want to point out that Google is probably deliberately "overpaying" on this Mozilla deal, because they want to keep Firefox afloat, because they don't want to catch a court ruling that they are monopolizing the browser market too.
Dirty tricks with web browsers is the antitrust charge that actually caught Microsoft in the 90s.
I always got the opposite impression: people here love Firefox. But it seems that's part of why they're critical of its shortcomings.
At least for me, if I'm criticizing something, it probably means I care at least a little bit about whatever I'm criticizing. Not worth time talking about things I actually dislike.
Don't you think they dabbled on stupid projects and acquired some companies like pocket precisely because just a browser wasn't enough to pay the bills?
Oh for fun! I don't want Mozilla to go down, Firefox is one of the few non-Chromium web browsers; I'm glad that Google is pronounced as a monopoly, as it is true. However, for every good thing, there is a terrible curse that shows how much our system needs to be changed. It will be so heartening to not have Apple using Google Search by default, as the results are fucking shit. They could survive the lack of Investor Daddy's cash.
I suspect that Apple will choose to open up the choice of what search engine a user would like to use instead of Google. To avoid playing favorites or getting into an oversaturated market.
ROFL This is Apple we're talking about, the slowest to innovate in the tech space. That would be a Samsung maneuver, in my opinion (if that giant tech corpo would even consider a FOSS ad-free search engine). Apple is just now getting some customization options this September with an update, something Samsung and third party launchers have pretty much solved years ago.
I don't know, I think they wanted that Google money so much they didn't bother! It might have been in the cards, but perhaps Google beat them to the punch and evaporated their desire to create a search engine. Search engines are likely not a business that Apple wants to get too involved in as well, that's something to consider. Sometimes it's better to use what is already out there and not sink too much capital in something so uncertain. I doubt Apple would've seen a serious amount of success with Google being the top dog in search.
Who exactly is going to pay for it's development in their stead? Developing firefox is an enormous ongoing technical project akin to building the Linux kernel. Someone has to pay or it won't get done to the standard it needs to be done.
And that's why IMO the project should ensmallened. Instead of trying to catch up to everything bloatware internet and Google are doing, Neo Firefox / Neo Mozilla could instead focus on developing a subset that's lean and safe to use (no JS, for example) or even promote and offer first-class support to alternative internets like Gemini (the actual one, not Google's namesquat).
If you disagree, why not share your opinion instead of just downvoting? Why do you think Mozilla is the only organization capable of supporting Firefox?
ROFL I wasn't suggesting that you were suggesting that. Like any open source project, uh, talent tends to pick up important things that get abandoned. It would be an amusing turn of events, probably in the distant future when AI becomes a thing. That a program can start its own journey of self-improvement. 😂
I know, I was just being hyperbolic. Not sure why my OC is so downvoted, I'm pretty sure people don't think Mozilla is the only org capable of leading the project.
LOL Yeah, I get it...Thus my non-serious response. Who know why people do anything? Personally, I can't downvote, as it seems to be disabled by my current server. There have only been a few times that I've seen a post or comment really need a good old downvote. There are capable orgs out there, for now, I suppose in their perspective it is only Mozilla who could handle it. However, open source code can be read and seen by anyone, so that means there are people out there familiar enough with Firefox to take it on if needs must when the devil drives.
If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google's YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don't like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.
Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.
The root problem doesn't get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is "resolved."
I would actually like to know how much it cost. And how much each user "should" pay so it becomes viable.
Though I would really think that public institutions should use firefox as a base browser instead of edge/chrome as being open source is usually a big plus for public agencies that need to really control what's going on in their computers. And thus being a big source of financial support for firefox.
Which would ironically give even more monopoly over how the web is viewed to Google. Chrome and Firefox are just about the only two players in that space right now.
Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I'm gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla's income is from Google.
The actual numbers are $510MM/y from Google out of $593MM/y total revenue. So 86% if my math is correct. It's bonkers how dependent on a single deal they are.
All I see is Google throwing a fuck tonne of money at them, and Mozilla spaffing it on pointless crap. They could probably raise more if Google went away, but they could also reduce spend significantly if they didn't have stupid money get thrown at them.
Its like giving your kids $100 a day. Sure they could blow it on pay to win games, but what would happen if you reduced it to $10 a day? Probably nothing of note, just less spending on crap.
They could probably raise more if Google went away
I'm interested in how you think Mozilla would raise more than half a billion dollars if they didn't take any money from Alphabet/Google. Genuinely. In what ways could Mozilla raise money that they're not doing right now?
That's not what I said. Their fundraising is dead because they don't need to raise any more cash.
They literally throw cash away each month. Without Googles dump truck money I am sure they could increase fundraising to raise what they actually need to operate. Not that they could increase fundraising to match Googles current contributions.
I think it's fair to think that they could refocus their efforts on the browser if they didn't have that large slush fund from Google. I don't think "hey we don't take Google money anymore" is going to lead to a lot of new donations, however.
As I understand, their fundraising is dead / not used for Firefox, because covering costs with them is not considered viable.
More specifically, they currently have around 200 million active users, according to this: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
So, even if they somehow cut costs, they'll still basically need all users to donate $2 per year. Or 1% of users to donate $200 per year. That's just more than realistically comes in through donations...
I can't say if they are completely dependent without seeing where the other ~$80MM comes from. If they come from products that require significant staff and server cost, then yes they are fully dependant. If the $$ comes from something they can keep going for much less than ~$80MM, then they are not.
I wonder if German govt. funds Mozilla
something like the sovereign tech fund for gnome
tax money should improve public infrastructure and Firefox is digitally doing that
I sincerely hope that is what's going to happen and Mozilla gets severely fucked over for how they have been running their shit. Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around. Hint: You're not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing "AI" bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can't compete with google there, they can always outspend you.
As a Linux user, such a break would also be very timely, now that we have survived the painful surgeries of systemd and wayland. Those problems are mostly fixed, so we need another dysfunctional troublemaker - Firefox it is!
But seriously: The official story is always that google gives Mozilla the money to be the default search engine. But really, they don't need to care. Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don't have a browser monopoly. For similar reasons, google used to employed 10000s of people who were doing very much non-essential stuff that is entirely irrelevant for their business. They could have fired them all long ago, and massively increased their profitability. But those would have looked obscene and raises regulators' attention. So just hiring a bunch of expensive engineers who build google chat 23.0 and whatever makes them appear more like a "normal" company.
Others will present themselves. Mozilla have been on a downtrend for years. I've heard of a couple of alternatives, but I don't have the experience with any of them. If anyone knows any good Firefox alternatives, please let us know!
If by that you mean “some alt-right-adjacent bro will come up with a new browser that’s essentially reskinned Chromium with a crypto wallet duct-taped to it”, you’re probably right
This used to be the thought, but the trouble is, HTML is now such a vastly complex web of requirements, mixed with the unwritten rules set by Chrome, it’s doubtful another browser could push forward easily; especially without a major source of funding.
No one asked for something that wasn't Chromium based here. It's the open source community, that's how it works, most of us are very happy to settle for just having some different maintainers. We weren't ignoring it, it's just not relevant in this particular post.
Well, given the people talking about it I'm not sure I'd agree that no one was asking or talking about finding something not chromium based.
A lot of people don't like having a monoculture, Google driving the entire cadence for new feature development for the web, or having a privacy focused browser whose process is to try to delete the tracking from a not privacy focused browser.
I suppose for me personally the question will always be: how good is it with adblocks? Especially on youtube as that's where I spend a lot of my time. SponsorBlock on Firefox has been invaluable for me, not just blocking ads, but auto-skipping the whole "like, comment subscribe" and in-video ads etc.
It has Adblock Plus built in which is not the best, but still pretty alright. You can still install most regular chrome extensions though and should be able to get mostly the same experience you have now.
When I heard the news, my first though was a mix of "Oh. oh no..", "yay! no vendor-lock-in", and "OH, NO."
My expectation for the future is that a crowd fundraiser like on Wikipedia (does anyone remember those?) will be on the way for Mozilla... there is no way they can survive a 80% drop in the budget gracefully.
Of these, the EoS for pre-Win10 is probably a good thing. Everything older has been EoL from MS and shouldn't be exposed to the Internet anyway. And if you're concerned about an old, air gapped system, what does it matter? Use that old version of FF right alongside the ancient Windows?
But yeah, they should just fuck off with the AI bs.
I don't understand why you are about layoffs. They are cutting useless bloat. (VR didn't pan out go figure) Also Windows 7 isn't supported by Microsoft so it doesn't make sense to support it. It isn't even receiving security patches.
From a profitability perspective I think there is lots of potential in privacy tech. The problem is that they keep creating and then discontinuing random stuff.
I don't like Mozilla but the stuff you listed doesn't seem like the problem to me.
Servo has been integrated into Firefox. The old engine has been partially replaced that's why Firefox is fast now. Servo is now the old term for Gecko.
Servo is not the old name for Gecko. Gecko existed long before Servo was started and Servo continues to be developed independently of Mozilla. It was a research project to develop a web rendering engine in Rust taking advantage of parallelization. The parallelization stuff mostly made it through the Quantum project several years ago, which did indeed help performance. That's about it. As of right now, Gecko's code base 55.4% C++, 22.6% JavaScript, 4.5% C, 4.3% Kotlin and a mere 3.8% Rust. If Servo had indeed been integrated into Firefox, over half of this would be Rust. 53.2%, if the current Servo repository is anything to go by.
If think of it then there be no competition any more even by a little. If Google Decide to give up on chrome and make there own close Source web engine. Nothing really stopping them as they control the web and search even taking then to count not going make them support the chrome web engine. Firefox just uphill battle even more now as user can't give up ther chrome habits and the forks.
The meme is real, but that doesn't mean that Mozilla is suddenly bankrupt. I can't speak to Mozilla specifically, but there are non-profits like Wikipedia that set up stores of money equal to at least a full year of operating expenses, so that they can work to pivot in the face of exactly this kind of eventuality.
Google will appeal the ruling, which will drag out the measures for a while still, and no one knows yet whether they'll actually be forced to stop paying Mozilla. Presumably, Mozilla will mention in court that this is a real fucking problem and would actually weaken Google's competition. But the concern is still there, yeah.
You can't just maintain a browser, the web is ever evolving.
That'd be a good way to get left behind.
Even now there are technologies that chromium supports and ff doesn't, e.g. the new-ish webusb api. (Actually checking now it is supported as experimental, but my point stands)
I think the point is that the world is constantly moving. If something isn't maintained properly the technical dept builds up to the point where it can't be salvaged. (See Xorg)
That's a valid question. Unfortunately, it's difficult to quantify.
The state of browsers in general has been a moving target since NCSA Mosiac; about around 1993 or so. So the last three decades has been a ceaseless grind of new features, security enhancements, performance enhancements, and so on. And this feature set is absolutely monstrous in scale, as it includes backwards compatibility to most of those features (if not all of) back to that beginning over 30 years ago. So, work on any browser is by definition perennial, and it only ever gets more complex.
I would also argue that the only other software projects that compare to a web browser in terms of sheer scale, compatibility, and longevity, are things like the Linux Kernel or maybe the entire Microsoft Office suite. IMO, software in this class is a lot of work to keep going, no matter how you slice it.
A browser is one of the most complex pieces of software you will find. There's a reason why only 2.5 browsers exist (I'm counting chromium and safari as 1.5 because they are not the same but they are both WebKit). Maintaining a browser is difficult and making a new one is even more difficult.
Take Microsoft, one of/the most valuable company in the world. They had a browser (internet explorer) that has been state of the art, then they couldn't maintain it anymore and it became a joke. They made a new one instead (old edge) with all the intention of making it a real player. Fucking Microsoft couldn't do it and had to give up. They replaced it with a reskin of chrome (new edge).
Apple and Google manage to maintain chrome and safari both thanks to their position of monopoly, and because their position of monopoly depends on it. Firefox exist(ed) as a tax sponge for Google, but it's definitely behind chrome in technology, but if it was a new browser, and not one order than safari, they would never be able to make it.
It's around 30 million lines of code. You need actual human beings who have enough knowledge of this code to make decisions.
When I'm on a project with 30000 lines of code as a reasonably experienced dev, I consider that rather challenging to know most details of. This is obviously some complete ballpark math, but that would mean they need 1000 devs.
They had around 750 employees in 2020, after they laid off 250 employees. This includes HR, management, IT support and such, so possibly 650 actual devs, of which not all are working on Firefox.
Librewolf kinda depends on the existence of Firefox
The librewolf maintainers have written some patches, scripts and config to remove some specific bits of Firefox and bundle a few extensions. They will not necessarily have the ability to develop a whole web browser on their own
Mozilla has around 750 full-time employees. LibreWolf is a few volunteers in a trenchcoat. There is absolutely no way they'll just take over that work, not to mention without a source of income.
You think if mozilla dies its users are just going to start using chrome, brave and safari? And the devs are just going to move on to those projects? No shot bro
I am not saying that. What I am saying, is that the vast majority of those devs cannot continue full-time work on Firefox when they need to work another full-time job to actually earn money.
If you're expecting Mozilla to implode and then LibreWolf to be overrun by donations over night, so they can hire all those devs, well, there's the first problem that LibreWolf doesn't accept donations. But even if they did, they'd have to hire the management and such of Mozilla, too. It would be Mozilla in a trenchcoat immediately.
I guess, a Mozilla that suddenly can rely completely on donations, can make more decisions that are popular with those making donations. But yeah, you can already donate to the Mozilla Foundation, and so far, people largely don't.
But even if they did, they'd have to hire the management and such of Mozilla, too. It would be Mozilla in a trenchcoat immediately.
Hiring them wouldn't be mandatory. Look at Godot. They figured their shit out right quick after whatever it was that the other game engine pulled. LibreWolf will have the time to prepare for this. Courts move slowly.
Thunderbird got millions in donations and are free of Mozilla. When you donate to Thunderbird, guess where that money goes. That's right, Thunderbird. Not some CEO who takes 6M in bonuses. Librewolf can provide a harbor for firefox devs if they decide to get their shit together when clouds start forming.
Of course it's possible that another org will swoop in.
Donations to Mozilla do not go to the CEO. You donate to the Mozilla Foundation, whereas the CEO that we're talking about is heading the Mozilla Corporation.
The latter is a subsidiary of the Foundation, so if the situation should get really dire, then the Foundation could hand them some money, but since the Foundation is legally a non-profit, it doesn't have much more than pocket change.
Incidentally, yes, donations to Mozilla generally do not go towards Firefox development. The Foundation rather works on lobbying governments, as well as community work (which may help win some open-source contributors for Firefox), but they often also just award donation money to less publicly known open-source projects.
Where do you think development resources are going to go to once there is a void? They're just going to go poof and never work on a project again? Or do you expect a new contender to pop in with a full shaped org to sweep them up?
Developers tend to like to get paid. In the absence of an organization that isn't giving them money to do something as complex as work on a browser engine they tend not to do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They tend to look for jobs at actual companies.
Maintaining a browser that doesn't rely on someone else's upstream code is quite an ordeal. Of the four main browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox), 3 are built by large for-profit enterprises and the other relies on money from a large for-profit enterprise. Browsers are very complex pieces of technology and can't be maintained by 3 guys on GitHub in their spare time.
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Mozilla chose to waste most of it.
Right? I don't need AI BS. I just want a solid browser.
What do you mean, you don't want an opt-out ad tracker?
I kinda get why they (and other companies) have to try AI at the moment though.
It’s not what people claim it is, but it could end up being an essential tool for the modern world, and if they don’t invest in it early their business might end up getting left behind.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before.
Best example I can think of is Kodak and digital cameras. They invented it then sat on it until it was too late because they didn't want to cut into their film scam.
Sears. They got wrecked by the internet.
Sears had a massive mail order catalog. Easy to switch that to Internet, right? But they decided to focus on stores.
It’s quite unbelievable that it was literally right there. The logistics were like 60% solved for them already, the remaining 40% was just making sure the online content remained linked with inventory and fulfillment, and expanding that capacity.
“We think online shopping will be just a fad” - the unimaginable hubris…
I was refreshing myself on wiki. They launched prodigy, but it was too early for online shopping to be popular. So they probably got a bad taste for that kind of thing. A concept in venture capital is that it's all about timing.
Nokia. They were at the top before iPhone. They couldn’t catch up with smart phones at all.
I believe Intel will be another potential example, but we’ll see about that.
But is a bullshit generator even cutting edge in terms of web browsing? Feels like solutions without a problem.
Any day now.
But, but but, it's AI!! It'll solve
noneall of your problems!Netscape navigator ftw
I still have a retail copy somewhere on a CD. I wonder if it'll even load on a modern OS.
Investors want AI BS that’s why.
What AI bullshit? I didn't get the memo.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-investing-in-trustworthy-ai/
There's no mention of adding AI to the browser. It's just an AI platform or ecosystem for development.
Mozilla has a finite amount of money. If they're (as far as I'm concerned) wasting it on AI nonsense, that's less development funds that can go toward Firefox.
I don't know. I think for them it's an opportunity to draw more attention and investments. Especially now with how hot AI is at the moment.
I think people are overreacting a bit.
While ML does have legit uses in many specific cases, this whole "throw 'AI' into everything" hype/trend is just blockchain all over again. IMO, the ones who are overreacting are the ones swept up in the hype.
In that there is a finite amount of money, there is also a finite amount of development that can go on at once. If they just pile tons and tons of bodies on what you might call useful endeavors, it can lead to bloat and the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
I hate to see AI (I suppose we mean specifically GPTs in this instance) trashed all the time, just because companies use it incorrectly. They shove it in every hole they can to hike the stock price. But it's a great tool, that arguably needs more time in the oven, which has legitimate helpful uses. Especially in the context of a browser.
For example, in Arc Browser I can semantically search the page/article for anything and it will show me the location of the information I need (ever tried to find the recipe itself in an article about the recipe?). I can also do some obvious stuff, like summarize and translate sections, which I could do by copying it into a dedicated service, but it's definitely much more convenient being built-in.
Would be much better if it ran locally off the NPU, but we are not there yet.
That's cool. It also uses LLMs, I presume?
Downvotes from the people who believe that all “AI” is an LLM/GPT that must be trained on the collective stolen works of all humanity and requires all of South America’s collective power supply for just a day’s worth of queries
No one is protesting machine learning.
Yeah, lots of people are.
The lemmy community "Fuck AI" literally has
as a description.
Maybe that's not bad for firefox.
Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects and just focus on delivering a good browser.
Algo the lack of google as financial support means they'll rely more on donations, which would mean that they really need to focus on offering a good browser.
I'll gladly donate to firefox if I would see they are really focusing on it.
I donate around 5 dollars to Wikipedia every month. Another 5 to Mozilla isn't an issue for me.
... will you though?
I just signed up for monthly donations of 5 USD per month. 5.60 USD technically since I also opted to pay the transaction fees.
Suck it.
Present it. 😮
I have nothing to prove to you. Besides, even if I did present it, you wouldn't believe it. Even if I presented it with doxxing information you would note it for future harassment campaigns and also claim you don't believe it.
So... as I said previously... suck it.
5.60 USD to mozilla every month. Not much, but if everyone did it, they would be bigger than google and tell them to eat shit livestream.
Your dick dumbass. Not a copy of your fucking bank statement lmfao. Were my lips on my dick sucking emoji face not clear enough?
Ya'll take yourselves way too seriously lol. I'm glad you contributed. I haven't, besides hopefully spurring you on to, in which I'll take some of the credit for it. So you're welcome.
I donate to lemmy and mastodon instances. As I do believe they are using my money for good things.
I have donated in the past while still living in a third world country. I stopped when I realized how my donation was squandered.
I think in the future I will try to donate like 10 dollars a month for free software that I use, including Firefox, KDE, Thunderbird, Wikipedia, Lemmy, etc.
I think it's very important to support open source financially, because without it we would all be fucked by huge corporations. And I might sound overly anti-capitalist, but I think that most of them should be broken up.
If I had the money, an extra $5 or so would definitely be something I'd spend monthly on donating to Mozilla/Firefox.
If I had the money, an extra $N or so would definitely be something I’d spend monthly on X
The moment that it's possible to donate directly towards the development of firefox, there's roughly 10€/yr with their name on it. As it stands however, Mozilla is not funding FF at all, but rather extracting money from the project.
Mozilla (not Google) got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO's salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic. It basically got rid of the innovation that could have made Firefox a faster, more secure, and pleasant experience. Rust and Rust-based Servo, as a replacement for Gecko, were two of those side projects. These are the things Mozilla needs to invest in.
Also, I think Mozilla needs to ask the user upon install what the default search engine should be from a list of search engines including Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Yahoo. Maybe the order of those could be arranged based on how much they're able to finagle from the search engines.
The real monopoly is their control over Chrome. That's what they should be forced to split from the company that owns the search engine. Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.
How did Google do any of that? Wasn't that all Mozilla Corp?
Major brain fart/typo, haha.
Not saying they did, if you're paying for a thing, you a lot of control of that thing.
I'd go so far as to argue the exact same for development of: Operating systems, automotive, smartphones, residential fiber...
The ulterior motive is simply never in a user's best interest when every function ultimately becomes part of the "influence towards the purchase of goods and services" funnel.
While I find your assertion inspiring and very worthy of consideration, I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development. Apple sells the hardware that goes with its OS(es), so they get the hardware revenue (not to mention the App Store and iCloud subscription revenues). They would have to start charging devices to use their operating system or something, and I have to wonder if that would be possible under open source licenses.
I would love an open, sustained, and even open source, secure operating system for phones that's the target of app development. I think the Linux stack should should develop an NPR/PBS type ecosystem public funding of development (with maybe the corporate underwriting of those networks being equivalent to contributions from corporate employed developers to the open source code) and I'd love for it to be a real competitor in the smart phone market (knowing the Android stack modifies and sits on top of Linux).
Cuts from app purchases and in-app purchases. Of course, developers can implement their own payment gateways and distribute their apps in third party stores, but nobody would do this at risk of being removed from play store.
That's the issue that caused this. Google was paying Mozilla to be the default search engine at the top of the list in Firefox and other browsers.
Right now it's already set as the default search engine and you have to work to change it to something else as I understand it. I'm proposing that no default is set and that the user is asked to select one upon first installing Firefox from an ordered list of search engines. If that's already the case (it's been a while since I installed Firefox from scratch), then I'd argue that's fine. And it allows other search engines to contribute to be higher up in the rankings.
I can't think of anything that would replace the revenue that Google pays Mozilla that sustains the development salaries to hopefully keep Mozilla competitive and hopefully making it the best performing, convenient and private browser.
Like Firefox?
It really seemed like it's been a bit of a side project those last few years...
They are throwing things at the wall hoping something sticks.
For some reason people don't want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.
By their own account, it's not meant to be lucrative.
"Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.
Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."
Straight from Mozilla's About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users' privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don't actually want.
You're right of course, but you're also wasting your breath.
In 2024 the business sociopaths have so many people so twisted and screwed up in the head that they can't even CONCEIVE of the idea of a person or organization focused on delivering a product sustainably rather than "MONEY MONEY MONEY, NOM NOM NOM!" for eternity.
Like Rust?
For userland code that basically fingerbangs every server on the web, some forced memory-safety might not be a bad idea
I really hope that's sarcastic, because Rust is one of the most valuable additions to the whole IT field in a good while.
Entire industries have been stuck on C/C++ for decades. Industries, which are normally extremely late to any form of modern software development, are now practically jolting to get Rust integrated into their toolchains.
Similarly, languages without runtimes allow for building libraries that can be called from other programming languages, which so far meant C/C++. That's a big reason why many widely used open-source projects like OpenSSL, SQLite, OpenGL etc. are written in those.
Even if, for whatever reason, you think Rust is awful, getting a third language into the mix will allow many more people to build similar libraries, which is again really good for everyone.
The problem is that building a plain simple browser doesn't pay.
In reality it means they'll have to focus more on monetization, which will create more enshittification and not less.
What they need is to focus on enterprise functionality and privacy services. Maybe they could even do some sort of consulting
Maybe you have noticed it, but they try to widem their portfolio with paid services in the last couple of years. They have seen it coming.
I pay for at least one of their new services.
true true. good point
Maybe they can stop paying their CEO 7 million per year
That CEO quit earlier this year.
Maybe they can stop paying the next CEO 7 million
Maybe that CEO will also quit, because other companies offer them a higher salary.
It's so easy to say they should just pay their CEO less. I mean, I get it, it's a ridiculous amount of money that no one needs. But few people, who are qualified for that job, will just do it out of the goodness of their hearts for a salary far below industry standards.
This is predicated on the assumption that a CEOs skill is directly related to their salary.
This may or may not be the case.
I don't think companies care. If you're the CEO of Mozilla for a year without it imploding, you're looking very experienced compared to some of the applicants that medium-sized Silicon Valley companies, like Dropbox, Evernote and such, will get.
And if Mozilla is only paying you $200k, they'll consider it an absolute bargain to give you tenfold that.
This is predicated on the assumption that people just give money away easily.
I mean, they do... the higher my pay goes the less actual work I do (thinking is not actual work). And I keep getting promoted.
It's dumb as hell but the only answer I've come up with is maybe not everyone can do the "stupid monkey shit" (i.e. "Someone get this herd of retarded cats to do literally anything").
what the fuck could the CEO possibly do for a company that seems to just fucking zombie its way along, it does literally nothing and hasnt died, what could the CEO possibly be qualified for, it's not like they're gaining more market share from having a good product
They are the face of the company. If they are shit at communicating it will affect share prices which could end a company. They have to say the right things at the right times or they could potentially break laws by saying the wrong things.
There’s a lot of stuff they need to know and it’s not cheap to get that knowledge.
I love all the vague, ambiguous examples that say nothing.
I mean, the Intel CEO just literally quote the Bible... I guess you need a lot of education for that
Look, I understand you can't get a high school dropout to do this job, but can they really justify earning 10000x more than other people in their companies? Are they 10000x more valuable??
I would imagine they can find a perfectly good CEO with something like a 500k/yr salary
Everyone here is talking past each other. There's one crowd raging that CEOs do literally nothing, which is objectively untrue. When that is pointed out, people assume it to be an argument that these CEOs should be paid that much, which it's not.
CEOs do things. If they're non-shit, they'll work significantly more hours than normal workers. No, that does absolutely not justify paying them magnitudes more. Their salaries are inflated, because publicly traded companies pay them that much.
Because while the effort a CEO puts in does not match the salary, the impact of their work does so more closely. As in, if they're doing a bad job, the losses for the company will far exceed that salary.
More importantly, though, you want to keep one CEO for as long as possible. Even if their strategies are mediocre, constantly changing CEOs and therefore flipflopping between strategies is worse.
I can't even tell you who the CEO is off the top of my head, if they're the face of the company they're doing a bad job
I notice, very glaringly, you didn't mention a SINGLE thing about the company running efficiently, being profitable, producing something of value...
It's not that the company could end if it doesn't do well at what it does. It's that the company could end if fickle, short-term focused asshats aren't happy, and to keep them happy, you need a head fickle, short-term focused asshat at the helm.
God, I wish every company could just be private.
If that's all there is, it sounds like you just need good legal and marketing department and someone who is attractive to deliver their script.
Is Mozilla even publicly traded?
Nope, they aren't. The Mozilla Corporation, which does Firefox development and has the CEO position that everyone's talking about, is a 100% subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which is the organization that you can donate to.
i dont even fucking know who C suites at mozilla, i havent even googled their company in years to see if they even still exist. The only sign of life from this company is when i update my system and firefox also gets updated.
Also, it's pretty cheap to get that knowledge, just don't ever say anything that might lose you money.
I'm still waiting for evidence these CEOs do anything special... They get paid millions whether the companies they lead succeed or flounder
CEOs do nothing. They rake in millions, and hire advisors to tell them what to do
Literally the "consulting" industry. Making millions off of boneheaded C-suites who only know how to pay others to think for them.
Then go be a CEO
Need to be a nepo baby for that
So if there are CEOs who aren’t related to the board of directors, would that overturn your theory?
When did I say I want to be a parasite? I want to abolish CEOs, not become one of them
This shit right here is why we have capitalism and classes, peolle believing a ceo does something so special no one could possibly do it.
Shit might be true for things like software development, science stuff not some overpaid C level exec.
Oh noo.
So anyway
Oh no, I'm sure there won't be anyone else who would like to be CEO if they quit.
What I primarily meant by that, is that you do need some knowledge about financials. Which isn't hard to learn, but the group of people willing to learn about it has very little overlap with the people willing to do something out of the goodness of their heart.
Solution: H1B visa CEO
Too expensive. Just get someone undocumented to do it for pennies, then threaten to deport them if they ask for a raise.
All it takes is one person
Maybe they can stop fiddling around with A I.
I know many of us don't really like AI stuff. But it is just a door opener - and Mozilla needs funding like any company.
The product we sell at our company also has AI features. So far AI got us to talk to many more customers. So far none of them bought the AI stuff - even if in my opinion it would provide productivity increases. For us AI is a net positive: it cost us 2 weeks of writing gluecode, didnt sell at all, opened many doors for selling the main product.
I upvoted you but I wasn't happy about it.
Okay, Satan.
I had a good chuckle at how well that all came together.
Mozilla chose a stupid business model. 🤷
Although some people are Google fanbois or reactionary dumbasses, I think most of what you're misinterpreting as "Firefox hate" is actually love for Firefox and hate for what Mozilla has done to it.
Most Firefox-critics' feelings towards it are more like this:
Love the browser, hate the corpos desperately trying to fuck it up because that's the cool thing to do to your software now days.
I remember building Phoenix from source when it was basically still an experiment to decouple it from the suite. Good times.
Yes. 😢
Consider that many of the same people think of Arch as a viable daily driver distro for the everyman. Some folks are more accepting of jank than others.
this does mystify me. only time I nearly dropped firefox was when they did the big change that broke add ons but firefox with the addons I like is the best browser for me. nothing they have done has been consequentially bad. philosophically maybe but the actual effect is not bad compared to any other options.
oh yeah. duck duck go is for my firefox. duck duck go is another one with a lot of drama that amounts to nothing. have tried a few alts but went back.
Not disagreeing with you. I just want to point out that Google is probably deliberately "overpaying" on this Mozilla deal, because they want to keep Firefox afloat, because they don't want to catch a court ruling that they are monopolizing the browser market too.
Dirty tricks with web browsers is the antitrust charge that actually caught Microsoft in the 90s.
I always got the opposite impression: people here love Firefox. But it seems that's part of why they're critical of its shortcomings.
At least for me, if I'm criticizing something, it probably means I care at least a little bit about whatever I'm criticizing. Not worth time talking about things I actually dislike.
I don't think people hate Firefox as much as people hate Mozilla and what they're doing with Firefox.
its an emotional reaction. google has always been bad, them doing a bad thing is just business as usual. who cares
but when mozilla does something bad? mozilla is supposed to be the good guy! they betrayed us!
its an emotional reaction, not a rational one. i know mozilla, despite its problems, is faaaar from being as bad as google
to be clear i don’t hate mozilla, i do hate google, and i feel like the hate mozilla gets is way overblown, even if their actions are disappointing
Only viable competitor is a bizarre thing to drop when browsers like Opera exist.
Don't you think they dabbled on stupid projects and acquired some companies like pocket precisely because just a browser wasn't enough to pay the bills?
That's why Mozilla Foundation shouldn't have created Mozilla Corporation in first place.
Meh. It's just Monopoly money /j
I hope Mozilla put most of that Google money into index funds or something. At least it didn't go into paying the developers.
I haven't confirmed this but according to this
They didn't
That... Is a weird link that doesn't open
Oh for fun! I don't want Mozilla to go down, Firefox is one of the few non-Chromium web browsers; I'm glad that Google is pronounced as a monopoly, as it is true. However, for every good thing, there is a terrible curse that shows how much our system needs to be changed. It will be so heartening to not have Apple using Google Search by default, as the results are fucking shit. They could survive the lack of Investor Daddy's cash.
I wonder if it will make apple create it’s own search engine or?
I suspect that Apple will choose to open up the choice of what search engine a user would like to use instead of Google. To avoid playing favorites or getting into an oversaturated market.
They could piss all their competitors off by investing a bit into a FOSS add-free search engine (and hosting it) and putting that as default
ROFL This is Apple we're talking about, the slowest to innovate in the tech space. That would be a Samsung maneuver, in my opinion (if that giant tech corpo would even consider a FOSS ad-free search engine). Apple is just now getting some customization options this September with an update, something Samsung and third party launchers have pretty much solved years ago.
Let me live in my fantasy land okay?
😂
I'll let you stare at the stars and imagine a better world then. 😂
It really is bizarre that they did Apple Maps before an Apple Search.
I don't know, I think they wanted that Google money so much they didn't bother! It might have been in the cards, but perhaps Google beat them to the punch and evaporated their desire to create a search engine. Search engines are likely not a business that Apple wants to get too involved in as well, that's something to consider. Sometimes it's better to use what is already out there and not sink too much capital in something so uncertain. I doubt Apple would've seen a serious amount of success with Google being the top dog in search.
Firefox is open source, we don't need Mozilla.
Who exactly is going to pay for it's development in their stead? Developing firefox is an enormous ongoing technical project akin to building the Linux kernel. Someone has to pay or it won't get done to the standard it needs to be done.
A project as big as Mozilla wouldn't be abandoned. If Mozilla stopped development I guarantee more than one group would fork.
I am sure they would. I am equally sure most would fail without significant funding.
Of course they would, Firefox is a huge project. But that doesn't mean Mozilla is the only organization that can manage it.
And where exactly is that funding coming from?
And that's why IMO the project should ensmallened. Instead of trying to catch up to everything bloatware internet and Google are doing, Neo Firefox / Neo Mozilla could instead focus on developing a subset that's lean and safe to use (no JS, for example) or even promote and offer first-class support to alternative internets like Gemini (the actual one, not Google's namesquat).
Bro thinks he made a point💀
If you disagree, why not share your opinion instead of just downvoting? Why do you think Mozilla is the only organization capable of supporting Firefox?
There needs to be a willing organisation with large amounts of funding in the first place because a browser is a full time job.
Also, others have already said why the spirit of RMS can't will a browser into a usable application and I just wanted to meme.
Provided that someone with enough skill takes up the mantle of maintaining a fork...I'm sure it will be fine!
Welll yeah, obviously. I wasn't suggesting Firefox would somehow become sentient and develop itself.
ROFL I wasn't suggesting that you were suggesting that. Like any open source project, uh, talent tends to pick up important things that get abandoned. It would be an amusing turn of events, probably in the distant future when AI becomes a thing. That a program can start its own journey of self-improvement. 😂
I know, I was just being hyperbolic. Not sure why my OC is so downvoted, I'm pretty sure people don't think Mozilla is the only org capable of leading the project.
LOL Yeah, I get it...Thus my non-serious response. Who know why people do anything? Personally, I can't downvote, as it seems to be disabled by my current server. There have only been a few times that I've seen a post or comment really need a good old downvote. There are capable orgs out there, for now, I suppose in their perspective it is only Mozilla who could handle it. However, open source code can be read and seen by anyone, so that means there are people out there familiar enough with Firefox to take it on if needs must when the devil drives.
If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google's YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don't like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.
Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.
The root problem doesn't get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is "resolved."
That is actually fairly smart. That way you don't shock the ecosystem and effect the economy.
Firefox; being open source as it is; is not in danger.
Should we buy Mozilla?
Sure, how much could a web browser cost anyways? Here’s $20.
I would actually like to know how much it cost. And how much each user "should" pay so it becomes viable.
Though I would really think that public institutions should use firefox as a base browser instead of edge/chrome as being open source is usually a big plus for public agencies that need to really control what's going on in their computers. And thus being a big source of financial support for firefox.
Someone above posted that they have a revenue of 593 million dollars per year. Presumably somewhat below that is going to be their yearly costs.
And according to this, they have around 160 million desktop Firefoxes showing up, which is going to be roughly how many active users there are.
593 / 160 would be $3.71 per user.
Maybe ad-supported version?
Like the Opera browser in 2000s.
Yes. Can we ? Eh ...
I have a very mouthy Jackson who says no.
Which would ironically give even more monopoly over how the web is viewed to Google. Chrome and Firefox are just about the only two players in that space right now.
No they're not, there's safari and Edge. Don't forget about opera.
:|
Sorry. I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face while I say that....
Opera and Edge are Chromium based. Even most of the alternatives are still Google controlled.
There are still versions of Opera with their own original engine going around.
Damn, Presto should return. That thing could load like 300 tabs in like 30, maybe 60 MB RAM tops.
Edge is a Chrome clone. Safari exists purely because of Apple. It is designed to not work well so you get trapped in the Apple app store.
Lightweights!
I'd pay for a browser if it wouldn't sell my data.
Oh no, they will have to stop paying their CEO a ridiculous amount of money. TRAGIC.
Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I'm gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla's income is from Google.
The actual numbers are $510MM/y from Google out of $593MM/y total revenue. So 86% if my math is correct. It's bonkers how dependent on a single deal they are.
Are they dependent?
All I see is Google throwing a fuck tonne of money at them, and Mozilla spaffing it on pointless crap. They could probably raise more if Google went away, but they could also reduce spend significantly if they didn't have stupid money get thrown at them.
Its like giving your kids $100 a day. Sure they could blow it on pay to win games, but what would happen if you reduced it to $10 a day? Probably nothing of note, just less spending on crap.
I'm interested in how you think Mozilla would raise more than half a billion dollars if they didn't take any money from Alphabet/Google. Genuinely. In what ways could Mozilla raise money that they're not doing right now?
Fire their overpriced C-Suite for starters
That's not what I said. Their fundraising is dead because they don't need to raise any more cash.
They literally throw cash away each month. Without Googles dump truck money I am sure they could increase fundraising to raise what they actually need to operate. Not that they could increase fundraising to match Googles current contributions.
I think it's fair to think that they could refocus their efforts on the browser if they didn't have that large slush fund from Google. I don't think "hey we don't take Google money anymore" is going to lead to a lot of new donations, however.
Completely agree that it will require effort. But considering there is literally no way for me to donate, the bar for improvement is stupidly low.
What would be nice is that having a better feedback loop could encourage community engagement. Having proper profiles would be my request.
As I understand, their fundraising is dead / not used for Firefox, because covering costs with them is not considered viable.
More specifically, they currently have around 200 million active users, according to this: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
So, even if they somehow cut costs, they'll still basically need all users to donate $2 per year. Or 1% of users to donate $200 per year. That's just more than realistically comes in through donations...
I can't say if they are completely dependent without seeing where the other ~$80MM comes from. If they come from products that require significant staff and server cost, then yes they are fully dependant. If the $$ comes from something they can keep going for much less than ~$80MM, then they are not.
Um, it's actually 114% of Mozilla's total income.
it's not like they used the money to improve the fucking browser anyway
I wonder if German govt. funds Mozilla
something like the sovereign tech fund for gnome
tax money should improve public infrastructure and Firefox is digitally doing that
I doubt they would make Google stop paying Mozilla. That would make Google more of a monopoly
Google pays because Firefox has Google as the default search engine. That deal is where the problem lies.
I sincerely hope that is what's going to happen and Mozilla gets severely fucked over for how they have been running their shit. Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around. Hint: You're not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing "AI" bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can't compete with google there, they can always outspend you.
As a Linux user, such a break would also be very timely, now that we have survived the painful surgeries of systemd and wayland. Those problems are mostly fixed, so we need another dysfunctional troublemaker - Firefox it is!
But seriously: The official story is always that google gives Mozilla the money to be the default search engine. But really, they don't need to care. Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don't have a browser monopoly. For similar reasons, google used to employed 10000s of people who were doing very much non-essential stuff that is entirely irrelevant for their business. They could have fired them all long ago, and massively increased their profitability. But those would have looked obscene and raises regulators' attention. So just hiring a bunch of expensive engineers who build google chat 23.0 and whatever makes them appear more like a "normal" company.
Revenue of Mozilla Corporation. Not Mozilla Foundation.
Hopefully Ladybird turns out well
Others will present themselves. Mozilla have been on a downtrend for years. I've heard of a couple of alternatives, but I don't have the experience with any of them. If anyone knows any good Firefox alternatives, please let us know!
If by that you mean “some alt-right-adjacent bro will come up with a new browser that’s essentially reskinned Chromium with a crypto wallet duct-taped to it”, you’re probably right
It's okay you can just say Brave
those already exist
Isnt that brave?
This used to be the thought, but the trouble is, HTML is now such a vastly complex web of requirements, mixed with the unwritten rules set by Chrome, it’s doubtful another browser could push forward easily; especially without a major source of funding.
All good modern browsers are based either on firefox or chromium if I'm not terribly misinformed
I think Safari is WebKit.
Webkit is Chromium (or at least, Chromium is Webkit, since the inheritance goes in the other direction).
The only ^1^ browser engine that is a completely separate and independent codebase from Chrome is Firefox's.
(^1^ aside from extremely niche/unusable stuff like Lynx)
Close. Chromium uses Blink which was originally a fork of WebKit. I have no idea how much they've diverged since then.
The fork was 11 years ago, so a lot. So much that they are considered different engines now.
fair enough, although I'm not sure that falls in the "good" category :P
Forks are often dependent on the original unless the source just gave up.
Also chromium
Vivaldi is pretty alright.
And also based on chrome. That's the thing that people seem to keep ignoring. Your browser options are Firefox or something based on chrome.
pre-chromium Edge was too good to be true.
It was shit. Once Edge changed to Chromium it actually became a viable option and in my opinion made Chrome irrelevant in business environment.
Chromium browsers are good. I personally prefer Firefox, but Chromium is alright.
No one asked for something that wasn't Chromium based here. It's the open source community, that's how it works, most of us are very happy to settle for just having some different maintainers. We weren't ignoring it, it's just not relevant in this particular post.
Well, given the people talking about it I'm not sure I'd agree that no one was asking or talking about finding something not chromium based.
A lot of people don't like having a monoculture, Google driving the entire cadence for new feature development for the web, or having a privacy focused browser whose process is to try to delete the tracking from a not privacy focused browser.
I suppose for me personally the question will always be: how good is it with adblocks? Especially on youtube as that's where I spend a lot of my time. SponsorBlock on Firefox has been invaluable for me, not just blocking ads, but auto-skipping the whole "like, comment subscribe" and in-video ads etc.
It has Adblock Plus built in which is not the best, but still pretty alright. You can still install most regular chrome extensions though and should be able to get mostly the same experience you have now.
Built in ad block is decent, you can add extra filter lists the same way you can with ublock origin
That said, just install ublock origin and sponsorblock as an extension from the chrome store
They'll probably just switch business daddy's and just have Bing as default.
When I heard the news, my first though was a mix of "Oh. oh no..", "yay! no vendor-lock-in", and "OH, NO."
My expectation for the future is that a crowd fundraiser like on Wikipedia (does anyone remember those?) will be on the way for Mozilla... there is no way they can survive a 80% drop in the budget gracefully.
Tbh I like Gecko but I hate the Mozilla company's recent statements.
Please elaborate or point me in the direction
Mass Layoffs
AI Focus
End of Support status for FireFox on windows older than Windows 10
Removal of many settings such as browser.privateWindowSeparation.enabled
It's a company. Mozilla Foundation has nonprofit status but the Subsidiary Mozilla Corporation is for-profit.
TBH I'm biased af because I just liked it better before all the recent updates.
Of these, the EoS for pre-Win10 is probably a good thing. Everything older has been EoL from MS and shouldn't be exposed to the Internet anyway. And if you're concerned about an old, air gapped system, what does it matter? Use that old version of FF right alongside the ancient Windows?
But yeah, they should just fuck off with the AI bs.
I don't understand why you are about layoffs. They are cutting useless bloat. (VR didn't pan out go figure) Also Windows 7 isn't supported by Microsoft so it doesn't make sense to support it. It isn't even receiving security patches.
From a profitability perspective I think there is lots of potential in privacy tech. The problem is that they keep creating and then discontinuing random stuff.
I don't like Mozilla but the stuff you listed doesn't seem like the problem to me.
laying off the servo staff at least was a mistake
Servo has been integrated into Firefox. The old engine has been partially replaced that's why Firefox is fast now. Servo is now the old term for Gecko.
Servo is not the old name for Gecko. Gecko existed long before Servo was started and Servo continues to be developed independently of Mozilla. It was a research project to develop a web rendering engine in Rust taking advantage of parallelization. The parallelization stuff mostly made it through the Quantum project several years ago, which did indeed help performance. That's about it. As of right now, Gecko's code base 55.4% C++, 22.6% JavaScript, 4.5% C, 4.3% Kotlin and a mere 3.8% Rust. If Servo had indeed been integrated into Firefox, over half of this would be Rust. 53.2%, if the current Servo repository is anything to go by.
I personally think it is silly to try to keep alive. If it was good Mozilla would've used it more. You can have your own take though
If they can't handle having thousands of extra employees then they shouldn't have hired them.
You are completely right
However reality is hard to predict
This is the only Mozilla mistake I'm aware of:
https://lemmy.world/post/16458081
If think of it then there be no competition any more even by a little. If Google Decide to give up on chrome and make there own close Source web engine. Nothing really stopping them as they control the web and search even taking then to count not going make them support the chrome web engine. Firefox just uphill battle even more now as user can't give up ther chrome habits and the forks.
Penalize Google many much monies and use some of those to endow a trust that gives yearly funding distributions.
Simple.
I suppose it's time to fork Firefox. Can call the fork "Netscape Navigator". Ya, I think that has a nice ring to it.
popcorns
3,2,1... more spyware coming to Firefox.
I'm too OOTL here, is the meme for reai? Is Mozilla without funds now?
The meme is real, but that doesn't mean that Mozilla is suddenly bankrupt. I can't speak to Mozilla specifically, but there are non-profits like Wikipedia that set up stores of money equal to at least a full year of operating expenses, so that they can work to pivot in the face of exactly this kind of eventuality.
Google will appeal the ruling, which will drag out the measures for a while still, and no one knows yet whether they'll actually be forced to stop paying Mozilla. Presumably, Mozilla will mention in court that this is a real fucking problem and would actually weaken Google's competition. But the concern is still there, yeah.
Mozilla Corporation? Mostly. Mozilla Foundation? No.
It's likely if other browsers collapse they could rule chrome a monopoly too
well then they can start resetting duckduckgo as the default search engine
They honestly should partner with DDG. They are in the same industry.
Coming soon: [Firefox - Mozilla Ads Edition]
Always that Bing money!
Mozillas mo' problems
Firefox seems fine now and it's open source. I get that no software is maintenance free, but how much work actually needs to be done each year?
You can't just maintain a browser, the web is ever evolving.
That'd be a good way to get left behind. Even now there are technologies that chromium supports and ff doesn't, e.g. the new-ish webusb api. (Actually checking now it is supported as experimental, but my point stands)
I think they dont implement it on purpose
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
For a browser...
A huge amount
Tell me you've never worked on a long-running software project without telling me you've never work on one.
Seems like a rude response to me asking a sincere question.
I think the point is that the world is constantly moving. If something isn't maintained properly the technical dept builds up to the point where it can't be salvaged. (See Xorg)
Meant it more playful, but tone is hard to communicate over the internet.
That's a valid question. Unfortunately, it's difficult to quantify.
The state of browsers in general has been a moving target since NCSA Mosiac; about around 1993 or so. So the last three decades has been a ceaseless grind of new features, security enhancements, performance enhancements, and so on. And this feature set is absolutely monstrous in scale, as it includes backwards compatibility to most of those features (if not all of) back to that beginning over 30 years ago. So, work on any browser is by definition perennial, and it only ever gets more complex.
For Firefox, well, just take a look at their bug tracker. It's broken down by component, but each link on this page is its own fresh hell of things to do, many of which are barely a year old: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Firefox
I would also argue that the only other software projects that compare to a web browser in terms of sheer scale, compatibility, and longevity, are things like the Linux Kernel or maybe the entire Microsoft Office suite. IMO, software in this class is a lot of work to keep going, no matter how you slice it.
A browser is one of the most complex pieces of software you will find. There's a reason why only 2.5 browsers exist (I'm counting chromium and safari as 1.5 because they are not the same but they are both WebKit). Maintaining a browser is difficult and making a new one is even more difficult.
Take Microsoft, one of/the most valuable company in the world. They had a browser (internet explorer) that has been state of the art, then they couldn't maintain it anymore and it became a joke. They made a new one instead (old edge) with all the intention of making it a real player. Fucking Microsoft couldn't do it and had to give up. They replaced it with a reskin of chrome (new edge).
Apple and Google manage to maintain chrome and safari both thanks to their position of monopoly, and because their position of monopoly depends on it. Firefox exist(ed) as a tax sponge for Google, but it's definitely behind chrome in technology, but if it was a new browser, and not one order than safari, they would never be able to make it.
It's around 30 million lines of code. You need actual human beings who have enough knowledge of this code to make decisions.
When I'm on a project with 30000 lines of code as a reasonably experienced dev, I consider that rather challenging to know most details of. This is obviously some complete ballpark math, but that would mean they need 1000 devs.
They had around 750 employees in 2020, after they laid off 250 employees. This includes HR, management, IT support and such, so possibly 650 actual devs, of which not all are working on Firefox.
lol is this a joke or are you being serious?
Good.
I switched to brave anyway.
Librewolf kinda depends on the existence of Firefox
The librewolf maintainers have written some patches, scripts and config to remove some specific bits of Firefox and bundle a few extensions. They will not necessarily have the ability to develop a whole web browser on their own
If Firefox dies, the entire Internet goes with it because Google's hegemony over web standards will go unchecked.
"ah nuts, well nothing for it, best just give ourselves willingly over to our google overlords when the time comes"
for real? you're not even gonna try?
Giving your money to Mozilla wouldn't even guarantee it went to Firefox. First 6M have to go to its CEO.
If firefox is not maintained, librewolf dies too.
Bullshit. It'll become the new firefox without Mozilla.
Mozilla has around 750 full-time employees. LibreWolf is a few volunteers in a trenchcoat. There is absolutely no way they'll just take over that work, not to mention without a source of income.
You think if mozilla dies its users are just going to start using chrome, brave and safari? And the devs are just going to move on to those projects? No shot bro
I am not saying that. What I am saying, is that the vast majority of those devs cannot continue full-time work on Firefox when they need to work another full-time job to actually earn money.
If you're expecting Mozilla to implode and then LibreWolf to be overrun by donations over night, so they can hire all those devs, well, there's the first problem that LibreWolf doesn't accept donations. But even if they did, they'd have to hire the management and such of Mozilla, too. It would be Mozilla in a trenchcoat immediately.
I guess, a Mozilla that suddenly can rely completely on donations, can make more decisions that are popular with those making donations. But yeah, you can already donate to the Mozilla Foundation, and so far, people largely don't.
Hiring them wouldn't be mandatory. Look at Godot. They figured their shit out right quick after whatever it was that the other game engine pulled. LibreWolf will have the time to prepare for this. Courts move slowly.
Thunderbird got millions in donations and are free of Mozilla. When you donate to Thunderbird, guess where that money goes. That's right, Thunderbird. Not some CEO who takes 6M in bonuses. Librewolf can provide a harbor for firefox devs if they decide to get their shit together when clouds start forming.
Of course it's possible that another org will swoop in.
Donations to Mozilla do not go to the CEO. You donate to the Mozilla Foundation, whereas the CEO that we're talking about is heading the Mozilla Corporation.
The latter is a subsidiary of the Foundation, so if the situation should get really dire, then the Foundation could hand them some money, but since the Foundation is legally a non-profit, it doesn't have much more than pocket change.
Incidentally, yes, donations to Mozilla generally do not go towards Firefox development. The Foundation rather works on lobbying governments, as well as community work (which may help win some open-source contributors for Firefox), but they often also just award donation money to less publicly known open-source projects.
Will people slowly stop using an outdated browser? yes
will people who are out of a job no longer do their job? also yes
And who will develop it?
Do you know where 99% of the code in Librewolf comes from?
Where do you think development resources are going to go to once there is a void? They're just going to go poof and never work on a project again? Or do you expect a new contender to pop in with a full shaped org to sweep them up?
Developers tend to like to get paid. In the absence of an organization that isn't giving them money to do something as complex as work on a browser engine they tend not to do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They tend to look for jobs at actual companies.
I will browse the web with raw curl commands
OK buddy Stallman
Just use Lynx.
Deyr fé, deyja frændr, deyr sjalfr it sama, ek veit einn, at aldrei deyr: dómr um dauðan hvern.
Just wait until Ladybird kicks off, then Mozilla can die.
And that has already gotten its lead maintainer into trouble over claiming the use of gender-neutral pronouns in the documentation is "political"?
This would be true, if there were any other viable options. There aren't.
Maintaining a browser that doesn't rely on someone else's upstream code is quite an ordeal. Of the four main browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox), 3 are built by large for-profit enterprises and the other relies on money from a large for-profit enterprise. Browsers are very complex pieces of technology and can't be maintained by 3 guys on GitHub in their spare time.