- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox’s revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser’s default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla’s ability to keep things “business as usual.”
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company’s actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search “partners completely,” which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google’s money suddenly dried up.
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Based on their 2022 report, only half of their expenses were on software development costs - around $220m, and it’s not clear what portion of that was on Firefox vs other projects.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
In terms of revenue: around $100m was from sources other than Google.
Therefore, it seems plausible to me that Firefox development could still be funded with $100m of annual revenue. At a smaller level no doubt, but still in existence nonetheless.
Given that they are focusing on initiatives like intrusive adverts and machine learning BS, I’m okay with them cutting that kind of nonsense off; Firefox still doesn’t have a native vertical tab bar.
Firefox still doesn’t have a native vertical tab bar.
At least the extension APIs are powerful enough to have an extension that does a decent job (or even a great job, in the case of extensions like Sidebery), plus there’s a way to hide the regular top tabs. That’s not the case with Chrome - all the Chrome vertical tab extensions feel kinda janky and the regular top tabs are still visible.
You could also use a Firefox fork like Floorp that has native support for tree-style tabs.
Firefox still doesn’t have a native vertical tab bar.
That is only mostly true now. There is an about:config setting you can turn on in FF 129 (released this week) which will let you have native vertical tabs. The implementation is only about half done, but it’s good enough for me to use alongside Sidebery Tabs.
You can track progress on vertical tabs in Bugzilla. They are also working on tab groups, but that work is at an earlier stage.
All in all, I think we’ll see vertical tabs in the next 6 months or so? As a devout Firefox user and resister of the Chromium monopoly, I am really excited.
Why have I never considered vertical tabs before? The screen is way too wide for normal pages, you can fit a bunch more information sideways per tab, and way more tabs vertically than horizontally. You could even double-stack them with all the space available.
This is such an obvious change to make.
That is only mostly true now. There is an about:config setting you can turn on in FF 129 (released this week)
That’s also the one with the intrusive, facebook-endorsed, opt-in advertising system, isn’t it? I use LibreWolf, because Mozilla doesn’t truly care for privacy.
Hey, I think it’s possible you’re misunderstanding how the system you’re referring to works, as well as its purpose. It’s happened a lot.
I’d like to try to help by answering any questions I can and clarifying things, if you’re willing to talk.
And their bookmark manager on android is absolute crap.
Agreed. A real PITA to organize, some unintuitive and hidden options, but very basic. I’ve used sync and organized on desktop. (But now I do NOT sync desktop bookmarks at all, it has messed them up too many times.)
Not a huge problem, but annoying. Like some newer non-removable toolbar buttons on desktop. Lack of JXL support. I’m a huge Firefox and Mozilla fan, used non-stop for years, but it has annoyances. The team also used to quickly cater to user feedback, but that seems to have slowed.
The translation tool is pretty good though
Local translations, heck yeah! I know it’s not the case for everyone, but I’ll even take worse translations in the short-term if it means being able to ditch google and friends.
And profiles work like shit, at least they announced they were gonna get to it…
Firefox still doesn’t have a native vertical tab bar.
What’s up with everyone obsessing this? I tried Floorp and vertical worse.
I have an ultrawide. Vertical works a lot better on ultrawide than on more narrow screen ratios. Though ultimately it’s just a matter of preference. I personally dislike dark mode.
I only use a laptop, having vertical took too much screen real estate.
Yeah I can see that. My work computer is a laptop, with an ultra wide external monitor. I never use the browser on the laptop screen because with vertical tabs it just takes up too much space. Otherwise vertical tabs give you an easy overview of what you have open if you like me tend to leave a tonne of tabs up.
Coincidentally, I just saw this article: https://www.howtogeek.com/mozilla-firefox-vertical-tabs-test/
This is the way. Mozilla is bloated to fuck as a company. They need to be forced to get back on their main goal: Building a fucking Browser.
No ad deals, no stupid cloud features, just actual browser and privacy features.
There is no fucking way all that money is actually being spent on maintaining core firefox functionality.
Mozilla is bloated to fuck as a company
On one hand, I think people underestimate how difficult it is to build a cross-platform browser in 2024. Just think about all the things that you now do through a web browser that used to require their own separate programs. A browser has to act as the UI for a word processor, a spreadsheet, online games, banking apps, etc. And, it has to work on multiple operating systems with different screen sizes etc. And, this is with constantly evolving web standards. Those web standards are things that Mozilla / Firefox has to participate in too, otherwise Google (the only other browser manufacturer) is going to steer them however it wants and do things like make ad-blocking impossible.
On the other hand, I completely agree that every sign points to Mozilla being ridiculously bloated. Being gifted half a billion dollars per year no matter what you do (as long as it doesn’t displease Google) is going to lead to massive inefficiencies. The CEO’s salary is an obvious red flag. But, it’s a lot more than that. Why did Mozilla buy an advertising company? Why did they buy Pocket? Why are they getting into AI? Why do they sell VPN subscriptions?
Also, what’s up with this weird structure where a non-profit (Mozilla Foundation) owns a for-profit (Mozilla Corporation). How can that not be a conflict of interest? I understand that there are some things that non-profits can’t do. But, why don’t they have two separate companies and have the for-profit one pledge to donate X% of profits or revenues to the non-profit?
It would be a bad thing if the result of the money spigot being turned off is that it was no longer possible to pay people to work on Firefox, resulting in Chrome being the one and only browser. On the other hand, it really does seem like Mozilla needs to be slimmed down and focused on a core mission of making an open source web browser (and hopefully their email client Thunderbird too).
I have written this elsewhere many times and I know it’s extremely unpopular with FOSS crowd but truth needs to be told in here once again:
Everyday I use Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 10/11/Servers.
I’m an “IT guy” and have installed Firefox on literally hundreds of computers over a decade. I also install and setup extensions like uBlock Origin (with few comprehensive ad & malware blocking lists) , Dark Reader, Auto Delete Cookies, Crypto blocking and many more… but I have given up on Firefox 2016 onwards.
You could give Mozilla 10 billion per year just to develop Firefox but Mozilla can and will decide that they wanna spend only 1 or 10 percent of that money on actual Firefox development.
They will spend most of their money on anything but Firefox.
I mean I love world-peace, and cancer and aids free world too but with the money Mozilla get in a year, none of that gonna happen.
Mozilla couldn’t stop Russia attack on Ukraine; neither were able to solve Israel Palestinian conflict nor hunger and migration from African countries to Europe…
Then what are they spending money on?
What they could have done successfully is to spend all the money they made from Firefox towards Firefox development alone. But this is the thing Mozilla do not want to do and are open about it.
Now I don’t want Mozilla to stop developing Firefox either but because Firefox needs money from Google, Google must be allowed their monopoly on search… is utterly insane thinking.
If Mozilla cannot survive without Google monopoly, so be it.
I would say some open source/ Linux foundations/ Linux distros needs to fork Firefox and let Mozilla die peacefully.
Servo is working on becoming a standalone browser.
I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s entirely correct:
Servo aims to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web rendering engine source - About Servo
I think it’d be better to say they’re working on becoming a modern, easy to use alternative to the likes of Gecko and Blink, the engines powering Firefox and Chrome, respectively.
I saw nothing about plans to become a fully featured web browser, even in the roadmap. Do you have anything else to share that supports the browser idea?
There is already the Ladybird project, which is a fork of the SerenityOS browser. We can say that it is a spiritual successor, although its license is more permissive than the Firefox browser.
I think Servo, not the Ladybird project would be the rightful successor to Firefox
Ladybird is in a prime position if they keep up their steady progress, I really hope they succeed.
I would be happy to seem them being open to use already working solutions, and not doing everything by themselves, since it just slows development speed by a lot, but it’s understandable.
Once again, note that if you’re the kind of user who shuns Brave because the CEO says stupid stuff every once in a while, you’ll probably not look fondly upon Ladybird’s project lead and main developer being scared of pronouns.
See the issue on github.
If you don’t care about that, it’s an interesting project. Can’t say I approve, though.
Posting this to inform people and let each one decide what to do on their own. Don’t harass anyone, please.
How about… AI instead?
Diversifying into non-firefox stuff people can pay for is the way they try to get some extra revenue in case something catastrophic happens.
I don’t think diversification gonna help with the mindset Mozilla Foundation have.
For my take on Mozilla, please read the reply I’ve just posted:
https://lemmy.world/comment/11639087
Thanks.
Mozilla gotta do something.
And based on their actions on recent years, that something is probably going to be: 1) firing more developers, and 2) increasing the compensation of their CEO.
I’ll add:
- Buying some random companies
It’s strange how the Internet has been flooded by this news. Like leave Google alone or Firefox gets it. Very strategic use of the media might I say.
Wtf, no? It’s saying “Hey, it’s great that you’re angry about Google search being a monopoly, but you need to be aware and ready that this ruling could further cement their browser monopoly.”
While I do want competition in the web space, its a good thing that Google could get told to stop doing stuff like this.
I dont want Mozilla to die of course but companies need to be held responsible for all the shit they pull. I’d imagine if Mozilla wasnt able to maintain firefox anymore it would fall to the open source community like they said in the article and I’d probably still use it.
No one company should own the internet.
Who in the open-source community would pay what it costs to develop Firefox? I hope some organization would, but it’s a huge and expensive project to run.
Great question that I dont have an answer for. Maybe one of the foundations that supports Linux development? This is just my hope though. No idea what it would really take to maintain Firefox at this point. Maybe if it was scaled down or something it’d be ok in the hands of just the open source community as a whole but I’m not well versed in programming or development so i dont know.
I gotta try and be optimistic about this kinda stuff because i forsee a future where Google just ruins more and more of the internet and i hate the thought of that.
Servo is now being looked after by the Linux Foundation in Europe, but is only maintained by volunteers. But another project has arrived that is not based on Chromium, Webkit or Firefox, which may be a hope in this somewhat confusing situation.
I’m thinking of governments using it and helping. They could have their computers running without Google sticking its nose.
In before Meta buys Mozilla, lol.
Zuckerberg is on a “spoiling other tech giants with Facebook money” streak.
Oh hey, you managed to think up the one scenario that would make me abandon Firefox
Not all their revenues come from Google and other sources are enough to cover Firefox development… But that would mean giving up on all the useless shit no one asked for they’re working on…
Mozilla’s next largest source of revenue is subscriptions and advertising (source 2021 financial report), by a wide margin. That “useless shit” is their other revenue, and they’re investing in it because they know they need to diversify revenue to fund Firefox. You’re suggesting they kill it because it’s not their core (unprofitable) business?
I wonder if this ruling over search engines could spook them with browser development as well considering they nearly have a monopoly with chromium too. Perhaps they’ll release control of it and stop pushing anti-consumer updates like removing your ability to block ads.
I wonder how much of their income actually goes towards development. At a glance, it seems a great deal of unnecessary administrative bloat has been added to Mozilla.
I honestly don’t see why a browser company needs to be so large (>700 employees).
Not that I want people to lose their jobs, it just seems unnecessary.
Well, a browser is a massive piece of software, especially if you include the development of a render engine as Firefox does
Web standards evolve constantly, you need to keep up somehow, together with optimizations, bug fixing, patching of security vulnerabilities, etc
And a JS engine! Firefox uses Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey, unlike every other (Blink/chrome-family) browser which uses Google’s V8.
Mozilla is not a browser producer, it’s a general internet charity that earns money by producing a browser. Most of their income goes to charity and reserves of which they have about 1bn – roughly four times as much as wikipedia just for a sense of scale, wikipedia doesn’t do any business deals to get at cash but instead does annoying donation drives.
They could scale down significantly while still keeping firefox development ongoing, they probably wouldn’t have much issue finding enough donations to fund development, but the strategy seems to be building reserves and diversify commercial income, things like the revenue share they get from pocket for sending people to ad-ridden pages.
When you’re currently donating to Mozilla you’re not donating towards Firefox: Mozilla-the-company can’t receive funds from Mozilla-the-foundation, those donations are going to charity work.
And, to make this clear: None of this is a grand revelation, or new, or outrageous, it’s basically always been like that and it’s always been a perfectly proper way to run a charity. Most of the recent pushbacks comes from people hating that Mozilla funds stuff like getting women into STEM, being outraged that the wider Mozilla community is not keen on having a CEO which opposes gay marriage (very staunchly so), etc.
Oh my, could you share more information about the homophobic CEO thing?
Search for Brendan Eich, nowadays he’s running the Brave browser.
Oh, him. Thanks.
nowadays he’s running the Brave browser.
Yeah, that’s what I knew him from. Figures he would go on to lead a browser infamous for its controversies.
They do more. They are also a vpn, and they are standing up new services.
There’s a reason why every other browser maker has given up and adopted Chromium. It’s not easy to support a browser and rendering engine across half a dozen OSes while keeping it secure, performant and stable.
Good, Baker can go find an other x millions salary elsewhere because it’s necessary for her family (as she said in an interview), and Firefox can become a community project again that still pays salary to actual developers but without the expensive bullshitting C-suite.
if you only do a monthly donation of $5 a month that’s still $60 a year and i urge you do do it. i have a recurring donation for firefox, thunderbird, and wikipedia because i believe they’re essential to the internet.
I will not donate anything to Firefox until Mozilla guarantees my money will be spent on Firefox.
But yeah wikipedia, archive.org, etc. Give them your money.
don’t forget archive.org!
Mozilla doesn’t use their donations for Firefox, though that might change if they lose the Google money.
i have a recurring donation for firefox, thunderbird, and wikipedia
So to Mozilla and the Wikimedia Foundation?
(weird that you list Firefox and Thunderbird as separate donations)
On the other hand, might also be good for Firefox to not be 86% funded by the maker of its top rival (Chrome).
Right? Great knowing there wouldn’t be an adblock killswitch waiting for us all like the sword of damocles
I would stand behind the idea of splitting Google in it’s seperate branches with no shared assets. Basically Google search becomes is seperate corporation, Google AI, Google Webservices, Google Ad Services, YouTube. etc… This will hopefully undo some of the webs enshitification since now the essentially most powerful company on the web has to actually offer good product for profit instead of compensating bad product with more profitable one.
That doesn’t produce any practical competition however. Some vertical splitting of the search business seems reasonable so we end up with multiple companies doing search out of it.
How exactly would you break up search? You can’t really do it geographically like the Bells.
If if wasn’t American, I’d say nationalise it. Maybe at some point we’ll need some kind of international version of nationalising.
Have a UN agency run it?
In a perfect world
deleted by creator
played a neat game that’s basically a choose your own adventure where you play as president Bernie Sanders. It has this as a possible thing to do.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.molleindustria.demsocsim
Ah yes, cos that would lead to stellar leadership in Mozilla.
Everybody forgets that if chrome and chromium breaks away from Google because of this ruling, it’s going to have the same issues as Firefox, if not worse because it’s an arguably worse product. The ruling has been pronounced, but what will happen because of it is yet to be defined.
That’s not it at all. The issue is funding Mozilla. Having it as the default search engine is something google currently pays them for the right for. If the DOJ says that’s anti-trust practices, then Google stops paying Mozilla for that right, and 80% of Mozilla’s funding dries up overnight.
I feel like the real problem is Google paying Apple, since they’re both major players, not Google paying Mozilla. Firefox is not a major player at all (unluckily…)
I believe I remember reading that Apple gets a share of the money from google searches by their users, too. That’s an absurd amount of incentive to sit on your ass and never try anything different.
I’ll try to add a source here, later.
Edit: it is now later:
An expert witness for Google let slip that the company shares 36 percent of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple.
I feel like the real problem is Google paying Apple, since they’re both major players, not Google paying Mozilla. Firefox is not a major player at all (unluckily…)
Why would Chrome/chromium break away? Isn’t this just about the search engine side of things? There’s no need to dump Chrome if all they need to do is drop themselves as the default search engine.
It’s a threat to the Mozilla CORPORATION, not the Mozilla Foundation nor the browser.
Nothing to be really scared about. Move along.
why do you think the Mozilla corporation losing 86% of their revenue wouldn’t hurt the Firefox browser?
There was a well sourced video a few months ago that showed where the money is going. Long story short, not into development, for the most part.
Well, only way I can figure it wouldn’t effect the foundation, is that the corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the foundation, presumably this is to protect the foundation financially and legally from anything that might happen to the corporation.
The corporation is owned by the foundation, and does most of the browser development. If you want the browser development to continue, it is a concern.
Not necessarily. Corporate money has a hidden contract. Mainly, you will develop what we tell you to develop and you will stall what we tell you to stall.
Google money is ad money. It’s DRM money, it’s private silo money, not general development money.
If you believe corporations drive all good development in the world, look at how many projects have been bought and killed by Microsoft.
In fact, why would Firefox accept money from one of its competitors? That’s SUPER fucked up.
Just think about the anti features that Google mmay want Firefox to implement: Unlockable ads, third party cookies, user tracking, and so on.
Is tha the development we want?
I say, let’s open fundraisers and keep Firefox free of corporate influence.
If were going to go after them for a monopoly, shouldn’t it be for chromium? At least with search there are actual viable alternatives that don’t get 86% of their money from a direct competitor…
I don’t think they pay others to use chromium tho. Other browsers independently decided to use it. That makes it a lot harder to argue that this is a monopolistic practice than when they explicitly pay people to make them the default.
That’s not entirely accurate. Google’s influence on the web has grown even beyond the web browser engine majority share (which is bad enough in itself). They offer one of the most popular web frameworks and run several of the most popular websites. There is almost no way to compete when the market leader is simultaneously the developer and the major user of new features. Of course everyone else is going to switch to using your browser engine. What else are they gonna do? There are even websites now that just check the user agent string and refuse service if you don’t use a chromium based browser. Shit’s fucked.
I needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google
There are dozens of us!!
At least 2, at the moment.
Three
Four… maybe even $10/mo after the manifest v3 chaos hits in full force.
Exchange rate is a bitch, but id chime in and do my part as well.
You’d need a hundred million people sign up for that $5 subscription to make up for Google’s bribe.
Your math is off. It would take 8.5 million people donating $5 a month, to equal the 510 million a year from Google.
My math (please correct me if I am wrong):
$510 million / 1 year
$ X / 1 month?
$510 million / 12 months = $42.5 million / 1 month
$42.5 million / $5 per person a month = 8.5 million people a month
You’re right. My European ass sees revenue and salaries as monthly
Also, Mozilla says that it spends only $220M on software development expenses, so if 100% of the money went to that it would only require 3.7 million people paying $5 per month.
But, IMO, if the Google money spigot is turned off, it might be that other companies that rely on web browsers (Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, etc.) will want to spend at least a few tens of millions on Firefox. That would mean that end-users wouldn’t need to support the entire cost of developing it.
Right now, everyone except Apple uses Blink which is a Google project tied to Chrome. Since Google has been found to have been illegally abusing their monopoly, the status of Chromium / Blink has to be uncertain. It would be smart insurance for these companies to ensure that Firefox doesn’t go away in case something happens to Blink.
Yup, and I could do $5/month, perhaps more if they really seemed to need it. I don’t know if there are 8-9M, but maybe.
They really should be working on improving their revenue streams. I think they should work on privacy-friendly transactions, like a Mozilla Pay where I put money into some kind of bucket, then purchases are paid out of that bucket. The system would work on something like GNU Taler, and they’d take a small cut for money going into and out of the system (or transactions within the system). I could use those funds to pay for online services, avoiding ads, tips to people online, or Mozilla services.
Is it not
5 x 12 = 60
$510 000 000 / $60 = 850 000
$60 is one year of subscription for if user.
850 000 users need to pay 60 dollar per year to amount to $510 000 000.
(Or 510 000 000/5 = 10 200 000 users per month to reach the same amount monthly.)
You mean 510 million divided by 12. That’s “only” 42.5.
Almost hoping this somehow causes browser support to fracture again.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
Also because I’m tired of google dictating the www by being a monopoly. It’s 2024 and jpegxl is being treated as ransomware as if enabling a god damn image format is too hard for web browsers. HTTP3/QUIC was 100% google’s invention that they just threw onto the web because no one else is developing this standard anymore. Manifest v3 is an explicit attempt to limit user control over web content. They even cornered the market along with Microsoft using gmail.
It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.
That can’t be helped. Hard to explain well without knowing how much CS you’re familiar with, but basically in order to guarantee security/user safety you have to sandbox each tab (basically running an entirely separate container program for each tab which constantly checks for illegal memory access to prevent it from being exploited), all separately running their own interpreters for javascript/typescript, HTML, CSS, all of which are very resource intensive (mainly javascript/typescript). There’s not really any getting around this, no matter how well you design your browser.
Now, theoretically, with the growing popularity/advances in WebAssembly, and increase in usage of frameworks/graphics APIs like WebGPU, you could completely get rid of that sandboxing and completely get rid of the extremely slow javascript and html/css, in favor of completely using safe, compiled Rust programs. There’s active research using versions of WASM which only accept completely safe code (mainly safe Rust code) so using memory bugs generated from user error to access data in different tabs becomes impossible (aside from potential unaddressed bugs in Rust itself obviously) and you don’t need to sandbox each tab – the program practically sandboxes itself. Then you could potentially have browsers with thousands of tabs perform perfectly fine, assuming each of the websites is programmed competently.
But that’s not going to happen, because billions of users rely on HTML/CSS and JS, and it’s not pretty to transition away from. Getting rid of it would be like getting rid of pointy shoes, or getting rid of US Customary Units in the US, it’s just not happening no matter how much benefit it would bring to users. It’s not so much of a browser company issue as it is everyone ever would complain and potentially trillions of dollars of damage would be done. Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.
This is kind of true, but at the same time, I’ve also seen some pretty talented front-end devs fwiw.
If this hurts Firefox more than it hurts Chrome, that’s probably not a good thing for the health of the Internet. Google running the Internet unchecked would be bad for everyone.
