It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing it into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn’t inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on ‘AI’ features nobody asked for.
Mozilla doesn’t exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It’s been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It’s always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn’t to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla’s charitable causes.
During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would’ve been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn’t possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.
Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That’s its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can’t make money with it.
Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it’d continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn’t be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don’t forget t-shirts and mugs).
I guess overall the gripe I have with the “Mozilla should invest more in Firefox” chorus is that it implies “Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is”. People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it’s running on donations etc.
There’s a subscription if you want and they’re also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.
It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing it into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn’t inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on ‘AI’ features nobody asked for.
Mozilla doesn’t exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It’s been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It’s always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn’t to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla’s charitable causes.
usually you invest in the main product to drive higher returns for diversifying. diversifying first means your baseline is unstable.
During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would’ve been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn’t possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.
Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That’s its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can’t make money with it.
Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it’d continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn’t be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don’t forget t-shirts and mugs).
I guess overall the gripe I have with the “Mozilla should invest more in Firefox” chorus is that it implies “Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is”. People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it’s running on donations etc.
wait, pocket makes money?
There’s a subscription if you want and they’re also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.
Actually, their new AI thing is actually useful: stays on-device, and summarizes web pages and videos.
But yes, they could stand to spend more money on the browser, and less on their CEO and other non-browser things.