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.
I guess they read the room and this is why they started delving into the ad business
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.
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.
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.
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.
If if wasn’t American, I’d say nationalise it. Maybe at some point we’ll need some kind of international version of nationalising.
Ah yes, cos that would lead to stellar leadership in Mozilla.
Have a UN agency run it?
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
In a perfect world
You’ve never worked with a UN agency it seems…
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.
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
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 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)
Mozilla doesn’t use their donations for Firefox, though that might change if they lose the Google money.
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.
mozilla donations not going to firefox was probably the caveat to secure google’s funding. If google has to pull their bribes, mozilla might make donations go to firefox.
Or I could be completely wrong. We won’t know until we know.
Yeah, I’ll donate to Mozilla the moment they actually apply my donations to Firefox. I’m not going to pay for them to buy ad companies, donate to other charities, or put on charity events. I honestly just want to fund Firefox development.
That said, I’m okay with not 100% of it going to Firefox, as long as the bulk of it does. I understand there’s a lot of admin overhead they need to cover and whatnot, and I’m fine with my money going to that. But it seems most donations don’t make it to Firefox dev.
don’t forget archive.org!
Chrome is the existential threat to FireFox.
Chrome is… Also Google.
Break up Google, make chrome competitive, and then we’ll stop seeing advertisers own the web standards and implement things like AVIF and ManifestV3, and instead embrace open solutions that favor users.
The JPEG XL vs AVIF thing still makes me mad.
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.
Even if Mozilla survives it’ll need to cut off some spendings.
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, 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 allow 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.
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
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.
Ladybird is in a prime position if they keep up their steady progress, I really hope they succeed.
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?
Diversifying into non-firefox stuff people can pay for is the way they try to get some extra revenue in case something catastrophic happens.
How about… AI instead?
What improvements would you like to see through development?
Semi-TLDR: Improvements under Mozilla? None.
They do not even want to develop a better (than Chrome) browser… they wanna “build a better Internet”.
Mozilla Foundation is making US$ 300-400 millions for many, many years (US$ 593 in 2021-22). If they could not develop a better Firefox all these years, it’s not happening __ with or without Google money __ ever.
When Mozilla /Firefox developers don’t even care/do not listen to feedback for simple things like ability to differentiate between active and inactive tab colors (why everyone that uses Firefox must play around with css to make Firefox usable?), expect them to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browser is out of question.
Longer, rant version:
According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments.
The fundamental issues as I see are:
Complete lack of vision. Utterly worthless CEOs. Spending money on everything else but development of Firefox.
Especially when Firefox made them US$ 510 million in 2021-22.
Instead of spending millions on worthless CEOs, why not spend millions on developers so people would use Firefox on their own, instead IT guys like me forcing friends & family to use it.
I try to find annual cost of developing & maintaining Linux kernel but could only find articles and PDFs from 2008/2017 mentioning total worth etc but not actual annual cost.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine every Firefox (desktop, mobile etc) stops working all of a sudden… IMO, the world and internet will not come to a full stop.
Now imagine what would happen if every computer, server, router, switch, phone, tablet, stops working completely at once, that runs on Linux kernel.
So if Linux kernel can be developed for $510 million (assuming its below this mark), why can’t Firefox be?
I’m trying to figure out why US$ 510 million is not able to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browsers.
Then there are issues related to lack of vision and no importance/urgency towards finishing a product.
Why only few extensions were allowed on Firefox mobile for many years without any explanations. Even developers of major extensions were not able to figure out the criteria to make their addon available on Firefox mobile.
What was the rationale behind it… Driving people away who were using Firefox mobile? If the product was not ready, do not fucking release it.
You need highly talented and additional developers to release product sooner… hire more, pay more. You got $510 mil just from Firefox.
I do not see any future for Firefox under Mozilla.
Only if some real big names (like Linux foundation etc) from FOSS world hard fork the Firefox, it might have a future.
I think, with real big name sponsors (pro-open source companies), search revenue will not be an issue.
IMO, the new organization (of course with big sponsors) of new fork must have one, single mission/goal… develop a great browser. New org must not have a mission statement written by MBAs:
“We’re building a better Internet”
Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
Something people will use it on their own for its merit.
I’m going to go eat now, so I’ll just respond to the short version:
Yes, the CEO is overpaid, but I do not get you at all.
active and inactive tab colors
The colors are perfectly distinguishable? Whatever’s active has a giant white background and border and shadow.
expect them to develop something better or comparable to Chromium based browser is out of question.
It’s already better than Chromium. For example, not only is it a bit less resource-heavy, it also has features that allow uBlock Origin to function much better even before all the Mv3 stuff.
Regarding tab colors, I’ll post screenshot from my Debian machine later tomorrow.
If something is better (or at least perceived as better) people will use it on their own. Default or not.
Examples: VLC player. Microsoft Office
Even if LibreOffice is free, why people are paying for Microsoft Office?
I have to spend 10 times more time on LibreOffice on Debian/Ubuntu than on Microsoft Office on Windows. Same with simple touch ups in GIMP vs Microsoft Paint.
Firefox market share in 2024: 3.36%
If something is better (or at least perceived as better) people will use it on their own. Default or not.
Wait until you learn about how monopolies work.
Most people are lazy. They don’t switch until some major thing happens. VLC doesn’t even have as much market share as you think it has; most people just use whatever comes with their system.
On how many computers (not your own and not as a part of your job) you have installed Firefox yourself?
On how many phones you have installed Firefox personally?
How many calls you have attended to solve Firefox related issues?
How many childhood friends you have fought (verbally) insisting to use Firefox? Not just one time but for years.
You didn’t comment on usability points I’ve mentioned of GIMP or LibreOffice… Ohh that’s right, you could not.
As per your logic, how apple was able to sell even a single iphone when Windows Mobile was there already?
With a better product or some unexplainable magic?
That’s exactly what Chrome did initially. They built a better product, when apparently Mozilla/Firefox executives were in deep cryogenic sleep.
Why Chrome was able to beat internet explorer. Android was not a thing back then, hence no monopoly/no default installations.
Why people are paying many times more on apple/samsung phones when far cheaper options are available in hundreds?
Can you name a single country on earth, where only apple/samsung phones are allowed to sell… so they can be called duopoly/monopoly.
In August of 1997 Bill Gates invested US$ 150 million to save apple, at a time when sony had market cap of US$ 34.86 and apple had just US$ 1.68 billion.
So, why apple was able to beat sony (which was dominant player in portable music) in music player business with ipods and hence started its meteoric rise?
Sources:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/sony/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/
What monopoly is at play with VLC player?
You didn’t mention any VLC installation numbers. Well it can be installed from many places on Android but here’s just one source, play store.
It’s over 100 million.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc&hl=en_US
As per your view, why people even use VLC?
What monopoly was at play when Firefox had 32.21 percent market share?
Source: https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/firefox-statistics.html
https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2008/12/01/firefox-surpassing-50-market-share-in-more-regions/
What monopoly was at play when Google launched in 1998? Yahoo was there already. Why people chose Gmail, when Hotmail, Yahoo and many others were there already.
Why small, medium or large device makers use Linux kernel? I’ve never read Linus Torvalds paying billions to corporations.
I can go on but I have to catch a flight.
I’m not gonna argue with you anymore as I find your worldview incredibly narrow/selective.
I think this is why Mozilla is at 3.36 % marker share as Mozilla might be surrounded by people/publications that keep repeating, “Everything is fine, no need to change anything at all”.
Don’t worry, we have a possible replacement for Mozilla, meet Ladybird
2026 though…
That’s a pretty good date. Browsers are monstrous software projects. I just wish it was written in a memory safer language. Oh well.
This project looks very cool, I hope it comes to be
So who’s going to fund that who can’t fund Mozilla Foundation?
At least with this project when you donate it goes to direct development.
Zuckerberg : Heyyy…
Do you mean the other software projects or the other non-software projects?
If the former, there is the Open Technology Fund (OTF), but it is affiliated with USAGM which is part of the government.
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.
I’m thinking of governments using it and helping. They could have their computers running without Google sticking its nose.
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.
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 at 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.
$510MM out of $593MM?!? WTF Mozilla?
The problem is: who is going to hive money for a web browser?
They got a one of a kind deal with Google, which ended up being problematic, but where else are they going to find the same thing?
Asking for donations will get you chump change.
This. Web engines cost a tremendous amount to develop.
Donations won’t raise hundreds of millions per year, unless they get serious commitment from the enterprise sector, which has already settled on Chromium unfortunately.
They’re in a tough position.
Cool. Mozilla is a corrupt, useless org anyway. Not much better than Google.
Mozilla isn’t and org. Mozilla Foundation is an org. And they get a fraction of that money. I don’t know what you’re talking about but you don’t either, it seems.
Tomato tomato
quite a good chunk of that goes to their ceo anyway.
I am livid over her absolutely disgraceful management over Moz. When electron was building a de facto monopoly of Chromium on the desktop she made no moves to produces equivalent tooling. While Node grew into a behemoth she totally ignored it. The only thing that has come out of Moz in the last decade that mattered was Rust, and she’s already fired the Rust team. She is poison and serves only to suck up a salary that could fund development.
Mozilla needs its wake up call and to start being the underdog that makes something worth doing. With Manifest V3 and the anti-trust case on the horizon they have a fork in the road that will define what becomes of them. Hopefully she can make one good decision and it’ll be the right one.
thats ceos for ya.
i doubt they will escape from going through some bad times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could also use a Firefox fork like Floorp that has native support for tree-style tabs.
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 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.
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).
