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.
This isn’t a new threat. This was always a threat.
The things that give google money are the reasons why we don’t want to use google. The things that firefox does to get money are basically just giving google the thing that makes them money.
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.
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.”
This article doesn’t even bother to explain the connection. I don’t get it if I’m honest.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership.
Obviously. Why is that threatened by this antitrust ruling ?
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
I would pay money to keep Firefox foss for other people who can’t afford to do so.
Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots
Is this llamafile?
The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).
Performance is insanely critical because they’re so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).
So… I’m not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don’t have many of those kind of devs, they don’t have a GPU farm, they’re not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They’re just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the “first” model that’s kinda OK on average PCs, we’re still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I’m a local LLM tinkerer, and I’ve never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.
From what I’ve heard the general idea is to run AI search on your browsing history, which is a very useful feature. I’m not deep into AI tech at all but to me it looks like that would involve local finetuning, ingesting all that history during inference sounds like a bad idea. It also wouldn’t be necessary to generate stuff, only answer “Can you find that article about how nature makes blue feathers” and it’s going to spit out previously-read links that match that kind of thing. Also, tl;dr-bot it.
Oh and there’s already AI, as in ML, in firefox, in the form of machine translation. Language detection seems to be built-in, translating requires downloading a model per language pair, 16M parameters. Trained on workstations with 8GPUs. Which is all to say: You don’t need gigantic GPU farms if you aren’t training gazillion parameter models on the whole internet.
Will this make ladybird our only hope overnight?
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.
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.
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 needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google
You’d need a hundred million people sign up for that $5 subscription to make up for Google’s bribe.
You mean 510 million divided by 12. That’s “only” 42.5.
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
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.)
510 / 60 = 8.5I see that I missed a zero (510000000/60=8 500 000). That numbers didn’t seem plausible when I did the calculation.
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.
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.
I hope some governments and EU see the need of a foss browser engine alternative from a non-profit and stuff some Money there
Why can’t Firefox use DuckDuckGo instead?
The problem isn’t the search engine - it’s the money.
Firefox can do without Google being the default fine. What they can’t do without is all the money that Google pays them to make Google be the default.
The problem is would DDG pay them $500 million to be the default. That’s doubtful.
If Mozilla collapses for being too deeply intertwined with Google, I won’t mourn them.
Firefox is open source. We probably need to pass the torch to another maintainer anyway. Mozilla has been betraying their original mission a lot.
I’ll mourn them but now knowing this gross imbalance of funding it’s frustrating that CEO still has a job - and they will surely get a golden parachute while every other employee will just lose their job.
Tax/fine Google more and give the profits to competitors like Mozilla (as long as those competitors use the funds for Firefox)
Sounds too European for the “land of the free”
The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy!
Fuck.
#BreakThemUp
Specifically separate the browser side from the advertiser side. Get rid of that conflict of interest.
good. Maybe firefox will die like it should have long ago
