The hilarious part is that there's no alternate proposal, and nothing (here) addressing Google in terms of antitrust at all. It's just a plea for half-billion dollar yearly checks from their competitor, for reasons. They want to be paid by Google so they can continue to challenge Google, but don't challenge Google in any way, right here, right now.
The reason Google spent billions on Firefox is for this letter, not for hits from a browser with 5% market share that 100% uses adblockers.
edit: also, how far has Netscape fallen? This is embarrassing for me to read, it had to be embarrassing to write.
Maybe the answer is to donate Chrome to Mozilla along with seed money to invest in the markets, and fund continual development. Mozilla can continue to do the work we need, but independent of the advertising/adblock warfare. And a trickle of the money behind Chrome can be fed to Firefox as usual
And end up with two shitty browsers instead of one? I don't follow
Mozilla says hey we exist and need funding.
Google also point to Mozilla and say "look look we value diversity in browser"
So it's a mechanistic way to get out from under and meet social obligations.
Obviously if you don't like either browser it does nothing for you.
I think they’re also underselling WebKit a bit. Under Linux it's not too far behind macOS/iOS and work to bring the Windows version up to parity is underway[1].
Anyway, the obviously implied alternative proposal is: disallow search deals with major players like Safari, not minor players like Mozilla, or find some completely different way to address the search monopoly. The most obvious prior art is the browser choice dialog that was imposed on MS/windows. The DOJ doesn't want that because everyone would pick Google anyway.
Mozilla is trying to compete against Google's browser and not their search engine. I don't see why Google wouldn't be paying for their search traffic as opposed to just letting Microsoft buy it.
Additionally, a bad browser will always be more harmful than a bad search engine due to the shear amount of things it interacts with. Breaking the default search engine agreement is good in theory, but seems worse practically.
But agree a browser monopoly is no better.
Finally, question: what do you mean you cannot pay your rent on Firefox? Curious.
Chrome on Windows/MacOS/Android, Safari on MacOS/iOS, or their own crap-app and NOTHING ELSE!
(Not even Chrome/Chromium on Linux or some Chromium on xBSD)
If you try to spoof that, and it doesn't work out, your account may be locked down for a while,
until you have proven (in person, in some branch office) that it was you,
and some corporate drone sternly waggles its index fingers at you for having the gall of even trying that (repeatedly).
This seems to be more often the case in the US than in Germany.
Your'e lucky when you have choices which don't fuck this up, or are wealthy, and thus 'important/valued' enough to ignore such shit.
But when you rent your house, you probably aren't, because why else would you?
Is that not enough to maintain a browser?
EDIT: this figure is for Mozilla Foundation only, Mozilla Corpotation makes about 9 times that amount (I assume most of which comes from Google). My point still stands though: $37M isn’t a terribly big amount of money, but it’s still a lot.
[1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
Just out of habit, I still test my stuff in Firefox (nobody above me cares). But market share is already getting into "only weirdos use this" territory. And "weirdos" also like a bunch of weirdo extensions. (And I frequently see HNers complaining about this.) So eventually, its like we just don't support weirdos.
Marketing and evangelism isn't free, but I find it hard to believe $37.5M per year wouldn't cover everything they need to do. At an average of $200k per employee, that's 187 people. As you point out, it's their strategy that's the problem. I'm not convinced they need more money to come up with and implement a better strategy.
(Yes, I know they pay for more than just employee salaries. Presumably they have other income apart from that $37.5M that doesn't come from Google.)
Not just now, but Mozilla's own argument here is they can't sustain themselves in the long-term without an illegal trust agreement.
PitchBook estimated Brave had 191 employees before they cut 27 last year. Mozilla don't have a search engine. But Brave don't have a browser engine. And they couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.
> Just out of habit, I still test my stuff in Firefox (nobody above me cares).
Personally, I develop on Firefox, then test on Chrome (and other browsers). I get the sentiment though.
> The last unicorn–the web can’t afford to lose Mozilla’s browser engine
Their stated plan is to be the "endagered species", like the Dodo of browsers. Can you find enough weirdos to care about that?
I think this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop because of bad analytics.
Maybe initially some big, popular, otherwise important sites only supported some Chrome.
Then the 'weirdos' discovered that it worked perfectly with only one mouseclick changing the user-agent.
Time passed, more and more 'weirdos' spoofed their UA by default, because clicking is boring.
Analytics saw less and less FF, more Chrome(simplified).
Management saw less and less need to support anything else.
Pseudo-Cyber-Security rose up high in the sky, shining so bright, that it seemed just right.
Analytics still spitting out falsehoods...
...damagement...
...repeat.
On any consumer site, mobile UAs just overwhelm the desktop ones anyway. Nobody cares about Samsung Browser, why would they care about some shit that's way below the fold.
But Mozilla is definitely wasting a lot of money on stuff that doesn't contribute to their mission.
Yes, I have noticed that too and every year they sink deeper with ads and shady choices
If they keep it lean and with a high standard the community wouldn't stop supporting it, but every 6 month or so they make a shady decision and lose more support
Though it’s mind-boggling in any case. I’m sure there’s thousands of brilliant developers who would gladly work for Mozilla for like $50k/yr if it was truly independent. That’s 750 full-time devs from investment income alone (which was Mozilla Corp’s total employee count in 2020, so I assume that should be about right).
(Investment here, I suppose, is what it says: they’re buying a bunch of stocks and use profits from these for their charitable goals. Kinda like endowment kind of thing.)
I am not sure. Can you convince me with evidence?
Not to mention, there are a lot of non payroll expenses to account for.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43340948
So they could cut the entire Google deal, and still be in the black.
Not as profitable as before (obviously they've been investing their profit for a long time, to drive $37M in investment income) but not as dire as this blog post makes it sound
Mozilla entities in 2023 received $495 million in royalties. This was 76% of revenue. Royalties means search deals essentially. Search deals means Google essentially. Total expenses were $497 million.
Thus if Google falls so does mozilla.