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Comment on The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine

Affidavit@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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.

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SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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

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- TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Indeed. People severely underestimate how complex and costly developing a browser and web renderer is.
  
  In many ways it’s far more complex than OS development.
  
  Firefox cannot get by on user donations alone. Mozilla needs a way to generate revenue, but nobody wants Mozilla to commercialise in any way. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
  
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- mke@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  And a JS engine! Firefox uses Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey, unlike every other (Blink/chrome-family) browser which uses Google’s V8.
  
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barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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- mke@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Oh my, could you share more information about the homophobic CEO thing?
  
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  - barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Brendan Eich, nowadays he’s running the Brave browser.
    
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    mke@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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stoly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
They do more. They are also a vpn, and they are standing up new services.

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Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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