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.
Why can’t Firefox use DuckDuckGo instead?
The problem is would DDG pay them $500 million to be the default. That’s doubtful.
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 isn’t the search engine - it’s the money.
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.
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.
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.
They do more. They are also a vpn, and they are standing up new services.
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.
Oh my, could you share more information about the homophobic CEO thing?
Search for Brendan Eich, nowadays he’s running the Brave browser.
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.
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
And a JS engine! Firefox uses Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey, unlike every other (Blink/chrome-family) browser which uses Google’s V8.
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.
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.
Good. Open source that shit.
I’m not sure what you mean, Firefox is already open source?
Well then double open source it! No excuses!
It’s a threat to the Mozilla CORPORATION, not the Mozilla Foundation nor the browser.
Nothing to be really scared about. Move along.
The corporation is owned by the foundation, and does most of the browser development. If you want the browser development to continue, it is a concern.
Not necessarily. Corporate money has a hidden contract. Mainly, you will develop what we tell you to develop and you will stall what we tell you to stall.
Google money is ad money. It’s DRM money, it’s private silo money, not general development money.
If you believe corporations drive all good development in the world, look at how many projects have been bought and killed by Microsoft.
In fact, why would Firefox accept money from one of its competitors? That’s SUPER fucked up.
Just think about the anti features that Google mmay want Firefox to implement: Unlockable ads, third party cookies, user tracking, and so on.
Is tha the development we want?
I say, let’s open fundraisers and keep Firefox free of corporate influence.
why do you think the Mozilla corporation losing 86% of their revenue wouldn’t hurt the Firefox browser?
Well, only way I can figure it wouldn’t effect the foundation, is that the corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the foundation, presumably this is to protect the foundation financially and legally from anything that might happen to the corporation.
There was a well sourced video a few months ago that showed where the money is going. Long story short, not into development, for the most part.
Mozilla gotta do something.
And based on their actions on recent years, that something is probably going to be: 1) firing more developers, and 2) increasing the compensation of their CEO.
I’ll add:
- Buying some random companies
- Change the UI and mess with plugins.
- More bloat in the install package that should be optional plugins.
- Offer advertisers user data.
(for absurdly small amounts of money)
Also forcing in AI somehow.
Spend millions developing the AI with no real goal of what it will do or why it should exist… (Seems to be the current trend these days)
I use only Firefox / Fennec, but fuck Mozilla. The obscene amounts they paid their CEO for stupid decisions, their shitty Pocket acquisition, regressions such as saving page as pdf simply disappearing on mobile. Let that rotten corporation die, the code is open source, someone will do a Gecko browser.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as someone just forking it. Realistically, a browser is an extremely complex piece of software that requires a lot of organizational effort to maintain, deal with security issues, etc. Pretty much every other piece of software on a similar scale I can think of (the kernel, KDE, Blender, Libreoffice) has some sort of organization behind it with at least some amount of officially paid work. All the major forks of Firefox or chromium follow quite closely to upstream for this reason (which is also why I’m skeptical of Brave’s ability to maintain manifest v2 long term, despite their probably genuine best efforts to do so).
I do wish that Firefox were developed and funded by an organization specifically dedicated to developing it. This could of course happen if Mozilla dies. But that’s going to require someone starting it, which is not at all a small or cheap task.
I could also see a future where Oracle or IBM buys it 😂🤡
Firefox enterprise edition, now with Lotus integration!
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.
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)
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!
Mozilla doesn’t use their donations for Firefox, though that might change if they lose the Google money.
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.
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.
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?
In a perfect world
You’ve never worked with a UN agency it seems…
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
I needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google
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.
You’d need a hundred million people sign up for that $5 subscription to make up for Google’s bribe.
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.
You mean 510 million divided by 12. That’s “only” 42.5.
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.
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
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.”
Fuck.
situational irony
