Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I'm sure they'll manage alright.
By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...
firefox is not remotely able to bring in enough cash to justify its current development costs. see https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202... ($12M income from contributions vs $260M spent on software development, the vast majority of which is undoubtedly spent on firefox). so no, mozilla cannot just drop everything else to finally focus only on their browser, as that is guaranteed to bankrupt the company.
Around 2012 I was advocating Wikimedia should have merged with Mozilla where by Wikimedia foundation would continue to fund the development of Firefox.
But then both were rotten and massively over spend.
What? I know the browser is a complex piece of software but considering at least part of the development is done by volunteers isn't this a bit too high?
Maybe at least they should move a part of the operation outside of HCOL areas in the US?
Aside from a handful of individuals the only volunteers doing a modicum of serious volunteer work are retirees/ people that don’t need to work anymore or companies directing their employees to make contributions for their own motivations
You seriously underestimate the complexity of a browser if you think it’s a hobbies maintained thing
1800 ish devs from the last figure I could find. 700 ish on Firefox.
Now there is no way 700 people actually work on Firefox code. Throw in team leads, QA, dev tools, UI, specialized developers like WebRTC and that number makes a little more sense. But still seems inflated.
Most of Mozilla is already remote.
I mean Mozilla and Firefox should survive. But I do imagine we’ll lose Thunderbird and anything not Firefox related. And dev will drop heavily. CEO salary of almost 7 million will need to go as well.
It may be good for Mozilla to return to a streamlined company. Rather then a bloated one as it is now.
Thunderbird is (amazingly) funded entirely by donations from users. The money is hypothecated for that purpose. There are so few good email clients now they get enough donors.
You can! Thunderbird lives in a separate entity outside the main Mozillasphere called MZLA. I've given a few times in the past and use it for personal use, but my workplace recently banned Thunderbird.
Almost nothing noticeable has changed with Firefox for years. A couple of minor features here and there, and just keeping up with standards. It does seem pretty excessive. Definitely seems that Mozilla has become massively wasteful and misguided over the past ~15 years.
That’s actually the point. An army of people are keeping up with standards so things just work. I’m curious as to what it looks like when only certain browsers are maintained.
That's one of the main problems with Google controlling not only the top browser but also the rendering engine behind most of the competition. They don't have to care about standards at that point. When they do, it's mostly to put a veneer of openness over their operations.
> Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
Why the hell would they?
Mozilla does all the "harebrained" stuff to make money. Especially to diversify their income and rely on Google less. Developing Firefox is a net loss of money.
Is any of their stuff actually making money? It certainly doesn't seem like it, and most of their products and projects were complete failures, because they were getting involved in things where they had no expertise like building a mobile OS.
From their own report [0], in 2023, they made 494M from 'Royalties' and 64M from 'Subscription and Advertising Revenue".
If I read it correctly, 'Royalties' is mostly just Google paying them to be the default search engine. 'Subscription and Advertising Revenue' is what people on HN refer as harebrained projects, like Mozilla VPN.
Notably both numbers declined in 2023, and it's not clear how much these subscription and advertising projects cost. So we don't really know if they made a profit.
They won't, and in fact those harebrained moonshots at desperately acquiring scalable revenue will only increase. The money from selling the default search actually directly incentivizes Mozilla to make the browser good to increase the value of the ad space.
Absolutely not. As you say, harebrained schemes would go, also it'd change the browser ecosystem considerably.
In time that might force browsers to adopt a minimum connectivity standard for all browsers that would be simper than those in use today. That would have many upsides for users which I posted about earlier.
> Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
It was the other way around. Other product like VPN, MDN Plus, Pocket was a way to diversify revenue which could be channeled to Firefox, although the problem is Mozilla isn't the best company at making money.
>Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
Again, the whack-a-mole myth that simply won't die. I have asked people about this over and over and over again over I'm gonna say like the past year and a half and at this point I feel pretty confident that this was kind of a mass-hallucinated myth. If you try to be objective and actually look at the numbers and you look at the time period over which Firefox lost browser share and you look at their budgets in the time period over which they engaged in side bets, the math just doesn't add up. None of the side bets ever occurred at prohibitive development costs, and they did not occur over a time period over which Firefox's browser share crashed. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature which Firefox was unable to implement because they didn't have access to resources due to those resources being siphoned away by sidebeds. And people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually like make a real argument about these things before simply claiming it.
There is a kinda-sorta real version of the argument, which is that around 2016 or so, before Firefox released quantum, the quality of the browser was lagging behind alternatives, and they were investing significant resources in Firefox OS. That's the closest to a real thing that this argument can attach to. But no one making this claim even knows that no one making this claim has looked at their budget, how much it costs to run a VPN, or made any cause and effect connection between that and other things. This is a myth that kind of got hallucinated into existence by hn comment sections.
I do think the critique of straying from a commitment to privacy is a real thing, but the narrative that they wasted time and resources on side features while the core browser experience deteriorated, attempts to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between that and market share is not backed up by any facts. And if you look at my comment history, it's practically a year of pleading with people to cite any example whatsoever that would substantiate this argument.
Back in the 2000s, Microsoft wasn't wasting their desktop money on harebrained schemes like porting Windows to touchscreen mobile devices (or rather, it wasn't a huge priority), and then Android ate their lunch.
Firefox spending money on harebrained schemes like FirefoxOS is a good thing (even if it failed), it's how you find black swans that everyone has to copy from you. Otherwise you're always playing catch-up.
How do you make money by developing a web browser? You build this immensely complex piece of software and then have no choice but to distribute it for free. It seems like with the current browser landscape the only viable business model for companies building browsers is to make your money elsewhere while investing some of it into the browser development.
Mozilla spends very little on "hairebrained schemes" like (for example) Rust these days compared to direct investment in Firefox. Did you miss the massive layoffs that occurred many years ago?
That comparison has always been nonsense. People can't keep pretending like ActiveX was the same thing as, say, WebMIDI, or that stuff like WebMIDI is Chrome's "moat". Chrome simply has superior, less buggy support for basic, uncontroversial web APIs, the kind that every browser maker agrees on. Look at the massive gap in Interop 2025, possibly the most conservative Interop yet (due to Apple's constant behind-the-scenes vetoing). It's not magic. Google invests more in their browser, and the Chromium codebase attract more contributions from a wider variety of companies. And Firefox has exponentially fewer issues than Safari anyway (which is deliberate, Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store monopoly).
> Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store monopoly
While I agree that this is probably true at the BOD level, the people working on the browser itself go in the opposite direction. They spend a lot of effort trying to actually develop a robust standard. Jen Simmons has been kicking ass since she went to work on Safari and I'm here for it. If she leaves or is forced out, I will be much more skeptical about the pushback offered by Apple.
The Interop 20XX projects are a great first start and I'm hopefully that feature parity will continue to increase over the next few years.
I like the work and advocacy of Jen Simmons too, but without the large infusion of cash (on the order of $20B) from Google, why wouldn't Apple downsize the Safari team and force her out?
I worry about the jobs of all browser devs in fact. The pace of innovation in web and browser technologies will significantly slow down. All browser teams are likely to be downsized.
It last happened with Safari when it was the overwhelming majority of mobile traffic market share. That was even a meme for a while in the web developer community around 2010-2015 or so: "Safari is the new IE."
It took years for Android's growth to make it a credible second browser for mobile devs to care about, and to pressure Apple to catch up to web standards faster.
> ...pressure Apple to catch up to Google's web standards faster.
Ftfy.
Safari is the only brake we have in this rush towards complex and unmaintainable web, with Google (the only company which can afford to play this game) at the helm. So no, Safari not supporting some random new feature is not a bad thing.
During the "Safari is the new IE" era though, Apple had created all sorts of proprietary extensions to make websites more mobile-friendly... a whole slew of nonstandard `-webkit-*` prefixed CSS properties and DOM events.
I can't say for sure whether pressure from Google got all that stuff migrated into real web standards faster or not, but it sure felt at the time like it was having that effect.
Firefox has been my goto browser for years but recently I've noticed it screwing things up, most notable when viewing source code in github. The text highlighting gets broken somehow.
Then it’s GitHub fault, because hihglighting works everywhere else. When has it becomes the default to blame the platform because some program have bad code?
You don't see any difference between Internet Explorer and Chrome?
Did you actually ever try developing anything with IE, or are you just failing to see the difference between something you do see and something you failed to see?
It think it's pretty safe to say that Chrome is objectively better than IE. Even Microsoft saw that.
If you want to talk about what their differences are, or how important it is that they're different, then go right ahead, but if you fail to see the difference, I don't think you have much to contribute to this conversation from your willfully self blindfolded perspective.
Obviously they are not talking about the difference between the two browsers, but between the two situations. Your post looks like you chose the least charitable interpretation in order to pick a fight.
The two situations are also totally different: Chrome has been far better for the Web than IE ever was, and the reason Firefox is still keeping up is that it got that money from Google.
If we decide that Web innovation is done in the browser, and it all has to move to Javascript libraries again, the way we did when browser innovation stalled in the 2000s and we got jQuery, so be it, I suppose.
It may also force a minimum-connectivity standard for all browsers (an ISO, etc.) that's simper than existing ones. Users would be the beneficiaries, not Big Tech.
I'm wondering, will the big G be allowed to start another browser project, once they sell Chrome? Let's say Google Cobalt.
They'd fork the open source of Chrome and get to work. After a while, they'll start taking the market share (they can afford to hire back the whole team).
Couple of years later are we in the same position? Maybe, maybe not. I'm curious to see how it plays out.
Probably not a bad thing if you you believe in "antifragility". The technology will improve as it should.
I would consider KHTML as a technology. Much like v8 and blink. I have no doubt the open source technology community is capable of producing great technologies with or without big tech funding. But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption? I have my doubts but time will tell.
As a huge open source proponent I have my doubts. A big chunk of the tech people out there are like sheep, that follow the herd. And the herd is filled with people who look at the biggest corp and just copy what they are doing/using cause there must be a reason behind it.
Lately my feeling is more and more people realize why open technology in the hand of the people is important (it is a lot about trust), but I am not too optimistic that it will break that dynamic.
> But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption?
Hopefully not. There shouldn't be a "dominant" browser in the "market", there should be a huge mess of choices available. If there is a "dominant" browser, corporations will cut corners and target it directly. They shouldn't be able to get away with that. Browser diversity means they cannot afford to single out users as irrelevant and unworthy of support. They should have no choice but to support them all.
If the cost of web development goes up, either websites will be more expensive, or they’ll just have to be less complicated. We’re hoping for the latter.
Then let the costs rise. If that's the price of our freedom, we'll pay it gladly. We don't want some corporation taking over everything just because of they offer a cheap and convenient bargain. Accept that and next thing you know you're but a serf in their digital fiefdom.
Yeah, I'm sure killing a major revenue stream helps an organization to focus on keeping its cost center going and get rid of other shots trying to bring in more revenue /s
Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I'm sure they'll manage alright.
By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...