> 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.
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.