6 ms·

My understanding is Mozilla contracted its footprint substantially to remain sustainable in a future without Google's monetary contribution.

SilasX 2y ago
To little, too late. They underwent massive scope creep, throwing money at anything and everything, while neglecting the core task of maintaining a standards-compliant, user-friendly/non-hostile, privacy-respecting browser ... resulting in such incidents as Mr. Robot ad tie-in and the global add-on outage. Oh ... and I still can't customize my controls fully. (Add-ons only take effect after a page load.) Had they actually kept their scope small and focused, they could have put the difference into an endowment that would let them give the middle finger to the Chromes of the world forever. Yet here we are.
m463 2y ago
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-on-them-being-an-advertising-company-now/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o...
drpossum 2y ago
Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service or how to comply with Google's advertising decisions. Then they would let people contribute money to the browser (instead of to Mozilla Foundation which goes to enabling aforementioned trash fires) and to the salary of a multi-million dollar CEO after laying off developer staff and hiring more C-suite assistants. Mozilla is a bad organization in every sense, a bad steward of Firefox, and the best thing that could happen is they do have their funding cut, they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.
- AstralSerenity 2y ago
  I imagine their VPN service is financially viable if they've still stuck with it this long. Aside from that, they've just about cut all other initiatives aside from "Firefox and AI". The latter gives me pause, but hopefully they really are more focused moving forward. I think Mozilla has done alright, but I agree the folks is in charge of their business direction and especially PR are abysmal. Personally, I wish a company like Proton was at the helm.
- bilalq 2y ago
  Isn't Mozilla's VPN just a thin UI over Mullvad's servers? I don't think it costs them much and probably brings in some decent revenue.
  - culi 2y ago
    Do you have a source for this? I'm a big fan of Mullvad and trust their service more than any. I wouldn't mind supporting Mozilla's independence from Google while getting the same VPN service I'm currently getting Hopefully Mozilla's MDN Plus offering can grow to bring them a big source of revenue. MDN is a treasure for any web developer and, should Mozilla go under, this public service would be sorely missed for the open web.
    - ta1243 2y ago
      The main problem with mozvpn is that they have a mozilla:mulvad account mapping. I'm unclear if my name goes to mulvad, but it does to mozilla. Yes with mulvad you can pay anonymously via cash or bitcoin or whatever, but assuming you aren't doing that, using mozvpn seems potentially safer than mulvad - as you'd have to compromise both mulvad and mozilla to link my name/credit card with the vpn used.
    - nanderson_ 2y ago
      The privacy notice for Mozilla VPN [1] briefly mentions their partnership with Mullvad. [1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services/
- glenstein 2y ago
  >Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service It's pants-on-head level of crazy talk to suggest that the VPN service is compromising Mozilla's finances. It's a re-wrapped Mullvad VPN that probably was not expensive to roll out (it being inexpensive to deploy is probably precisely the reason they moved forward with it). It's like people are just workshopping arguments where they randomly claim these things are expensive without any substantiation whatsoever. Mozilla is sitting on 1.2 billion in assets and investments. They're not underwater. They are indeed in a position where they need to diversify revenue, but the idea that the side bets have created running deficits is a narrative completely manufactured in comment sections.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    The VPN service is probably the most sensible thing they could lean into. It's basically all margin and it works nicely with the privacy messaging.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > It's basically all margin Is it? Do you have a citation for this? From what I understand it's a white labeled Mullvad VPN, and I haven't been able to find numbers for what percentage of the revenue is taken by Mozilla and what percentage goes to Mullvad.
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        I don't know any details of the revenue split, but I'm talking about the act of running a VPN service itself as being low overhead compared to the costs. Paying mullvad obviously reduces the margins, but it doesn't have the kinds of organizational overhead that would come with say, running an advertising company on the side like Mozilla now does.
      - glenstein 2y ago
        Previously the argument was that the VPN was an example of "throwing money into open firepits", but now we're talking about the extent to which it generates revenue.
- AceJohnny2 2y ago
  > Then they would let people contribute money to the browser People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income. You are not the majority you think you are.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    It does not have to be the majority. It would suffice to produce enough funds to continue developing Firefox, with full-time engineers, infrastructure, etc. The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience of Firefox is approx. 170M users; it would take about 0.3 percent of the audience to be paying users; 0.6% if you lower the rate to $5/mo. This is how any freemium works. Even more funnily, someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors. Eventually the developers might stop needing the paycheck from Mozilla, and thus from Google.
    - buzer 2y ago
      > The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Firefox is under corporation, not foundation. Mozilla Corporation expenses are $400M+, not $100M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances (I don't enough knowledge about freemium economics to figure out if the stated numbers would work out or not)
      - nine_k 2y ago
        Thank you for the correction! If we adjust to these numbers, we need to quadruple the number of paying users, up to some 1.2% of the total user base. Let's add a safety margin, and bump it to 2%. Still does not look impossible to attain.
    - 2y ago
- aucisson_masque 2y ago
  > they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community. who is going to support, maintain and develop Firefox in your scenario ?
culi 2y ago
Yup. Firefox Relay, their own VPN, MDN Plus, and many more. The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income. Based on their interop performances Mozilla seems to be doing the best they can to do both. Firefox interop has improved significantly in the past 4 years (surprisingly, so has Safari's) and they've also rolled out more new Mozilla offerings that could some day replace Google revenue
- AstralSerenity 2y ago
  In a perfect world, I would have liked to see Firefox build what is now the Proton suite of apps. I would still like to see Proton fork Firefox and operate their own browser once they've matured further.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income. There's no inherent contradiction here. Mozilla still doesn't give me a way to donate to them to fund Firefox. They haven't even tried. I want to fund Firefox development, desperately, but they deliberately structured their organization to make that impossible without paying for some other random project that has its own overhead. I want Mozilla to offer a Firefox+ subscription or donation or something, anything. Let me give you my money! Just give me a way to be confident that you'll take it as a signal to fund Firefox and not as a signal that what your customers really want is VPNs.
  - noisy_boy 2y ago
    Taking your money creates a firmer expectation from them to stick to their main selling proposition of privacy which would make it more difficult for them to go after revenue streams that are more lucrative but less privacy-focused.
    - SilasX 2y ago

SilasX 2y ago

To little, too late. They underwent massive scope creep, throwing money at anything and everything, while neglecting the core task of maintaining a standards-compliant, user-friendly/non-hostile, privacy-respecting browser ... resulting in such incidents as Mr. Robot ad tie-in and the global add-on outage. Oh ... and I still can't customize my controls fully. (Add-ons only take effect after a page load.) Had they actually kept their scope small and focused, they could have put the difference into an endowment that would let them give the middle finger to the Chromes of the world forever. Yet here we are.

m463 2y ago

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-on-them-being-an-advertising-company-now/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o...

drpossum 2y ago

Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service or how to comply with Google's advertising decisions. Then they would let people contribute money to the browser (instead of to Mozilla Foundation which goes to enabling aforementioned trash fires) and to the salary of a multi-million dollar CEO after laying off developer staff and hiring more C-suite assistants. Mozilla is a bad organization in every sense, a bad steward of Firefox, and the best thing that could happen is they do have their funding cut, they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.

AstralSerenity 2y ago
I imagine their VPN service is financially viable if they've still stuck with it this long. Aside from that, they've just about cut all other initiatives aside from "Firefox and AI". The latter gives me pause, but hopefully they really are more focused moving forward. I think Mozilla has done alright, but I agree the folks is in charge of their business direction and especially PR are abysmal. Personally, I wish a company like Proton was at the helm.
bilalq 2y ago
Isn't Mozilla's VPN just a thin UI over Mullvad's servers? I don't think it costs them much and probably brings in some decent revenue.
- culi 2y ago
  Do you have a source for this? I'm a big fan of Mullvad and trust their service more than any. I wouldn't mind supporting Mozilla's independence from Google while getting the same VPN service I'm currently getting Hopefully Mozilla's MDN Plus offering can grow to bring them a big source of revenue. MDN is a treasure for any web developer and, should Mozilla go under, this public service would be sorely missed for the open web.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    The main problem with mozvpn is that they have a mozilla:mulvad account mapping. I'm unclear if my name goes to mulvad, but it does to mozilla. Yes with mulvad you can pay anonymously via cash or bitcoin or whatever, but assuming you aren't doing that, using mozvpn seems potentially safer than mulvad - as you'd have to compromise both mulvad and mozilla to link my name/credit card with the vpn used.
  - nanderson_ 2y ago
    The privacy notice for Mozilla VPN [1] briefly mentions their partnership with Mullvad. [1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services/
glenstein 2y ago
>Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service It's pants-on-head level of crazy talk to suggest that the VPN service is compromising Mozilla's finances. It's a re-wrapped Mullvad VPN that probably was not expensive to roll out (it being inexpensive to deploy is probably precisely the reason they moved forward with it). It's like people are just workshopping arguments where they randomly claim these things are expensive without any substantiation whatsoever. Mozilla is sitting on 1.2 billion in assets and investments. They're not underwater. They are indeed in a position where they need to diversify revenue, but the idea that the side bets have created running deficits is a narrative completely manufactured in comment sections.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  The VPN service is probably the most sensible thing they could lean into. It's basically all margin and it works nicely with the privacy messaging.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > It's basically all margin Is it? Do you have a citation for this? From what I understand it's a white labeled Mullvad VPN, and I haven't been able to find numbers for what percentage of the revenue is taken by Mozilla and what percentage goes to Mullvad.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      I don't know any details of the revenue split, but I'm talking about the act of running a VPN service itself as being low overhead compared to the costs. Paying mullvad obviously reduces the margins, but it doesn't have the kinds of organizational overhead that would come with say, running an advertising company on the side like Mozilla now does.
    - glenstein 2y ago
      Previously the argument was that the VPN was an example of "throwing money into open firepits", but now we're talking about the extent to which it generates revenue.
AceJohnny2 2y ago
> Then they would let people contribute money to the browser People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income. You are not the majority you think you are.
- nine_k 2y ago
  It does not have to be the majority. It would suffice to produce enough funds to continue developing Firefox, with full-time engineers, infrastructure, etc. The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience of Firefox is approx. 170M users; it would take about 0.3 percent of the audience to be paying users; 0.6% if you lower the rate to $5/mo. This is how any freemium works. Even more funnily, someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors. Eventually the developers might stop needing the paycheck from Mozilla, and thus from Google.
  - buzer 2y ago
    > The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Firefox is under corporation, not foundation. Mozilla Corporation expenses are $400M+, not $100M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances (I don't enough knowledge about freemium economics to figure out if the stated numbers would work out or not)
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Thank you for the correction! If we adjust to these numbers, we need to quadruple the number of paying users, up to some 1.2% of the total user base. Let's add a safety margin, and bump it to 2%. Still does not look impossible to attain.
  - 2y ago
aucisson_masque 2y ago
> they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community. who is going to support, maintain and develop Firefox in your scenario ?

culi 2y ago

Yup. Firefox Relay, their own VPN, MDN Plus, and many more. The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income. Based on their interop performances Mozilla seems to be doing the best they can to do both. Firefox interop has improved significantly in the past 4 years (surprisingly, so has Safari's) and they've also rolled out more new Mozilla offerings that could some day replace Google revenue

AstralSerenity 2y ago
In a perfect world, I would have liked to see Firefox build what is now the Proton suite of apps. I would still like to see Proton fork Firefox and operate their own browser once they've matured further.
lolinder 2y ago
> The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income. There's no inherent contradiction here. Mozilla still doesn't give me a way to donate to them to fund Firefox. They haven't even tried. I want to fund Firefox development, desperately, but they deliberately structured their organization to make that impossible without paying for some other random project that has its own overhead. I want Mozilla to offer a Firefox+ subscription or donation or something, anything. Let me give you my money! Just give me a way to be confident that you'll take it as a signal to fund Firefox and not as a signal that what your customers really want is VPNs.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  Taking your money creates a firmer expectation from them to stick to their main selling proposition of privacy which would make it more difficult for them to go after revenue streams that are more lucrative but less privacy-focused.
  - SilasX 2y ago