HN user
If you knew the amount of project changes, reorgs, CEOs, products, executives, etc we’ve went through you’d realize Googles behavior had little do with it. In fact, if it weren’t for their corporate generosity we’d be finished by now.
We’re basically run by a bunch of lawyers and ex-McKinsey people now (and have been for some time). We’re not victims of Google, we’re victims of our own hiring practices.
You should actually read the link you posted. That had nothing to do with Firefox and has everything to do with ad blockers. Looks like YouTubes goal was to bring parity between those using ad blockers and those not, as to not incentivize ad blocker usage, not to cripple Firefox.
Basically, follow the money.
To keep nonprofit/tax benefits, the work has to be done for some sort of public benefit. That work never gets done, instead it’s constant reorganizations, hiring/firing, and shuffling money around. We’re always profitable, and every few years there seems to be decent to huge layoffs even though we’re beating revenue estimates and behind on our hiring goals.
Money keeps going up from Google, usage keeps going down, start new projects, never staff them to what is budgeted, cut project, fire people, and the money disappears into the foundation. Foundation sends money out to various levels of ghost and shell corporations.
Web standards are open but that doesn’t mean you can’t build on top of them. YouTube is not an open standard. If Google wanted to end web support for YouTube and force everyone to use some sort of YouTube app even on desktop, they could do that. They’re not obligated to make sure YouTube works on EVERY browser especially when an insignificant amount of their users come from there.
A game running on windows isn’t a false equivalence either. A lot of games are built on open standards and open source (e.g. OpenGL, various game engines, etc) and still won’t work on wine/linux. If a bunch of people are using windows in order to play their games, that’s not too different from a lot of people using chromium browsers to use YouTube.
Also, I work at Mozilla.
It’s not monopolistic to not support shitty browsers with little user base. This isn’t even the basis for the current antitrust ruling against Google, for what it’s worth.
As the parent comment points out, if YouTube isn’t buggy for most of their users, why do they have to worry about it? We don’t expect either Microsoft or game devs to ensure their stuff works well with wine on Linux.
The perception of corruption is not without merit. Mozilla is pretty corrupt at this point. (Source: I work here).
I really don’t get where this whole “the EU should fund it” idea came from and why it’s repeated so often. Why would the EU throw their tax payer money at another corrupt American corporation? Mozilla has been in bed with Google for several years, has horrible web compatibility, and is only barely still in the privacy lane.
Besides, Europe isn’t the land of open source software and privacy. Look at the laws in the UK, France, and Germany; they’re not exactly privacy friendly. Look at the tech stacks at companies in the UK and Germany, they lean very heavily into the Microsoft/.NET world.
The rendering engine portion of the whole Firefox vs Chrome debate gets way more attention than it should. It’s really not that important. Someone could fork any piece of the chromium project and have an “independent rendering engine/browser” without all the problems gecko has from a decade of little market share and under investment. Google nor Mozilla make money from their rendering engines as is evidenced by their ability to make money on iOS.
Also, the rendering engine isn’t the way Google is being anticompetitive or violating users privacy, just like no one is really that worried that Google, Facebook, and MS are some of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel. People use a chromium based browser because chromium is better. Google gets people to use Chrome, and gets their data through the code they add on top. Overall though, Google has not been a bad steward of Blink.
Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.
Really there’s only 1 other company who can throw that level of money at us and it’s Microsoft. Without Google bidding up the price, doubtful they would pay as much for Bing to be the default search and it’s not like Firefox users would welcome that change.
Free software doesn’t work for long without some sort of corporate sponsorship at some point, and it’s not in anyone’s interest to fund it at this point. (And don’t say “the EU should” most Europeans are not clamoring for their governments to spend money on an American browser company with web compatibility issues that no one tests against)
Just so you know, the money users donate goes towards political causes not towards Firefox.
When you are donating, you are donating to the Mozilla Foundation (which is a non-profit). All Firefox development is done through Mozilla Corporation (which is a for profit entity). There is no way to donate to Firefox.
No we won’t. We all knew this gravy train was coming to an end. In terms of revenue it’s ~500M per year/~80-something %.
Once this stops, there’s no way for us to keep funding operations at the level they’re at.
Working 10 hours per week was nice while it lasted.
The bar for how savvy you have to be to use an ad blocker is a lot lower than it used to be.
There’s 2 different issues here: privacy and user experience. A lot of YT users are probably signed in to YT through their gmail/google account, in which case the ad blocker is not providing them privacy. If you don’t care about privacy and only care about user experience (e.g. not seeing any ads) there will not be an alternative to YT for long that can operate free to the user without showing ads.
Most people will opt for a better content catalog, load times, and device battery life over leaving YT, even the computer savvy.
No one (and I mean that in the sense of a significant number) is switching to Firefox over this. Our user numbers are consistently heading downwards.
Besides Google does other things to slow YouTube down on Firefox so this isn’t really a compelling reason to switch browsers for most people. They’ll likely just disable their ad blocker. For the person who values privacy that much, they’re likely staying off Google properties anyway, and for the average user, their YouTube experience is more important.
Mozilla
It would be if you were willing to pay an ungodly amount for that box of crackers that not only made Walmart a viable business but was also an amount no one else was willing to pay.
Mitchell got Google to pay nearly double what Yahoo was willing to pay and has gotten Google to pay more each year for a dwindling user base.
If someone was going to Walmart and paying millions for a box of crackers, you’d be right in assuming the transaction wasn’t about the crackers.
Did you read my post that you’re replying to?
Principles come at the expense of your salary sometimes, and sticking to your principles isn’t pragmatic if you can’t effect greater change.
It’s not about having moral qualms or not. The company doesn’t want to change, at least not on its own. So if the ship is sinking, yeah I’ll keep my few hundred K + benies on its way down.
If anything the most change I can make is to keep working here and exposing all of the BS. Maybe enough of an uproar from the users will force them to change. Maybe if enough people who use FF see this and stop using it, they’ll be forced to change? It’s funny, we have an internal slack channel (#cccc to prove I work here) for dealing with external comms. Those in charge know a lot of our users are on HN, but they refer to people on this site as morons and it’s part of the playbook to avoid HN. Some are trying to change the opinion of HN internally.
I can’t tell you what will come of my posting here but in the meantime I’m going to keep rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
It was really illegal. But what are you going to do? You can report your employer but once your culture has gotten to the point Mozilla’s has - where you can openly say these things, your problem isn’t one person. And your employer has a ton of ways to retaliate, then you have to prove that.
Principles come at the expense of your salary sometimes, and sticking to your principles isn’t pragmatic if you can’t effect greater change.
We also have MRGs - Mozillian Resource Groups - where you can only join if you’re black, or gay, or <insert group>. That’s pretty blatantly illegal, too. Doesn’t stop it from happening.
I’ve been on hiring committees at Mozilla where being a white male hurts the candidate.
The committee wants a racial minority, LQBTQIA+, etc. The best white males can do is claim to be neurodivergent. That one lets them get passed the filters. But I’ve been part of discussions where the committee explicitly said they were disappointed the best candidate didn’t help with diversity and thus we passed.
You’re partly right. MoCo only cares about money. MoFo though is/was Mitchell’s political slush fund. TBD how things will shake out once there is a permanent CEO but Mitchell is remaining chair of the foundation. She’s also got really deep ties to how MoCo is funded (google) so it’s likely the new CEO will be her puppet.
Gentle reminder that Mozilla Monitor is just OneRep, albeit marked up for Mozilla Corporation’s profits (yes Mozilla is a for profit, its foundation is not).
I’d imagine Google’s culture is more Mao-ist public shaming. Here at Mozilla, we like Stalin. Go against the orthodoxy? You’re disappeared and killed quickly.
We have hour long pronoun training videos for onboarding; have spent millions on DEI consultants from things like Paradigm to boutique law firms; tied part of our corporate bonus to company DEI initiatives.
Not sure why anyone uses FF anymore. We barely do any development on it. You basically just sit here and collect between 150-300k depending on your level as long as you can stomach the bullshit.
Maybe you’d forgotten how it’s structured or maybe you hadn’t read through the foundations financial filings before. I don’t know.
But somehow you think the foundation/corporation boundary is somehow relevant to Mitchell increasing her pay so much when she essentially leads both.
I work at Mozilla, there is no Firefox LLC. Please don’t post stuff like this if you’re unfamiliar with the corporate structure.
There is Mozilla Corporation a for profit entity that is responsible for virtually all development of products under the Mozilla name. Then there is Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit that is the sole owner of Mozilla Corporation. Mitchell until stepping down as CEO a few weeks ago was both the chair of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation.
You don’t understand how it works either. Mitchell is both the chair of the foundation and until like 2 weeks ago was the CEO. She had full control over where the money goes hence why she increased her pay so much. The foundation is sole owner of the corporation.
I think it’s a reminder of what Mitchell’s priorities were as CEO: lining her pockets and funneling money to her political projects.
She has deep ties at Google and after getting out of the Yahoo deal when Verizon bought them, she got a sweetheart deal from Google that was an 84% increase of revenue YoY. She then laid off 25% of the company that year. This last year she ran a budget surplus as she failed to hire as aggressively as we had planned to at the beginning of last year and she still cut 6% of the company (for reference we were behind more than 60 hires for the year which is the amount that was cut). Meanwhile she took a pay increase to 6.9M
I think the point is that is the number Mitchell jacked her salary up to while presiding over FF’s demise.
The other products are very unprofitable. FF profits actually fund everything else. Search deals on FF are over 80% of revenue yet less than half the company works on FF.
It fluctuates a little bit but 80-85% of revenue comes from search deals with Google being the dominant one. Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house; it’s just white labeled. VPN is Mullvad, Monitor is OneRep, etc. So even that 15% of revenue doesn’t/barely covers all the product/marketing/etc personnel that work on those teams.
Every quarter that segment is behind forecasts - pocket too - mostly because the forecasts are widely optimistic. It’s not a viable business strategy to pursue them much further.
You shouldn’t donate. The donations don’t go to MoCo which is the for profit subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation under which FF is developed.
All the donations go to MoFo, where they barely covered Mitchell’s salary and what was left went to her pet political projects. People are pretty unaware/misled about how Mozilla is structured/funded.
The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the default search engine.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Mitchell has been a disaster for Mozilla (her only accomplishment is squeezing more money out of Google for the search deal despite an ever dwindling user base for FF - we measure DAU and MAU and the hemorrhaging hasn’t stopped).
Very few people in the org actually work on FF. It’s increasingly other bets that don’t pan out or weird acquisitions: Hubs, Pocket, FakeSpot, VPN, Relay, now Monitor. Eventually these lose enough money and they’ll cut them. Then inevitably Mitchell will run a surplus in the budget by cutting projects early and squeezing more money out of Google, funnel the money back to the Mozilla foundation which she also chairs, and then doll it out to her pet political projects.