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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

Love that FF exists but one of the things that always strikes me is that if FF is successful in their mission they will cut off their major revenue channel.

Google is still the majority of their revenue is it not? The reason they're making that money is off the backs of other consumers who are NOT benefiting from the privacy features that you guys want to see everywhere.

Willing to be totally wrong here and would love to see more FF advocates speak out here but FF wouldn't be financially viable without Google and many FF advocates say Google is the problem...

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> if FF is successful in their mission they will cut off their major revenue channel.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Their mission isn't to break search engines, just to prevent privacy violations.

If Google Search is unsustainable with any less than Google's current level of tracking/etc, then I suppose a successful Firefox means an unsuccessful Google.

But Google didn't start out doing this much tracking, and there are other search engines out there that still don't. A paid default search engine that shows a few search-related ads on its results pages doesn't seem opposed to Firefox's mission?

Yes, I wish there was a clear way to fund Firefox development. You can (and I do) donate to the Mozilla Foundation, although the funding relationship between the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox isn't clear. I believe that if Google's funding were to become insufficient, then the Foundation would step in to fund it if they have the funds, which is why I donate to them. But I don't know if this is actually the case.

> the funding relationship between the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox isn't clear

It's not really an unknown. Donations to Mozilla Foundation do not and cannot fund Firefox development.

> if Google's funding were to become insufficient, then the Foundation would step in to fund it if they have the funds

There are two assumptions here that are off. One is that the Foundation could come up with the kind of money that the Corporation spends on Firefox. The other is that the Corporation is somehow in a tight situation financially. Reality is opposite to both.

First, the Corporation is not strapped for cash. It brings in a lot of money. Like, in-the-neighborhood-of-half-a-billion-dollars-a-year a lot. It spent something like 29MM acquiring Pocket (which is still as closed source now as it was 3 years ago), and it manages to spend 50MM on its marketing campaigns that most people aren't even aware exist. Under the current arrangement the Corporation funds the Foundation, paying a percentage of its revenues to allow the Corporation to trade on Mozilla's name. (If that sounds like a weird way to put it, consider revisiting your other assumptions about Mozilla and Firefox.)

Any idea why donations to Mozilla cannot fund Firefox development? I'm told other orgs like FSF/EFF/ACLU do put donations towards software development.

FF gets most of it's revenue from Google Search, a service that was extremely profitable long before Google started personalized ads. Sure, Google might not like losing browser market share or having fewer tracking opportunities, but none of those hurt nearly as much as losing search engine users. I expect them to pay Firefox for quite some time (and if they don't, their competition will).

They've experimented with other forms of revenue. Things like Pocket and VPN [1]. I assume that if Google pulled the plug they could find another sponsor but Google may not want to do that anyway, otherwise they run the risk of being an obvious monopoly.

[1] https://vpn.mozilla.org/

many companies did targeted advertising in the pre-web days and made a profit. you can advertise without knowing anything about a consumer - except that they like reading this kind of article. so there is no tradeoff between privacy and profitable advertising; both are possible at the same time.

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