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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

I’m sad to see Firefox lose its edge in Technology. I’m not so sure why I would use Firefox (over say Safari). Servo, Rust, WASM - They’ve been pioneers of many great performance and safety oriented technologies.

It’s great that AWS wants to have the rust team onboard, but in my experience at-least AWS has been good at leeching Open Source, rather than fostering it. Open source isn’t part of their culture.

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I believe part of the problem is Firefox has been operating as if it had a large money making product, and investing in long term, not revenue generating projects. While fantastic for the community, they can be expensive. Operating as if your Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc is expensive when you don't have the money printing machine.

I think it'll be a long term lose for Mozilla, but things don't seem great in the short term so maybe priorities needed to shift.

Firefox more or less had a money printing machine. Google gave them about half a billion per year for the last half decade (the last financial statement is for 2018). They verifiably burned through billions of dollars over the last decade (the timespan over which they developed rust) and I'd be surprised if servo and rust constituted more than a tiny fraction of that. If anyone has a rough ballpark of yearly spend on rust and servo, I'd love to hear it.

What would have happened if they had invested that money exclusively in non-silicon-valley engineers?

$500 million per year can buy you 5,000 talented engineers at $100,000 almost anywhere on this planet.

Mozilla did and does employ a lot of people outside of silicon valley.

Pocket is profitable, but people have complained about it nonstop for years.

I might agree with you, except in my experience their money-making products still largely suck. The Mozilla VPN app on both my Android devices randomly logged out weeks ago, and has put me in an unbreakable log-in loop since). They still don't have Mac or Linux support, despite that crowd being the exact kind of early adopters you'd want on a VPN product. I'm paying them money, and if it wasn't for the hope I have that maybe this is just a (way too long) blip, I'd switch over to normal Mullvad tomorrow (which they're using on the backend anyway).

It's not just a priorities shift when you're doing badly at both things and losing incredible people, it's straight-up organizational dysfunction and managerial incompetence.

Mozilla is a non-profit. Their only goal should have been development of Firefox(and follow-up technology like Rust and Servo), not all those money making schemes and side projects they started.

Mozilla is a for-profit owned by a non-profit. The for-profit organization develops Firefox.

(That said it’s run by the same people with the same outlook, so it feels like a non-profit even if it’s not.)

Seems like an unnecessary complexity for what should be a browser maker.

It’s a necessary complexity, particularly given that Mozilla predates the existence of Benefit Corporations by a dozen years. As a purely non-profit corporation, having most of your revenue come from business income is a big problem. As a for-profit, director’s fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders can get in the way of pursuing a public good mission. And, collaboration with for profit orgs gets a little less regulatory scrutiny if a non-profit is in control.

> As a purely non-profit corporation, having most of your revenue come from business income is a big problem.

What's the exact problem?

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