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Comment by _m4ua | Hacker News Reader

There isn't even a way to donate. All "mozilla" donations go to the foundation and their social justice causes, not useful things like MSN and Firefox.

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That’s kinda the point of TFA. Open Web Docs is funded by donations and works with MDN on the free-forever web focused content. MDN is part of Mozilla and just as lost in the woods as the rest of that organization.

You can donate to Open Web Docs here: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs

That's because donations will never even remotely cover Mozilla's costs. They get something like $3m in donations. Wikipedia gets something like $120m. Mozilla's costs and Google income are like $400m.

Is a browser so expensive to maintain? $400m/year?

A web browser is some of the most complicated software in existence.

Mozilla management is so expensive to maintain.

Mozilla management is probably around 1% of the budget, more if you count middle management but I doubt you're discussing positions like those.

"Mozilla CEO Increased Her Salary From 2.5 Million Dollars to Over 3 Million"

This person alone receives around 1% of the budget.

When she "increased her salary" she became the CEO seemingly without replacing her old role, becoming the only executive.

It's worse than this. While money does not flow from Mozilla Foundation to Mozilla Corporation, the opposite is not true. A lot of the money that Mozilla Corporation manages to make is not spent on Firefox development, but is instead paid to Mozilla Foundation, ostensibly to license the Mozilla brand. The Foundation is actively holding Firefox back with this organizational scheme.

> For 2019, the Mozilla Foundation received $15,858,258 per a trademark license agreement with Mozilla Corporation, allowing us to reinvest earnings from our products into advocacy and grant making that grow the internet health movement.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/

Of course.

Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Browsers are the most important software at those companies because most other software runs on them.

The Hacker News community doesn’t seem to appreciate the work Mozilla has done to establish web standards. I’ve experienced what it’s like to be stuck with IE6 and IE11 for a decade, holding back web projects at work. Firefox broke through that inertia and made Google, Amazon, Netflix and other companies possible. Essentially, Firefox made the whole “startup” wave Hacker News rides on possible (though much of that momentum transferred to the App Stores).

"Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple."

Not exactly the same. Many are willing to accept less pay, to work on meaningful open source and not for advertisement.

Maybe 10-20% less, but it’s not enough to meaningfully make a difference.

20% less would be already quite meaningful. Add to that volunteers who work completely for free, and this could give an edge and I would argue, that this is mainly what keeps firefox alive. Despite their management increasingly acting like a ordinary company.

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...

> That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.

And she said that while laying off 250 people, imposing a 100% discount on them and their families.

From another point of view, our society has major market inefficiencies around resource allocation that we need to figure out. As a society, we absolutely need a free and open web (modern telecommunications). We also need other things like agriculture, energy, medical tech, sanitation, transportation, and education. Yet we pay people the most to work on ad tech. This is a major, generational problem.

Edit: I think we may be starting to figure this out. Google is slowly starting to charge for more services. Even Facebook is looking to introduce paid products (Quest). People are also learning from Elon Musk how much wealth can be generated by working on major human problems like transport, energy, and space access.

To work on an open source browser instead of apps yes, but how many people would take a significant pay cut to work on Firefox instead of Chrome?

Maybe. I'm glad FF exists, am using it all the time on desktop.

But here's another perspective: FF led an audience towards Google's web of shit. It would've been entirely possible for Moz to have said no to the latest fad; then, by the power of having a dominating browser in the field, the web could've been preserved as a medium for relatively simple text-mostly information. I, for one, am interested in individual info and personal sites rather than thousands of nice-looking content farms with tracking.

I'm particularly puzzled by those CSS apologists always painting a naive creationist story about how much we progressed etc etc. Yet, realistically, CSS is so bad, like consider-your-career-choices bad, that I have a hard time accepting this as a result of so much energy of so many intelligent people. CSS will go down as this generation of web "developers" retire, since it's an irrational, overcomplicated piece of shit only understandable in discourse as it has happened. Why did I put "developers" in quotes? Because the web was a vision for easy good-enough self-publishing for layman, not an "industry".

Saying this as someone who's a sucker for design, and sucks at it, too.

If a camel is a horse designed by committee, CSS is the product of 10 generations of camel breeding by different committees, followed by some rounds of competing evil geniuses creating genetically modified variants.

We should also keep in mind that the use cases have completely and wildly changed.

That being said, it does seem like we are overdue for a clean slate.

The web was actually better in the days of IE6 than today.

You're talking about the contents, GP is talking about the devices/engines.

They can't compare.

The limitations made the web better.

And much less secure.

Ha can you even see through those rose-smothered spectacles?

TBH they they could do a little more in regards of donating. For eg. I can very easily ask my government to donate 1% of my taxes to Wikimedia foundation, but Mozilla is not registered as such in my country.

I wonder how much of Mozilla budget is actually spent on Firefox.

Wikimedia Foundation had a revenue of $157 million in 2021 and >550 staff and contractors.

You can contribute directly to Thunderbird, I often wonder if it's poor performance is one of the reasons similar things aren't tried with Firefox.

https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/

Thunderbird is a separate and entirely voluntary project that Mozilla don't manage.

But even apart from Mozilla's lack of involvement, it's also a wildly different - and so incomparable - product (local email in a webmail dominated world, compared to a browser in a browser dominated world).

Thunderbird would absolutely be worse off if they didn't have that (great, well organised) facility.

Same I contribute too, and seriously wish the same was setup for Firefox.

I suspect the Thunderbird fund is not doing well because people assuming giving to Mozilla funds mainly technical work and most people don't know about Mozilla issues nor about the smaller direct funds like Thunderbird's.

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