I wish they'd stick to a browser, and keep the other stuff separate. I have no idea why every product has to grow until it's overbloated and the core functionality starts lacking behind.
"I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google"
(Mozilla tries to branch out so that they're less dependent on Google) "I wish Mozilla would just stick to Firefox"
(Mozilla tries to find a non-Google revenue source for Firefox) "How dare they try to monetize Firefox, the one and only product I want them to produce."
It would be nice if those critical of Mozilla offered solutions.
I agree with alot of the points raised, but I also empathize with the tough position Mozilla is in. I know squat about product management and would love to hear some knowledgeable input.
How many is core? I don't know. Not 750 though. To change course now would mean layoffs which nobody likes. But I argue they never should have hired that many folks, and to continue with that headcount is throwing good money after bad.
If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100%
The mission statement of the Mozilla Foundation is not about Firefox:
> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
Apache can do it... want a web server? Apache webserver. Want java? Get tomcat. Data streaming? Kafka. All apache, but separate.
Look at microsoft.. you need their email account just to be able to install the OS (in many cases). Look at google... get banned on youtube, lose gmail, google analytics, etc.
Some of Mozilla's ventures seem cool. Like Mozilla VPN seems like a win/win; it supports Mullvad, you get a reasonable service, no complaints from me. But the thing that sucks is, Mozilla clearly needs to expand and build a large business to properly support Firefox, but their avenues for doing so in an ethically reasonable way that connects with the general mission seem pretty limited. Like it would be better if they could operate leaner and more directly focused on just building a good browser, but a lot of their options for monetizing Firefox itself are absolutely terrible. Ever since the whole debacle with using Firefox Studies to advertise, I don't even use upstream Firefox anymore. I do use Thunderbird and even donate sometimes, but I'm terrified that despite being donation-driven Thunderbird will somehow start to be enshittified too as part of their strategy to try to grow at any cost.
All of this signals, to me, a more general issue: it seems that maintaining a feasible mainstream web browser has become generally unsustainable.
Where can I read about this? If it’s hard to link to a blog post, maybe expand on it for the curious!
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have...
God forbid they’d just make us pay for it…
Give me a $10/month Firefox subscription and I’d pay it in a heartbeat. But I don’t want it to be a $10/month ‘other bizarre Mozilla projects’ subscription. Right now it’s hard to trust that any money I give them would go to a better browser.
Edit: Leared that you could only donate to mozilla foundation which is not the same.
Gecko/Firefox developers on payroll are employed by Mozilla Corporation, which pays taxes etc. like any company.
It's a bit complicated so I drew up a little diagram:
1. Mozilla Foundation (not for profit) <- Donations accepted here
├── 2. Mozilla Corporation (for profit, wholly owned by the foundation so all profit goes to the foundation) X- No donations
│ └── 3. Firefox X- No donations
└── 4. Other social causes (??? it's not clear)
pkill Mozilla
What can't Firefox do that the better browser can? Mozilla improves Firefox all of the time.
Do you think "none" is the amount of a donation that will go towards a better browser? If so, donate $0 of your $10. Is it 10%? If so, donate $1.
* https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
I'd like a precise breakdown, too, but I'm not an accountant, and donating a few dollars is within my means.
* https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/
* https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
* https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
* https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/15/how-mozilla-makes-money-a...
> How will my donation be used? At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. To learn how your donation is put to use, click here.
It links to foundation’s website, which has the following things listed as “Our areas of focus”: Rally Citizens, Connect Leaders and Shape the Agenda. Firefox is mentioned 0 times on that page.
But, sure, I'd like more information about funding Firefox in particular, too.
The issue here is that things like socialising, search and what have you to diversify revenue would have been really interesting back in Firefox 2.0 when they had a thriving extension ecosystem. There were things like ChatZilla where there were full fledged apps being built in browser to provide social options.
Mozilla killed that off when they removed the old XUL layers. They went with Google's strategy of everything being a HTML/Javascript web app. Cool I suppose but they've obsoleted themselves and there isn't an obvious way back into the game for them. They aren't competent at anything, thy're stewarding a 3rd rate product and they're wasting a lot of money. They'll struggle to do anything right under current conditions.
Despite everything , Firefox is still an amazing product. I just hope the Mozilla leadership gets thrown out before they finally kill Firefox through incompetence and neglect.
Your take also ignores the very real anti-competitive factors Firefox is up against. Google relentlessly promoting Chrome across their web presence and paying third parties to trick end users into installing it and setting it as their default for instance: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
Firefox isn't owed a market. Google have proved themselves, so far, to be better stewards of the world's browser engine than the people at Mozilla. It might have a new era in the sun one day, but right now there really isn't much of a niche for Firefox. And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. Chrome was (likely: still is) just technically better.
I mean, Mozilla couldn't afford to pay Adobe, Avast, etc $3 per user to install an unwanted browser for years even if they'd cross the moral and ethical line to do so. So a chunk of that was outside of their control.
Firefox uses an entirely different engine underneath. So, from a 'health of the web' perspective, it helps prevent the mono-culture. It also supports extensions on Android, which is quite nice, and syncs my stuff between them. It can't support them on iOS since everything is just Safari Lite underneath.
The whole input behind linux was to have the central piece of computing managed by the community for the community. I'd wish something similar for the central piece of the internet.
If any other product lost so much market share, the CEO would be removed.
Also those "fun" projects are career boosters for people involved, not something that makes firefox better. It even makes it worse, since fewer resources go for firefox.
Their investment into AI yielded some cool things like on-device language translation that I use a lot in Firefox.
Rust is something that grew out of their investments into programming languages/tooling/etc.
Their investment into documentation and technical writing brought us MDN, which is a great resource for web development.
Mozilla's development of password managers, that they eventually walked back on rolling out as an independent product, yielded a better password manager built into Firefox, as well as Firefox Verify.
It's also important to make a distinction between the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit, and Mozilla the corporation. The non-profit is responsible for many of the non-browser investments.