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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, time to switch to Google Chrome. It's made by a party that will never collect personal data, certainly not make it their entire core business.

Oh wait...

Ok, serious mode. For years people have been complaining that Mozilla is too dependent on funding from Google. This is a way for Mozilla to fund itself without depending on Google. But that's not good either?

Maybe Mozilla should start nagging people for donations, Wikipedia-style? But that's not good either: lots of people complain about Wikipedia's yearly "begging" and say they would prefer to see ads instead.

What would you have them do?

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> But that's not good either?

Indeed, it's not a binary decision, there are other ways than just sell you user's data.

For starter, Google (and now Yahoo) were giving hundreds of millions every year. What did Mozilla do with that?

What did they do with it? Have you looked at the insane amount of engineering they have done in the past 8 years? Their Javascript engine is among the fastest in the world. An insane amount of money has been pumped into hiring world-class experts to develop it. Not to mention the continuous improvements to their rendering engine, marketing and awareness projects, charity projects to get minorities like kids and women into web development, fighting legal battles against patent encumbered technologies like H264, etc. You are seriously underestimating the amount of money they need.

> Their Javascript engine is among the fastest in the world.

And still easily the slowest.

Oh really?

http://arewefastyet.com/

Yes, really. Benchmarks are fabricated and hardly represent real use cases, such as modifying the DOM.

DOM modification performance has next to nothing to do with the performance of the JS engine.

Mostly, it funded development: http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/mozilla_re...

In 2012 they had a surplus of more than $100,000,000 though...

And still, $30,000,000 for administrative cost? $45,000,000 for marketing? (never saw any ads for firefox, did you? I have no idea what they spent so much money on)

The discussion of those numbers is here:

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...

It isn't hugely informative, but I would guess that the $9 million in office leases mentioned towards the end is categorized as an administrative cost.

Marketing is not just ads. They support a lot of projects like the Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon[1], the Gigabit Community Fund[2], the Hive NYC Learning Network[3], and many more, which probably are itemized as marketing.

[1] http://stupidhackathon.github.io/

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/gigabit/

[3] http://hivenyc.org/

Maybe you can email them and ask?

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