[Kye]

It's unfortunate that Mozilla's slow collapse under the weight of being hooked on Google ad money is being used as proof for people who are perpetually mad about diversity and accountability.

The fault is with management that's afraid to disrupt the cash firehose. Not a mishandled CEO hire 7 years ago or the move from the increasingly untenable XUL.

[zamadatix]

It seems very common to blame the money from Google (and Yahoo for a bit) for Mozilla's failures 18 years in but how exactly is it causing this collapse? Mozilla is raking in 3x as much off this deal today as it was during peak Firefox usage share and success around 2011 and any collapse is unrelated to where the search box directs you. Mozilla has been trying profit making products to diversify income so it doesn't have to worry about this money in the future but they've all failed to generate that income. In the meantime they still exist.

What could they do by disrupting this cash flow? Or is it just nice to imagine a world where Mozilla found a way to become the next trillion dollar tech company that could spend tens of billions on its browser per year and we need something to blame other than it being hard to do so as the reason it hasn't?