[Certhas]

There is so much wishful thinking around this... "me and five other people want to pay, if you just cater to my specific tastes, than the me and these 5 people will happily bankroll your massive engineering effort!"

Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??

[y4mi]

It's not as clear cut as you seem to think.

A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years.

Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.

[Hnrobert42]

Do you have a source showing the vast majority of revenue goes to leadership? In 2018, the CEO’s salary equaled 0.64% of revenue. Before we discuss whether that is right or wrong, we should at least agree on a set of facts.

https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

[y4mi]

they generally get more then 400 million yearly revenue, though there was one outlier with over 800 million. this is money they generally don't have to pay taxes on because of their status as a non-profit.

mozilla employs at the moment around 800 people.

according to their FAQ

> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/f...

> More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible.

this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee.

Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc.

you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.

[pseudalopex]

Mozilla Corporation is a for profit subsidiary of the non profit Mozilla Foundation.

A common rule of thumb is employees cost a company 2x salary.

The 2019 combined financial statements show $210 million for program salaries and benefits. Management and general salaries and benefits were $109 million.[1] Program means software development basically.[2]

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

[stickfigure]

> this is money they generally don't have to pay taxes on because of their status as a non-profit.

Minor nit here - they don't have to pay taxes because they don't make a profit, not because of their status. If a for-profit corporation doesn't make profit (and few tech companies do), they won't have to pay income taxes either.

$375k per employee for a pure technology company doesn't seem outrageous? That has to include facilities too.

It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries. I really doubt that's going to succeed in a challenging and competitive market like browsers. IMO they'd be better off spending more trying to poach the best brains behind Chrome.

[y4mi]

> That has to include facilities too

does it? whats the remaining 25% (100 million) for in that case?

> It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries

i do not want them to do that particularly. i just pointed out that not all 800 employees will be getting the $137,000 with a $54,800 bonus wage to point out that i'm being extremely generous in my calculation of how much they're likely paying to actual employees.

there are no conclusive numbers i know of, but if you just look at their open positions portal (https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/) you will surely agree that few of these will be getting that $190k...?

this is quite offtopic but what i find especially disheartening about mozilla is that almost all of its revenue comes from google.

every nation i know of is trying to build up their online/web presence, and yet we have only one mega corporation sponsoring web browsers to a significant degree. why isn't every nation like the USA, Canada, Australia etc each investing at least 10 million into a fund to build an open source web browser or contribute to one? why is every nation fine with that situation?

[whoisthemachine]

I agree. I think they would find use in having a "Firefox Enterprise" that catered to businesses directly - basically a version of Firefox that they will tailor to an organization's crazy security requirements. Basically anywhere I've worked has wanted to lock down internet browsing in some way or other, and they now pay for expensive products to do so externally. I think it would be very appealing to just pay for a product that did so out of the box...

[Swenrekcah]

If you get 5000 people paying $5/month for every person working on a truly private browser, you have $25,000/month per teammate.

I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them.

The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.

[TeMPOraL]

> The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.

In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.

[denton-scratch]

I approve of this traditional usage of the term "literally". It's literally correct, but possibly too late - they've been burning bridges for five years.

[samhw]

There's some remarkable sleight of hand in "for every person working on [it]". That's a lot of people required to build a browser. Are you suggesting each of those 5000 users pays $5 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS, or that you'll need [5000 multiplied by $NUM_OF_DEVELOPERS] users?

[Swenrekcah]

The latter. The numbers are not precise, it's just to show that you really don't need a lot of paying people and they really don't need to pay a lot each.

[nine_k]

(1) Too many ad networks involved; who do you pay for not seeing their ads? (2) You would be unpleasantly surprised by the amount to pay.

[TeMPOraL]

(2) is in big part because people who're willing to spend money to get rid of ads are exactly the people advertisers are trying to get to - people with plenty of disposable income.