[noobly]

Would you mind supplying a source supporting that they’re drowning in money? Developing a browser on the functionality of chrome (especially in terms of security) is crazy imo, especially with a different engine. Sincere question btw, as far as I know they’re “non-profit” but they get a good bit of hate. I love the browser due to the customization/flags it offers while being up to date in terms of security. I haven’t put any effort into looking into them beyond that so I promise it’s not a loaded question, I’d be upset to hear they’re squandering their funds.

[boomboomsubban]

>Sincere question btw, as far as I know they’re “non-profit” but they get a good bit of hate

They sort of aren't a nonprofit anymore. Too much of their money came from the search deal as opposed to donations so they had to spin off the Mozilla Corporation which is completely owned by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. The foundation is what does research like this, and they're funded by donations and a certain percent of the corporations profits.

As for "drowning in money," they make ~$500 million a year. Many people think they waste it by doing things like paying their CEO a few million or being located in San Francisco.

[krono]

You must agree this is completely unjustifiable:

> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%.

> In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

[boomboomsubban]

Not particularly. From 2008 to 2018, their revenue grew more than 400%, and much of that was due to executives doing a better job selling the search deal. Then getting more money when you become CEO seems normal.

[krono]

Revenue is about the only thing that might have improved. The meat and potatoes certainly haven't.

Edit: was not my intention to make this sound so unfair to the moz employees and contributors - it's all on management

[boomboomsubban]

Revenue's pretty damn important, without the increase Firefox likely would have been dead years ago.

The management has hardly been flawless, but I don't know how to compete with opponents that have practically unlimited budgets with no expectation of being independently profitable, first IE then Chrome. Any move that isn't a grand slam will be viewed as a failure.

[krono]

Nicely worded. I suppose it's not as much that I believe she's doing a particularly bad job, but more that she's been moving Mozilla too far into the direction opposite from where I would have liked it to go, and where I believe it belongs.

I find her salary increases and their timing both unconscionable and excessive regardless.

[trollied]

Their annual financials tell all: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

[bryanrasmussen]

that really is not anywhere near drowning in money.

[rerdavies]

They have $1.1 billion dollars in net assets. How is that NOT drowning in money?!

[cedilla]

They are a company, not a single person. 1.1 billion is only three times their yearly expenses.

[rwmj]

That's part of the problem.

[bryanrasmussen]

for a company supposedly competing with Google $1148 billion net worth, that's a rounding error.

[rini17]

Do you imply better integrating browser with the OS is a trillion $ level project?

[fleddr]

They get roughly $0.5B in easy money each year from search partnerships. I call it easy money because all that is asked is to keep Google the default search engine. You could argue that they do need to deliver something for this money, in particular maintaining a decent market share so that the search deal makes sense.

Not really. Market share has been in a 12 year(!) non-stop decline: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

And yet the value of the search partnerships seems relatively stable. Probably because Google wants to avoid regulatory pressure. Google could destroy Mozilla today, but won't. $0.5B is pocket change for Google in comparison to the $20B they wire to Apple for being the default search engine.

Still, getting $0.5B whilst failing and being shielded from market forces that other companies face is a luxury position. Mozilla would be long out of business if it was an actual business. There's also very few NGO-type of organizations with this type of generous funding.

Can this $0.5B be used to recover market share for Firefox? No. It's not an engineering problem. Safari wins because it has no competition on iOS. Chrome wins because it's shipped as a default on Android and Google uses platforms with billions of users to push it (Youtube, Gmail, etc). Mozilla does not have this "browser push" capability. And even if they would have that, they're unlikely to out-engineer the giants. Having your own browser engine is not a competitive advantage, as Microsoft learned.

Hence, Firefox is in a "keeping the lights on" mode whilst Mozilla tries to invest in other things. Such as upping the pay of failing executives, writing activist blogs, puzzling acquisitions that don't make any money (Pocket?), and they're even cocky enough to give away money in the form of grants.

They're used to easy and free money. To be able to constantly fail without much consequence. To be able to work on things with no impact.

I do want to end on a more constructive note. The way I see it, the world lacks a model for funding our digital common goods. W3C, ICANN, Mozilla (Firefox, MDN, the like) but also regulatory bodies (i.e. privacy) can be considered shared infrastructure. In the bigger picture they cost pennies to fund so it's quite pathetic that as a world we can't even organize that.