[ndriscoll]

Mozilla were pulling in ~$500M/year on those search deals. So on year one, spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers for Firefox, put $450M into a trust to fund future development, and find something to waste $35M on. Then for the next 15 years, find something to waste $500M on.

The amount of money they've squandered is mind-boggling. If their goal had been to develop Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla Suite, and they had focused on how to sustainably do that, they never would've needed to diversify income sources.

[sonofhans]

Yes, this is how I see it, too. They’ve been operating as if their money hose from Google was (a) infinite and (b) cost-free. Turns out neither is the case, and now they’re dependent on it Google owns them.

They could have funded Firefox development for the next 100 years but they’ve pissed it away, and now they’re selling us out. It’s gross.

[NullPrefix]

>spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers

Implies that the browser is the mission, not some social cause is the mission

[zamadatix]

It implies maintaining the browser would better fund the mission in the long run than selling user data to adtech now as the user count continues to decline.

Google pays Apple 18 billion dollars per year to be the default search engine on Safari. If Firefox had managed to stay just as popular imagine how much more money they'd have been making on search deals these last 5 years and how much of that could have went to whatever mission they wanted. Instead they've got a whole lot of noise adding up to about nothing for income + a much smaller search deal than they should have. That's why "having a social mission" isn't inherently the issue, it's all about the management around balancing how the investment for the social mission is done.

I think GPs numbers are off by an order of magnitude or so though. I remember reading something like Mozilla spending 200 million/year on software development (not all Firefox) so it might take 300+ million/year just on Firefox to really have a big impact from status quo. Someone with the real numbers is invited to correct me on that. Browsers have huge teams of people, even Ladybird is using large components like Skia developed by other browser teams.

[leetnewb]

Firefox can't compete with iOS or Android for what should be obvious reasons - it is structurally impossible. Also, the competing browsers are way better today than in Firefox's heyday. There is very little reason to use Firefox today outside of ideological.

[tiltowait]

Firefox (and its derivatives) is swiftly becoming the only place you can run full uBlock Origin. That's a good reason right there.

Ignoring adblock, I think you could flip it. Chrome and Firefox are basically interchangeable, so if there's little reason to choose Firefox, there's also little reason to choose Chrome.

[rolobio]

This is exactly it, millions spent on the product, but no noticeable changes? The money is going elsewhere.

Wikipedia is doing the same.

[Dylan16807]

If they've had any non-code projects that had costs in the millions, they were catastrophic failures, so they shouldn't have had such a mission.

[einpoklum]

They've not developed the suite for... between 15 and 20 years I believe; and Thunderbird for over 10 years. For the past several years, Thunderbird is back under the MZLA Technologies Corporation, but - it is funded by donations (and doing rather well in that respect it seems).

So - Firefox is the "only" thing they need to develop.