[ajdude]

I don't understand how they could be pulling in half a billion a year for a decade and still have financial problems... even if they just put that money in a low risk money market investment account the whole company could have just ran off interest by this point.

[martin_a]

Well, they took over things like Pocket, build that VPN service and Firefox Send and probably founded other projects that are not important to the core of their "business".

If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.

[II2II]

> If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.

I have no idea what the motivations of Mozilla are, but it is important to remember that many players in the industry faded away simply because the industry changes fast and those players failed to anticipate those changes. It is entirely possible that Mozilla was trying to anticipate those changes and ended up making a string of very bad bets.

[mystified5016]

Instead they're losing all the advantage they once had by failing to focus on their core.

Being one half of a duopoly is a pretty stable position. Just about the only way to lose it is to fuck around and quit playing the game. There's really no external force that could have destroyed Mozilla if they had just stayed focused.

Mozilla needed to be a browser company, trying to be an "everything" company was a really stupid move.

[wtallis]

The "industry change" that would make Firefox fade away would be the death of web browsers in general, replaced by site-specific apps that leave users with no freedom to control how they interact with a site aside from a complete boycott of the site and its app. Resisting that industry change is exactly what Mozilla should have been prioritizing. Nobody wants Mozilla to support or follow that trend.

[mmooss]

What bad bets? Rust?

[walrus01]

They didn't build a VPN service, they built a wrapper around mullvad, an existing VPN service provider. At least they chose a fairly decent one.

[glenstein]

Right, and that seems a relatively modest commitment of resources in the grand scheme of things. And it seems like the implication is supposed to be that those resources came at the expense of sustaining other parts of the browser experience.

[whamlastxmas]

This whole comment section is full of weird not-true accusations against Firefox in a way that feels really weird to me. Why would anyone want to lie to attack Firefox? Just use genuine facts to express concern, there’s plenty of legitimate concern without hyperbole.

[glenstein]

People repeat this ad nauseum, but assume away all the critical details that would actually make the argument work.

Do we have any assessment, other than people in comment sections randomly just saying so, that any of these actually came at the cost of developer resources on the core browser?

I feel like people have heard this repeated so many times that they keep saying it now. All of these issues were real, in 2016. And Firefox did the thing: they rebuilt the browser from the ground up under Quantum, achieving breakthrough performance and stability that everybody was asking for. And in the present day, the differences are real but subtle, and I don't think they have anything to do with the actual drivers of browser market share, which is about Google leveraging its unparalleled position in search and on Android.

Is the argument supposed to be that if the VPN wasn't there then like the tab snapping would work more smoothly and there would still be 35% market share? Once you start saying these things out loud, it becomes clear how nonsensical and vibes-based the whole argument is.

It's not to say that there's no concern with the pivot into erosions of privacy commitments. But it doesn't excuse the kind of tulip mania that seems to have spread across hn comment sections in reaction to every mention of Mozilla.

I keep pleading with people who perpetuate these narratives to try and make real arguments accountable to our usual standards of causation and substantiation, and they never do.

[wtallis]

> Is the argument supposed to be that if the VPN wasn't there then like the tab snapping would work more smoothly and there would still be 35% market share?

No, the argument is that if Mozilla didn't spend so much money on side projects, they wouldn't now be in such a precarious financial situation that they're making a drastic, controversial change with the stated purpose of ensuring their financial future. They might still have been poor stewards of the core browser project's technical development, but at least they'd have enough accumulated savings to continue without selling user data.

[glenstein]

>No, the argument is that if Mozilla didn't spend so much money on side projects, they wouldn't now be in such a precarious financial situation that they're making a drastic, controversial change with the stated purpose of ensuring their financial future

A couple of problems here. First, despite your protestations to the contrary, the argument for many is about market share. Secondly they're sitting on $1.2 billion in assets, so it's not that they're underwater, but that they're trying to diversify their income away from just Google.

I also have to note that you said no, but then proceeded to make an argument that bears the very form that I was criticizing.

You are saying that side bets (like the VPN) are what compromise their financial position. That's at least a coherent statement, but now comes the substantiating it and tracing out the cause and effect, articulating the actual scale of those investments, where it has the effect that you're claiming it does.

It takes more than just going ahead and saying it and it's weird that I have to keep pointing this out.

[mmooss]

Which side projects and how much money?

One person in this discussion claims they could live off the interest of $500 million invested in money markets. That's the level of seriousness and credibility so far.

Do you have something more substantive, with evidence, or are you just piling on an open source project and the people who work hard at it.

[aragilar]

Here's some back of the envelope maths:

* Anything that goes to the Mozilla Foundation is not spent on Firefox or Thunderbird (by definition). * Mozilla Corporation (which spends money to maintain Firefox, and used to spend money on Thunderbird and is now separate and hence not considered in these numbers) sends some proportion of its income to the Mozilla Foundation. * We have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances which lists total revenue, total expenses and software development expenses (I did find https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/ that wikipedia page, but some of the links are broken, so I'm going to stick with wikipedia's numbers).

I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation or is otherwise not available (note that "software development expenses" would have likely included things like FirefoxOS, Pocket, MozillaVPN etc. but I suspect it's all going to come out in the wash anyway).

Since 2010, that pot that wasn't spent of software dev is $1.89 billion (which assuming $300 million a year on software dev which is above what Mozilla Corp spent every year bar 2019, is more than 6 years worth of funding). That doesn't include donations (as they all go to Mozilla Foundation).

The numbers are somewhat rubbery, but let me leave this note: why is it NOYB that is ensuring that the GDPR is being followed, rather than Mozilla?

[mmooss]

> Anything that goes to the Mozilla Foundation is not spent on Firefox or Thunderbird (by definition).

Not at all. Much or almost all the Foundation does benefits Firefox. (I think putting Thunderbird in the same sentence is an exaggeration of its importance.)

> I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation

That's a big leap. Salary expense would be their biggest item, I would guess.

[glenstein]

Only a small portion of Mozilla's money goes to the Foundation, something like 2%.

>I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation or is otherwise not available

You're attempting to put under the under "otherwise not available" label things like legal and compliance, server, bandwidth, and infrastructure costs, all of which fall under the title of general operations in their audited statement. The marketing budget has gone up to 100 million but they are a global brand and I'm not sure that that's anything I'd consider out of the ordinary given their footprint.

I'm not sure I'm seeing anything like an aha moment where they're spending it on something I'd consider wasteful, or the cause and effect between that and some missed opportunity to invest more in development that would have driven changes to market share. (This was all supposed to be an argument about market share right?)

And at this point we're six or seven comments deep in a sub thread where people are attempting to backfill all of that data into arguments they committed to before having looked at it.

On some level, I hope that anyone reading this can appreciate that this whole exercise is ridiculous because what it's revealing is that no one really knows anything about most of these finances and are guessing and squinting and assuming and attempting to backfill arguments that they were perfectly comfortable making in the absence of this knowledge. And that, in and of itself is enough to prove my point that no one claiming that Mozilla's side bets compromised their company has any clue what they're talking about.

[nicce]

CEO salary alone was 6.9 million in 2022. I wonder what else is overpaid…

[gruez]

How much do executives at similarly sized organizations make? Moreover, if you want to cut executive salaries, how do you avoid the "pay peanuts, get monkeys" problem? Mozilla has nearly 1.5B in assets. A cheaper CEO might save you a few million, but cause far more than that in damage to the organization.

[fauigerzigerk]

Perhaps linking a greater share of pay to success would be a good idea. How about $200,000 + $1 million per percentage of Firefox market share? In recent years, CEO pay has doubled while Firefox appears to be in terminal decline.

[nicce]

Excellent post about this: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-...

Apparently the rewarding is opposite, to get Mozilla away from Firefox…

[delfinom]

It wasn't just doubling (and more) of CEO pay for Mozilla.

They also layed off tons of engineers. While giving the CEO the pay increase the same year.

Absolute trash of a human being and org.

[ycombinatrix]

A CEO running a non-profit into the ground does not deserve that kind of compensation

[blinding-streak]

They spent a lot of time and effort building a mobile OS for some reason. I'm sure that didn't help.

[Qem]

IMHO it was a worth bet. Had it succeeded we could have one extra mobile OS with much more freedom today. It lost steam, but it would be a shame if not even attempted. It lives through FireOS, despite negligible market share. And I still have my Alcatel One Touch Fire as a keepsake.

[tdeck]

It was bound to fail because they had no way to make it popular. They were in a race for third with Windows Phone

[mmooss]

Every tech company makes many bets that don't work out. If you only invest in sure bets, you invest in nothing.

The rest is hindsight. Unless, of course, you can tell us some sure bets right now?

[glenstein]

Huge missed opportunity for the Mozilla-Yahoo partnership in my opinion. I was intrigued by it at the time, but I think I recall opinionated bloggers on the subject that what it needed was the bare bones, features like maps and an email client and so on. And Yahoo was still at a point where it was relevant enough that it could have pitched in on this front, although that would have required strategic vision that Yahoo never had. A big risk, but the right kind of idea.

It's the kind of paradox of all of these Mozilla criticisms. "Do something to diversify your revenue. No, not that... Not that either."

[nurettin]

Maybe some of the money props up rust

[lrem]

Haven’t they abandoned that and laid off the team half a decade ago?

[nurettin]

They are on the Silver list of Rust Foundation members. I don't know if that's a good thing.

https://rustfoundation.org/members/#silver