[glenstein]

It would be organizational suicide to spend down their endowment just because they can. Right now it exists as a firewall to buy them some time in the event that search licensing goes away, which I think is exactly what they should have done with it.

And it's been talked to death before but the idea that the browser side bets are at some prohibitive cost is an unsubstantiated myth, conjured into existence by vibes in comment sections. It's the HN equivalent of American voters who think foreign aid is 50% of the federal budget.

[skywal_l]

Do you realize what 1.300.000.000$ is? Say you invest most of it in a safe way to get you inflation + 2%. That gives you 26.000.000$ every year. You can pay 100 engineers with this. Firefox is a browser. Sure a browser is complicated but 100 motivated and talented engineers is more than enough to make a good product if you focus on what matters.

There is no excuse to what is going on.

[glenstein]

How do you think they got that money in the first place? They've been growing this fund from $100MM in the 2010s to where it is now, by carefully managing and investing it.

Hilariously, you're here presenting something Mozilla has already been doing for nearly two decades like it's a new idea that only you have thought of. Yes, I realize how much that is: enough to cover their operating costs for like 2.5 years.

And sure, it's amazing how much an endowment can do if you give up and wipe out most of their staff and embrace magical thinking.

[amrocha]

The point is that the organization is bloated because of the search money.

The sustainable way forward for Mozilla is to fire most of their staff, keep a reasonable number of engineers, and focus on building a solid privacy focused browser instead of trend chasing like they’re doing now. Reduce operational costs and live off of the profits on their investments.

Exactly what about that is magical thinking?

[hosteur]

I dont even think they employ close to 100 FTE devs actually working on Firefox at this point.

[pseudalopex]

Mozilla spent $260 million on software development in 2023.[1] How do you believe they spent it?

Vivaldi employ 28 developers to produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program for comparison.[2]

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

[2] https://vivaldi.com/team/

[glenstein]

Props for citing real numbers! I hope other people reading this thread are looking at your comment and understanding that this is how you make reality based comments. One tidbit I will add: that's more than they have ever spent on development historically, including after adjusting for inflation. IIRC it's about quadruple what they spent back when browsers were desktop only when they had their highest market share.

[hosteur]

Well, I do not believe $260 million went to Firefox development. I would be surprised if the majority of that went to other non-Firefox projects like:

Various AI initiatives (Mozilla.ai, Orbit, etc.)

Mozilla VPN

Mozilla Monitor

Pocket

Firefox Relay

Fakespot

Mozilla Social

Mozilla Hubs

... just to name a few.

[glenstein]

I think you're probably about as dead wrong as it's possible to be on this front. First they ship millions of new LoC to Firefox on a monthly basis so the engineering efforts are open for all the world to see.

Secondly, if more than half(!?!) was spent on, say, Pocket, or Fakespot, then you would see a rise and fall in spending coinciding with the onramp and closure of those programs over their lifetimes. But in reality we have seen a steady upward march in spending, and so the interpretation that passes the sanity check is that they fold these into their existing budget with the existing development capacity they have which is variously assigned to different projects, including(!!) Firefox, where again, their annual code output is monumental and rivals Google.

Again I have to note the blizzard of contradictory accusations throughout this thread. According to one commenter the problem is they are biting off more than they can chew and need to scale back all of the excessive Firefox development they are doing (and I recall previous commenters speculating that 30+ million LoC was not evidence of their hard work but "bloat" that was excessive and that they probably could cut a lot of it out without losing functionality). But for you, the obvious problem is they're wasting all that capacity on side projects and not putting enough effort in the browser.

[skywal_l]

> First they ship millions of new LoC to Firefox on a monthly basis so the engineering efforts are open for all the world to see.

Who is they? You mean the thousands of unpaid developers?[0]

[0]https://openhub.net/p/firefox/factoids

[pseudalopex]

Most of these projects are open source. Anyone can see how much more active Firefox development is.

Mozilla.ai's featured projects sounded like things Firefox's AI features would use.

Orbit was a Firefox extension. Firefox integrated its features. You considered this not Firefox development?

Mozilla VPN and Mozilla Monitor are interfaces to other companies' services. And they are non Google revenue sources.

Mozilla Social was a Mastodon instance. How much software development did you believe running a Mastodon instance required?

[skywal_l]

You forgot CEO comp: 7.000.000 in 2022[0]

[0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...