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Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

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171–180 of 469 posts

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#171

Post by bdangubic »

magicmicah85 wrote: post #142
iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

I use Firefox for Container tabs. It’s useful for sites where I can’t have multiple tabs opened to same site but different login. That’s my main reason for sticking to Firefox.

just curious - why not use browser profiles available in Chrome/Brave…?

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#172

Post by e44858 »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #169
iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

Neither Safari nor -B- are opensource. Brave is even chromium based. EDIT: Brave is opensource

Brave appears to be opensource: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#173

Post by mightybyte »

My default uninformed assumption would be that Google is paying Mozilla for making Google the default search engine for Firefox. Does anyone know if this is the case, and if so, what the likely magnitudes are? Because it seems like Google can throw quantities of money at Mozilla that would easily overwhelm whatever pressure this petition might put on them.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#174

Post by summerlight »

ItsBob wrote: post #75
iggldiggl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has way more than 20 developers. Looking at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/mots/index.html , if I'm not mistaken in my count, there are currently 147 module owners and peers alone. Some of those might be volunteers, but I think the large majority of them are Mozilla staff. On top of that there are probably a number of further Mozilla staff developers who aren't owners or peers, QA staff, product mana…

I know they have way more than that but I'd argue that you don't need that many. Hypothetically, if I was given the money and asked to build a team to fork Firefox I'd be more focused. Way more! The current devs work on stuff I'd scrap like Pocket, telemetry, anything with AI, and so on. I bet there is a load of stuff in there that I'd want out! There's probably a bunch of things in Firefox Labs they're working on to…

You severely underestimate the engineering cost of modern web browser. Assuming a sufficient value-addition fork, a team of 20 cannot even catch up the Chromium upstream. Good luck coming up with a new engine compatible with Chrome; MS tried it and finally gave up.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#175

Post by dntbrsnbl »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #169
iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

Neither Safari nor -B- are opensource. Brave is even chromium based. EDIT: Brave is opensource

Brave is definitely open source [1] (under the MPL)? The source for Safari is closed, but their rendering engine is completely open source [2].

[1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-core

[2]: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#176

Post by abtinf »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #27

Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case. Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]: > Expenses 1. Program 'Software Development' 2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M 2. Management 'General and Administrative' : 2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses. Let's ignore inflation and COL and…

How much of that $260m is invested in Firefox? The docs don’t say.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#177

Post by manifoldgeo »

mightybyte wrote: post #173

My default uninformed assumption would be that Google is paying Mozilla for making Google the default search engine for Firefox. Does anyone know if this is the case, and if so, what the likely magnitudes are? Because it seems like Google can throw quantities of money at Mozilla that would easily overwhelm whatever pressure this petition might put on them.

Yes, this is correct. Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars annually to be the default search engine. This makes up the vast majority of Mozilla Corporation's revenue. It's somewhere in the ballpark of 85% of all their annual revenue last I heard.

They've tried hard in recent years to get out from under Google by diversifying into other areas. For example, they have a VPN service that is a wrapper around Mullvad, and they've made some privacy tools that you can pay to use, also largely wrappers around other companies' tools.

I was an employee of Mozilla Corporation and saw first-hand the effort they were making. In my opinion, it's been a pretty abysmal failure so far. Pulling Google funding would effectively hamstring Mozilla Corp.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#178

Post by DrillShopper »

noxer wrote: post #70
notpushkin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can invest some money with no strings attached – hey, why not.

Have you asked the people who pay in the end (the taxpayer) if they want that? The very last thing I want my taxes to go to is anything that has "no strings attached". Its by definition a gift and gifting taxes should be a crime.

In the US, at least, all funding goes through Congress, so get in your rep's ear if you don't like this (or get in their ear if you do)

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#179

Post by summerlight »

ItsBob wrote: post #57
exploderate wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how? Or is your argument "One guy in a basement in Bulgaria could build Firefox for 50 Stotinki."?

Let's do some back-of-a-napkin maths here and see if we could... Just for fun of course :D === ANNUAL COSTS === 20 developers at $150k each = $3M Other staff costs, like pensions etc. = $1.5M Someone in charge of overall project = $250k (this doesn't have to be the case. He could easily be a dev on $150k but lets run with it) Infrastructure for testing and whatnot. Lets say Azure (expensive!) = $1M 2 x Marketing peep…

> 20 developers at $150k each = $3M

It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#180

Post by laweijfmvo »

zb3 wrote: post #95
lallysingh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of reports can they generate from the data they collect: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone... ?

Searchfox? Not so fast! Don't forget they load "studies" code using so called "normandy" mechanism..

you can opt-out in the settings btw, but it should be opt-in or at least asked on first run.
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