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Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

mozillapetition.com

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

#191

Post by benatkin »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #32
jisnsm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they will find out you don’t need $555M a year to make a web browser. First good step would be to fire that useless CEO.

>Maybe they will find out you don’t need $555M a year to make a web browser. The only other browser spends significantly more than that. If it's so much cheaper, you'd expect organizations like Microsoft to have stayed in the game. >First good step would be to fire that useless CEO. The one who stepped down a year ago? Or do you have some issue with the interim? They're still looking for a permanent one

All the way out the door, please.

Edit: wow, it says here that "Mozilla announced her departure on February 19, 2025" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

Yeah I'm calling it on this new one as well. The interim CEO isn't aligned with the rightful mission of Mozilla either.

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

#192

Post by sdk- »

timewizard wrote: post #182
alberth wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know your intention is probably well placed but we do though need to factor in revenues: Year Revenue ---- ------- 2007 $75M 2023 $653M I bring this up because G&A of big companies (in general) always outpaces R&D once they hit scale ... and in an ideal situation - your revenues should outpace R&D expense because you're getting economies of scale (which further dilutes the R&D to Other Business Function comparison)…

Isn't Mozilla a non-profit though? Why does mozilla.ai exist? Didn't we like a trust the product more in 2007 than we do now? I mean, yay for scale, but haven't we lost something here?

Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit but Mozilla Corporation which develop Firefox is a for-profit entity.

There are other subsidiaries under the foundation umbrella like Mozilla.ai and MZLA/Thunderbird. This isn't something uncommon for large entity and there are many advantages. For example, it gives more freedom in term of decision making and spending to projects that aren't targeting the exact same consumer segment. Think about Thunderbird. Under Mozilla Corporation, it was always in the shadow of Firefox. Now, it's striving as an independent project.

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

#194

Post by trelane »

wmf wrote: post #166
kebokyo wrote: post #115

Something that this petition does not mention at all are possible alternatives to Google search as the default search engine. If Google isn’t the default, who should be the default?

Yahoo, Bing, DDG, Perplexity...

Bing is already the default, if you use Windows.

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

#195

Post by nightpool »

BearOso wrote: post #151
nativeit wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The question is more "Do these events and keynote speakers in Zambia have anything to do with browser development?" This isn't supposed to be a generic non-profit charity, it's a non-profit for supporting web browser development. If only 5% of the funds are going toward the browser or related technology, the organization is corrupt.

In 2023, Mozilla spend $230 million dollars on software development. And then they also $6 million on "Grants and Fellowships" (which supports many "green field" open source software initiatives), $1 million on Events (under which the event you're worried about probably falls), and $7 on travel (which probably also includes lots of travel to things like C++ conferences and browser standards conferences and other things that you probably would agree are very mission related, along with the event in question).

So—just out of this subset of expenses, there's probably some other stuff you could take issue with—Mozilla spent money in a 94% ratio on browser development, and 6% on "other stuff", of which probably .001% was this conference in Africa. And I think it's arguable that a lot of that "other stuff" is related technology! But even ignoring that, talking about how we can use the open web to improve life for people in third world countries is exactly the kind of thing that I, personally, would like Mozilla to be doing. And I'm happy for them to spend <5% of their budget on it.

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

#196

Post by wackget »

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…

> Firefox is no longer a developer default

Web developer here, and Chrome dev tools suck balls. I exclusively use Firefox.

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

#197

Post by nightpool »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #50
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…

The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million. Enough to keep a few dozen people employed. The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial produ…

  The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million. Enough to keep a few dozen people employed.
Huh? Mozilla currently spends $260M on browser development, of which >90% is salaries. Where are you getting this "it's only a few million" idea from?

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

#198

Post by paulryanrogers »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #163
paulryanrogers wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this landscape I'm curious if any amount of money can overcome the oligopoly advantages of owning the OS (with no anti-trust enforcement) or owning the most popular web properties. Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference? Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?

You're spending money in the wrong place - spend it on marketing instead of dev, and you've got a shot.

People aren't motivated to change the defaults, unless they're told they should change by "clicking here" in prominent (non-ad) banners. Mozilla cannot buy the OS defaults nor such brand positions.

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

#199

Post by kevwil »

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…

> Some argue that it's good to have an independent rendering engine. Here too Firefox plays no role at all. The only counter force to Google's web feature roadmap is Apple/Webkit, not Mozilla.

I'd like to understand this point better. Does Firefox use the Chromium engine under the hood?

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

#200

Post by bell-cot »

bugtodiffer wrote: post #106
dismalaf wrote: post #96

Mozilla will never do so willingly. Organizations always grow, since the entire point of an organization is to exist for the sake of its stakeholders. The bigger it is, the better for stakeholders. Willingly burning 85% of your revenue and downsizing isn't something that stakeholders want. Odds are Mozilla will simply die and their browser with it, since the Chromium based ecosystem is much more robust.

I think you are confusing organizations and companies. Yes, under capitalism, companies only exist to reek in profits, but from a non-profit organization you'd expect something else...

Sadly, the "companies only exist to..." version of capitalism is about as accurate as the "Santa only brings presents to Nice little ..." version of Christmas.

Substantial Organizations - whether capitalist, non-profit, or other - give a great deal of power to their leaders, and jobs to their workers. Those folks - most especially the former - may give lip service to the org's supposed mission...but their for-sure #1 priority is looking out for their own interests.

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